Are social impact conferences a waste of time and money?

In the social impact world, we seem to have an endless appetite for convenings. Every month brings another summit, forum, roundtable, symposium, “ecosystem builder”, or “multi-stakeholder dialogue”. You can spend half the year going from one air-conditioned ballroom to another and still feel like you’re standing in the same place – and trust us, we have been there. We have been to hundreds of conferences between us in the past decade, so we speak from personal experience. 

After a while, it’s hard not to wonder: What is it all for? Is this a design flaw of our sector? Or has the conference circuit become a permanent feature? 

Because if we look closely, whether intentional or not, many ecosystem builders – organisations focused on identifying and strengthening the individual ingredients that enable impact to thrive at scale – have ended up with a dominant business model: organise conferences, secure sponsorships, repeat. 

And the more we repeat, the more conferences become the work, rather than serving the work.

But as audiences become more time-poor, with tighter finances and a growing scepticism of “talk without traction”, the collective fatigue around conferences is starting to build. It’s important to remember that those who can afford the time and costs of attending the conference already have a high degree of privilege to start with. Fundamentally, capital is not moving at scale in the direction we all hope. 

Is the truth more uncomfortable than we want to admit?

Have conferences become our sector’s default answer to everything?

Q Want to convene stakeholders?

A Host a conference.

Q Want to map the ecosystem?

A Host a conference.

Q Want to raise funds?

A Host a conference.

Q Want visibility?

A Host a conference.

Q Want to “build the field”?

A You guessed it – host a conference.

And because the model brings in money and enables us to build teams around this, it keeps repeating itself. But where is the real, long-term impact?

Ecosystem building is not supposed to be an events business. We believe that a lot of the ecosystem builders are trapped in a vicious cycle, where these events become essential to business models. But if we think carefully about what that impact really looks like, there is an alternative future possible.

A focus on transformational relationships 

So, what is the point of conferences?

As 2026 progresses with an unprecedented number of conferences, we are posing this intentional question: What difference do conferences really make? And what does “good” look like?

Increasingly, we feel that it is not the content: is it really new and evolving? 

People who are close to the work on the ground are rarely invited into the spaces to begin with, so conferences unintentionally perpetuate the power inequalities. 

But maybe, just maybe, the meaningful value that conferences still offer is serendipity – the accidental encounter that creates the spark of a new collaboration: a conversation in a hallway; a shared problem between strangers; a moment that nudges someone back into the field.

For that to happen, relationships need to be genuinely cultivated, not merely transactional. 

Building transformational – not transactional – relationships is perhaps what must distinguish the social impact space from the purely profit-maximising, commercial sector. 

Alternative channels for our energy and funds 

What if we rebalanced?

Imagine if we invested half the energy and funding that we pour into conferences into:

• practical field visits and strategic convenings that are not purely performative but serve a clear purpose at a specific moment in time
• initiatives that channel capital to the most urgent yet underfunded problems
• relationships built slowly and with humility, that accessibly include a diverse cross-section of people who actually do work this work on the ground
• experiments that shift power rather than celebrate it.

The point of conferences becomes not actually the conference itself, but instead what we choose to do once we leave that space – connection, action and real impact – together. 

And how do we truly measure this? How many people walk out of the room and back into the world with more clarity, more humility and more commitment? How many funds are actually flowing and deployed to the beneficiaries, the people whose lives sit at the centre of our theories of change?

And so, if we are honest with each other, we can say that there is a point to conferences, but only if we see this expensive activity as a means to an end, not an end in itself. Let’s not mistake proximity for progress.

Trust building, not event building, should be the core of field building. 

Look out for the next articles in this series which will explore alternative solutions to supporting equitable participation, shared ownership of knowledge and long-term systems change.

Bonnie Chiu is a serial social entrepreneur and managing director of TSIC, a global network driving systemic change for a fair society. 

Peter Ptashko is a social entrepreneur, funder and sustainability expert. He is CEO of sustainability consultancy Cambio: House of Social Change.