Expert advice

The social network: tips for better networking at events 1

Fundraising | 1 Jul 2011

Love networking? Really? Helena Sharpstone offers advice on how to get contacts with your canapés.

I’m going to a networking event – who’s coming with me? Don’t all shout at once. Mention networking to a fundraiser and they’ll confirm it’s a vital part of the role. Suggest actually going to a networking event and you start to sniff the fear. We’ve all got horror stories to tell and may just find we have some very important email housekeeping to do on the days when a networking opportunity comes a-knocking. But it doesn’t have to be that bad.

I was invited to a business networking breakfast a few years ago. I think they over-egged (sorry) the breakfast part – cold, chewy toast, a few stale croissants and orange juice that had never seen an orange. After a bit of milling around where everyone talked to everyone they knew we sat down at long tables. We were given 20 seconds to stand up and sell ourselves in a couple of sentences in such a way as to entice people to want to talk to us. Oh the pressure. When it came to my turn, I decided to keep it simple. I stood up and said “I’m Helena Sharpstone, I run a training company and I can double your reading speed in a day.” Then we were told to go talk to the people who had said something that interested us. I was inundated.

At the time I was pretty surprised but looking back, I know why people approached me. I had fulfilled one of the essential rules of networking communication: when it comes to conveying your mission, cause or message – keep it short and simple.

Over the years, I’ve developed a survival guide for networking. It helps if you really understand what networking is. We all have bad experiences of networking soirées billed as inclusive and relaxed, only to find them full of slightly bored-looking people who form impenetrable cliques. If they do deign to talk to you, they spend most of the time looking for someone more interesting to walk through the door so they can dump you faster than you can say mushroom vol au vent. Those occasions and the people at them have got networking all wrong. The whole idea of networking is to develop links where you can share knowledge, contacts and good practice.

There has to be a real commitment to being both interesting to be with and interested in what others have to say. This kind of reciprocity means no one fleeces or feels fleeced by others. It also means you experience the real long-term benefits of networking – raising awareness for your organisation, receiving targeted leads and referrals, sharing ideas and solving problems with other fundraisers and becoming more influential in the sector, to mention but a few things.

Mind your manners

Before any networking activity, it pays to do your homework. A teenager during the 80s with the most appalling taste in films, one of my favourites was and still is Working Girl where a secretary impersonates her boss to help her climb the corporate ladder. I’m not advocating this as a career strategy; however, I was struck by her lack of preparation before attending a networking event where she wants to meet one particular man. She (Melanie Griffith) meets him (Harrison Ford) but he doesn’t disclose who he is and she knows no different. Admittedly back in 1988 she couldn’t Google him but still, she could have done her research before she went.

Nowadays there’s no excuse for wandering aimlessly and hoping someone will befriend you. Most networking event organisers will let you have a list of who’s attending so you can think about who you want to meet and look them up. Find out about them, develop some areas of common ground that you can use in conversation and be careful not to take it too far and sound borderline creepy. Even if a list is not available, when you arrive, ask the organiser to point out or better still, introduce you to the people you came there to meet. That is what they are there for and focused networking makes you feel better about being there and means you get much more from the time invested.

Fundraisers are famously good at breaking the ice and getting a networking conversation started but even they have wobbly moments when it comes to breaking into an established group, so here are some tips. Contrary to what many people think, don’t arrive late – get there on time. It’s easier to approach people before the room gets too full. It helps if you look approachable (but not desperate) and wear your name badge to the right – apparently that is where the eye goes to when you shake hands (ahh, so that’s the reason). Accept that small talk is part of the process even if it’s not your thing and remember that you can enter a group without necessarily joining the conversation straight away. Wait long enough to get the gist of what’s being said and not too long as to look like you’re lurking without intent, and then join in, trying to add something valuable to the discussion. After that you have a legitimate opportunity to introduce yourself and your organisation and take it from there.

Back to my earlier point about presenting yourself and your charity. This should be familiar territory as fundraisers all but invented the concept of the elevator pitch. The art of conversation involves asking questions and building on what others say, rather than playing bat and ball with anecdotes. So make sure you converse and show interest in others’ views and well as conveying your own.

While you’re behaving so impeccably, you may be wondering if you’re allowed to extricate yourself from the conversation at some point and of course you are. Swapping business cards is a perfectly legitimate way of bringing things to an end. It is good manners to ask for theirs first, rather than thrusting yours in their face, even if you have just been through a rebrand and really want to show off your new colours. Excusing yourself because you are keen to meet someone else (they may know them and be able to introduce you) is also fine and as a last resort, you can use desire to get some food and drink to get away – just check there are refreshments on offer before you go waltzing off. You may want to introduce the person you are leaving to a colleague before you exit, but only if there is value in their meeting each other, not because you got stuck with Mr/Ms Beige and you fancy getting back at your colleague who showed you up at a meeting the previous week.

All my suggestions so far relate to face-to-face networking, of course these days you don’t need to leave your desk to network with the wonder/horror that is social networking. Personally I rate LinkedIn as an excellent professional networking site but it is only ever a way to start a conversation. If you want to take things further, nothing beats a face-to-face meeting. Facebook is Marmite. Most people use it for social rather than business networking so use it as a start point but remember you are trying to develop professional networks, so it makes sense to move things away from Facebook to continue them on a more business like footing.

Follow through

The final word has to go to follow-up. If like me you get your buzz from moving quickly from one activity to the next (a positive way of saying that I’m sometimes badly organised), you need to work hard to get the most out of your networking experience. This means taking action quickly, getting people’s details into your system and where appropriate, making contact to talk more. You’ll find they’re much warmer to you if they can remember who you are, so build structured follow-up into your networking activities. And if some of the contacts you made seem less-than-thrilled to hear from you again, ask yourself if there was more you could have done when you first met them to create a positive impression. Networking requires more than a wee bit of resilience. Oh and check your teeth for spinach before you go.

Helena Sharpstone is director at Sharpstone Skinner 

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