Look up “bad-ass event professional” and you’ll likely see a photo of Monique Ruff-Bell next to it. As the chief program and strategy officer for TED, producer of world-renowned TED conferences, Ruff-Bell isn’t afraid to push boundaries and disrupt TED’s winning formula to keep its events compelling, engaging, memorable, inclusive, and always on-trend.  

Since joining TED almost three years ago as its head of events, following a transformative tenure at leading FinTech event Money 20/20, this seasoned event strategist has found ways to leverage TED’s leading platforms and legacy of innovation by continually pushing the envelope with content curation and programming to help the brand grow, evolve, and reach even broader audiences.  

“My sweet spot within events is to think about how to disrupt things, how to change things, how to be more creative in spaces, and create the right type of experiences for attendees,” she said. “TED has such a strong global brand, they’ve been around for 40 years, but when they approached me, I was like, ‘what do you want me to fix; what do you want me to do?’ They wanted me to help them figure out what the next 40 years looks like with an event experience, so I got right in and started doing that.” 

We had chance to sit down with Ruff-Bell at the inaugural TEDNext, a new future-focused conference series held Oct. 22-24 in Atlanta, where she shared her journey of redefining event experiences, her disruptive approach to event planning and design, the importance of creating lasting connections with event audiences, and why corporate event organizers must learn the language of the C-suite to effectively communicate the value of investing in event experiences. 

You’ve been organizing and leading strategy for TED conferences for just under three years. What about your previous event strategy and management work at Money 20/20 prepared you for this role?

I joined Money 20/20 at a time when it was trying to figure out its identity within the event space. Its owners were entrepreneurs, and they built it up in the way that entrepreneurs who are looking to sell something do: get the right partners, build your audience fast, and do what’s necessary to achieve that growth so you can sell it, which they did. They disrupted a market, they found a good idea, and that attracted a great audience, but now that event has to live on.  

When I was hired there, [my focus was] on ensuring the conference’s longevity by creating a compelling, must-have experience. It took a lot of innovation and creativity to come up with something of that type when you’re attracting 9,000-14,000 people, and to continue that, because when numbers go up there are expectations that things will keep going up. It took a lot to do more with less, to create an experience for an industry that’s not always sexy, so that was hard work, but in the end, it paid off. We grew by double digits every year and grew our partnerships, and now it’s the can’t-miss FinTech event in the market.  

Tell us about your experience working for TED so far. What was it like working through the pandemic? 

Events were starting to come back in 2021, but TED didn’t come back until 2022 virtually. And then we wanted to take the time to really figure out how to get a new experience going. We had TEDWomen in-person in 2023 and then it was like, ok, things are changing, society is changing, what is 2024 going look like with TEDNext? It took a lot of effort, strategy, and connecting to secure our partners to support us through that transition and crafting a compelling narrative to maintain support as TEDWomen became part of TEDNext. 

Then, working with [the main TED conference in] Vancouver, the focus was on making sure the business side of that program was appropriate for the type of premium event that we were delivering, as well as the experience side of it. [This conference] has an older age group, so we looked for ways to build a more diverse audience. We started the Ignite program, where you can apply to come to Vancouver and have access to the event and get it as a complimentary pass. If you’re doing something extraordinary, it doesn’t matter if you can’t afford this, you need to be in this space, because only a certain type of person can really afford a $12,500 ticket price.  

So for our next 40 years, we have TEDNext, TED in Vancouver, and our hybrid event program, where we ask our legacy TEDx organizers to help organize a TED event that’s thematic. Now we have TED AI Vienna, TED AI San Francisco, and we’re about to launch a TED AI Asia conference. So that has been really successful for us, because while we’re a generalist conference, it’s letting us dive deeper into thematic things that make sense for the industry.  

How is planning TED events similar or different than for-profit events? 

When I look back on my time in corporate, you don’t know what you don’t know, and the reason why I say that is because it’s important that you manage up to leadership for them to understand the real value of events. When you’re in certain corporate environments, the language of the C-suite isn’t always utilized by the event team to really show how [events] are not ‘nice-to-have,’ but core revenue and pipeline drivers for the business. But when we have these conversations sometimes, we’re not talking like that to them. We’re saying, ‘I need more budget because food got expensive,’ or ‘I need more budget because hotel rooms are more expensive,’ and we’re not talking about cost versus investment to them. 

When you’re planning an event, there are certain things that are costs and there are certain things that are investments, and when you’re putting that into an event you’re going to get paid back by more loyalty, higher retention, and higher sponsorship. Your sponsors are going to be happy, which is going to attract other sponsors, and your attendee base is going to continue to support you and be more okay with it when you have to raise prices because they’re having really strong experiences.  

What would you suggest to event organizers who are facing tighter event budgets than ever before? 

Learn the language of the C-suite. Learn how to pitch what’s an investment and then showcase it through data, through the proof that if we invest in this key area, it will lead to this type of pipeline, to this type of retention. Then explain why retention matters. It’s cheaper to keep [attendees] than to find them, so [explain] why you want to keep them coming back. Talk about how you’ve improved your retention rates, that it takes more money for your marketing to find new people, it costs X to find new, it costs Y to keep them, show those numbers and talk about it from that perspective. Even if you do just one thing every year, showcase why it’s an investment and why it’s important, and then back it up with the data.  

What was really important to me when I was at Money 20/20 was getting access to not just the CEO of the events area of Ascential, but also the CEO of Ascential, and being in those rooms and listening to the questions he was asking and how he liked to receive information. Then I would make sure that when I was in those rooms, I would deliver information in the way I knew he liked to receive it, using language that I knew would perk up his ears and get him to lean into what I was saying.  

At TED, I get to do that even more because we are a conference business. We film the majority, if not almost all, of our TED talks at our events, but we are also other businesses – we’re a non-profit, so we have to be! We have our TED Ed group, our TED Ed work group, our TEDx group, our business development group, our partnership sales group, and our media group, so we have a lot of ways that we bring in revenue to pay for what’s free. When we put our talks on these different platforms, those are revenue-driving and partnership-driving opportunities for us, and we sell advertising against some of that stuff, as well. We might make a nice portion of our money from ticket sales and sponsorships, but we have to drive revenue from other platforms. When I’m talking to our CEO, he has to balance all of that, so I have to come in with a really strong narrative in order to get these investments across, because these types of events are expensive.  

Where do you and your get your experiential ideas from and how do you find fresh trends?  

Our team goes out and explores, finds trends and brings them back to the full team, and I’ll go out to different experiences. I love to go to entertainment venues and see what we can implement from them. The experience is the queen, so the experience matters. Sometimes [planners are] just thinking about the content, what’s on the main stage, and having people talk at attendees, but you’re skimping on the conference experience. Post-COVID, people are investing a lot of time, money, and effort into going to a conference, and sometimes it’s really hard to fight to get money to go to a conference, so your event has to have it all: great content, great food, a great experience. Yes, it takes money to do that, but we’re nonprofit, and we know how hard it is to do something like this. But we invest in the right things that pay off for us in the end.  

What are the top things that corporate meeting and event planners can learn from how TED conferences are planned and executed? 

We look at our event and we cut it up into bite-sized pieces, [because] we like to evolve and surprise and delight and do something different every year. We look at our conferences in six ways: intrigue, arrival, exploration, participation, exit, and extent. As a team, we brainstorm on new ideas for those six areas for our conference, and then as a full team, we all take a vote on all of the different ideas that were presented. Then we look at the top three, which call our ‘big bets,’ and we explore what will it take, from a resource perspective, to do those three things, and whether we can pull it off for an event. 

This keeps the freshness of our program happening, and people feel like they have skin in the game because their ideas have been incorporated from a leadership perspective into how we can continue to surprise. We don’t get overwhelmed, because we can’t change 10 things every year in our event – we can change three things, or keep evolving, or adding something fresh to three things. So, we really are intentional about the experience that we give from those six areas.  

Sometimes with corporate meeting planners, you’re on a hamster wheel of delivery. You might be delivering 100 events for the year, 40 events, 10 events. I deliver under five big events every year, so we have the space and opportunity [to be creative], but when I was in the corporate world, I would have to make the space and opportunity be creative. That means I had to put something on the calendar every single month, what we called a solution-oriented meeting.  

If it could have been an email, we kept it as an email, and we were always trying to solve something. You can’t just do that off the fly, you have to bake that into your processes, into your leadership and with your team, because you have to allow them to have the space to think. If you don’t create that for them, sometimes it’s hard for them to create it for themselves. Having the space to be creative and to just think is a big deal in the meeting planning world.  

Know a dynamic female event industry leader who deserves some time in the spotlight? Please reach out to lisa.savas@informa.com and danica.tormohlen@informa.com.

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