The Wrap: Ending Events with a Powerful Look Back
By Gary Hirsch and Dr. Troy Campbell
Your Goal
Make your events memorable, impactful, and joyful
Insight
End your event by taking the time to look back in a way that is:
reflective
celebratory
incredibly fun
As a team, we often close out big organizational conferences by doing a 10 to 15 minute improv performance as a wrap.
After talks and presentations by Oscar winners, famous scientists, the CEO, and many more have dazzled audiences, our little team takes the stage.
In our wrap, we play back the most memorable moments from talks, events, and educational highlights with improv comedy and audience interactive elements. Our approach borrows from the artistic practices of improv, the experiential design practices used at Disney Imagineering, and the scientific insights of cognitive and social psychology.
Many organizations have decided to end conferences and individual conferences days with a wrap, and here’s why.
1. It Creates a Big Ending
A wrap is often a bigger ending than any single event or speaker can provide because it brings together all the other moments that have occurred.
A wrap is like the song that ends a musical that reincorporates all the other songs and memorable moments. A wrap that looks back feels like a proper culmination. As a Disney designer would say, it feels like a proper ending.
2. It Makes the Event Memorable
Memory is a fragile thing, and without taking time to remind people of important ideas, goals, and moments, they will not as easily solidify in memory.
The performances in the wrap can create more vivid memories of a key point, initiating more associations in the brain around the same idea and further solidifying the network structure of memory. Many clients also film the wrap and send it out to participants a week later to remind them of what happened.
3. It Unites People
The wrap connects people together through a shared set of experiences that they now uniquely have in common.
The whole wrap feels like a series of inside jokes. At a conference, the improv wrap only fully makes sense to those in the room. And as people laugh and cheer, they are laughing and cheering together through a shared sense of journey, memory, and what behavioral scientists call “shared reality.”
4. It Completes the Narrative
Great stories end by looking back, a reflection after the journey has been accomplished.
A reflective look back can complete the narrative of having done something special. It’s a signal to the audience that something amazing has happened.
5. It Brings Joy
Big events should end in celebration and joy.
The wrap is a joyful celebration of completing something important together. It’s filled with laughter. It ends the event with a smile. As one client who experienced our conference wrap recently said, “Best close to an event ever. That. Was. Epic.”
Bonus Idea: Have Multiple Wraps
We often wrap the end of each day of a conference or sometimes even the end of each big talk.
These wraps often involve audience participation, making each experience highly engaging, memorable, and emphasizing what is important.
Dr. Troy Campbell is the chief scientists at On Your Feet, an influential academic researcher, and a former Imagineer for Disney, where he designed experiences for the Disney Parks.
Gary Hirsch is a the co-founder and partner at On Your Feet. He is an improv performer and creates both studio and large-scale city-wide artistic experiences through his global art initiative BotJoy.
