How Rethinking Networking Lifted Conference Session Attendance by 10%

Case Studies Aug 19, 2026

Most conference teams try to manufacture connections between attendees. Lilly Conferences, a series of higher education professional development events, found that the best - and most unexpected! - results came from passing that torch to the attendees themselves.

A Small Team, a Big Crowd, and a Gap They Could Feel

Every year, the goose gets loose at Lilly. 🪿

Faculty and staff fly in from campuses across the country to learn, present, and find their people, and the team pulling it all together is small. Community is a very important aspect of a Lilly conference, so Ryn Spencley, Lilly's Director of Operations and Conference Coordinator, and Lindsay Au, their Marketing and Client Relations Director, worked hard to spark it: group dinners, sightseeing outings, introductions for attendees traveling solo. It was genuine effort, and it did real good.

But there is a ceiling on what a small team can broker by hand. You can seat two strangers at the same table, but you cannot make them click, and every hour spent coordinating was an hour away from the conference itself. "We wish we could do more to get people to meet each other, open up and form those bonds," Ryn said. There was just too much else to do.

So in 2024, after a professor’s recommendation, they brought Goosechase into the mix. What started as an experiment quickly became a fixture: Goosechase now runs across the four events they host each year.

First, What Is Goosechase?

Goosechase is an interactive experience platform built around Missions: playful challenges that people complete on their phones by snapping a photo, filming a quick video, or answering a prompt. Organizers build the Missions, participants earn points, and everything shows up in a live feed the whole group can see. It’s a conference app that was inspired by scavenger hunts, and that DNA still shows. The point is to get up, take action, and bump into other people while you're at it.

Goosechase Mission list showing five Missions with titles, instructions, and point values, including photo Missions, a video-only Time Capsule Mission, and one that unlocks after another is completed. — Missions can expire, unlock, or drop mid-event. Lilly uses all three.

For a conference like Lilly, that means a simple shift. Instead of the organizers matchmaking connections, the Missions give attendees their own low-stakes reasons to cross the room and start talking.

Building Bridges Even Before Day 1

The clever part is how Lilly designs their conference Experience to work across the whole arc of the event:

In the days before the conference, attendees get Missions that prompt them to introduce themselves, so faces are familiar before anyone arrives.

Submission feed for a "Start Here: Welcome to Austin!" Mission with 18 entries — a grid of attendee selfies, each awarded 500 points. — Eighteen hellos before anyone even landed in Austin.

Early birds who register ahead of time pick up bonus points, rewarding the planning that makes a conference run smoothly.

Submission feed for the "Early Birds Get the Worm!" Mission — attendees photographed at the registration desk holding their name badges, each earning 600 points. — Turns out bonus points are excellent motivation to register on time.

Once the event is underway, Missions tie to specific sessions, so showing up and taking part earns recognition.
Missions even drop between sessions, turning a twenty-minute coffee run into a conversation starter.

Every participant adds to the momentum.

"They're Talking to Each Other! Everyone Is Talking!"

Ryn and Lindsay remember the moment they knew Goosechase was working. They heard it.

"It was the chatter in the hallway. Once we implemented Goosechase, you would hear 'Has anyone been to four or more Lilly conferences? Is anyone from Austin?' Lindsay and I looked at each other and were like, they're talking to each other. Everyone is talking!" - Ryn Spencley

Mr. Burns from The Simpsons standing beside a machine, captioned "It's moving! It's alive!"

The shift was palpable everywhere, as people started seeking each other out after spotting submissions that caught their eye.

A "Campus Hidden Gem" Mission asks attendees to share little-known resources from their campus: 14 people from the same university, who had never met, discovered each other through shared answers.

Three Central Michigan University Missions — a photo Mission for a campus hidden gem, a video Mission for the school motto, and a text Mission about local partnerships — each unlocking after the university's Start Here Mission is completed. — Campus-specific Missions, and suddenly 14 colleagues from the same school have something to talk about.

A video Mission asking attendees to explain their area of expertise works like a living directory of the whole room.
Reflection prompts act as icebreakers, too. After "What's something a student said that surprised you about teaching?", Ryn recalls the conversations that followed: "No way a student said that to you!"

The cumulative effect is a conference where nobody walks alone. "It's almost like 'no introvert left behind,'" Ryn adds. "Everybody is just so included and welcomed."

Goosechase Facilitates More Active Conferences

The numbers talk, too.

Since bringing in Goosechase, Lilly has seen a 10-12% increase in concurrent session attendance.

The reason? The connections keep people in the building. Engagement in the conference activity actually led to better conference engagement.

"Instead of hanging out in their hotel rooms or outside for lunch, people stay in the conference space because they want those points," Ryn and Lindsay said. "As they get to know each other through Goosechase, they become familiar faces. And then it's, “I'm gonna come see you present!'"

Submission feed for a "Find your flock!" Mission with 13 entries — attendees posing together in groups, several holding plush geese. — Just a few examples of people who found their people.

Goosechase Changed the Conference Team's Experience Too

Beyond improving the conference experience for attendees,it changed what it felt like to run the conference.

"Goosechase isn't just impacting our clientele's experience of the conference," Ryn said. "It's also impacting our experience of the conference."

Think about what a conference organizer usually is to an attendee: the person who answers the wifi question, helpful but firmly on the other side of a wall. Missions knock that wall down. When attendees walk up to trade a silly answer, Ryn and Lindsay are part of the fun, not the staff. As Lindsay put it, Missions "make it feel a lot less like a 16-hour day and a lot more like you're just hanging out with your buddies."

A single Mission submission: two attendees bent over to show off their Lilly-branded socks, captioned "I found them!!", with the organizer's bonus-points panel open alongside it. — Ryn and Lindsay's Lilly socks come to every conference, and so does the Mission to hunt them down. To get the shot, attendees have to walk up and say hi. Icebreaker solved!

Even planning got better. "So much of our work is logistical and exacting," Ryn said. "Planning the conference Goosechase lets us pause and look back on the fun of past conferences, which really hypes us up for the next event." Those submissions become an unexpected souvenir, too, carried back to campus and shown to the provosts and registrars who footed the bill. A good time, documented, becomes the case for coming back.

When Everyone in the Room Is a Participant

The Lilly team started out sparking connection from the outside, with dinners and introductions and a sign that said "meet here at six."

The Experiences they build do that work from within, for everyone in the building: attendees find their people, and so does the team. The line between the folks running the conference and the folks enjoying it has mostly disappeared, which is a pretty fantastic definition of community. At Goosechase, Experience is everything, and Ryn and Lindsay didn't just take that to heart for their attendees. They kept some of it for themselves.

What is Goosechase?

At Goosechase, experience is everything. Originally inspired by scavenger hunts, Goosechase is an online platform that enables organizations and schools to engage, activate, and educate their communities through delightful interactive experiences. Sign up and get started with a free Experience, or check out our Pricing!