Inspiration Hub

The American Hotel & Lodging Association has launched a new campaign to try to unite the hospitality industry in an effort to fight human trafficking. The campaign, No Room for Trafficking, suggests four ways for the industry to focus on eradicating human trafficking and exploitation:

Event planning never seems to go away — even on your days off. You might shut off your work email, but somehow you always get roped into planning in your free time. The school bake sale, your friend’s baby shower, or the community walk-a-thon — you name it, you’ve (begrudgingly) planned it.  

At Meeting Professionals International’s World Education Conference in June, speaker Joanne Dennison, CMP, of The Ordinary Success Project, offered an hour of advice on how to make “bad” business more valuable to host venues. The packed house of planners and suppliers heard these eight tips.

Today’s associations are at an inflection point. For many, event attendance is flat or declining, and there is no clear path to turn that around. The hard truth is that the world moves faster than the pace of most association events. With the introduction of so many new technologies and consumer experiences, attendee expectations rise every year. Our audience is thinking: If we can have these things in our daily lives, why can’t we have them at our events?

If there’s one thing to take away from data research, it’s that nothing is ever as black and white as it appears. Causes may vary, adding layers upon layers of meaning to its effects. Sifting through it all and finding something meaningful can be time-consuming and requires loads of brain power. That’s where Eric Tyree comes in. Smart Meetings sat down with Eric, vice president and chief technical officer of data & analytics, chief data scientist at CWT, to talk about business travel, millennials, seeking hotels for function or for experience, and overtourism. What a ride.

To really influence attendees, event professionals need to be intentional about the experiences they design. But how do you know what innovations will work? At PCMA EduCon 2019 this week at JW Marriott Downtown L.A. Live, PCMA Foundation and Steelcase Event Experiences released an in-depth study of the behavior of attendees from PCMA Convening Leaders 2019 at David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh. The report, “5,000 People, 5,000 Personal Journeys,” is a collection of reactions—positive and negative—to everything from multi-track sessions to creative networking ideas.

Event signage may seem like the most basic of all event details. But get it wrong, and your entire attendee experience is at risk. Without clear and concise signage directing your attendees and helping them find what they’re looking for, any event will quickly descend into chaos.

Most meeting organizers invest a significant amount of time creating the educational programming for their annual conference. Models vary, but most include a 15- to 20-person conference committee (slotters) and army of reviewers (graders). Progressive organizers are shifting to a blended model, where conference committees act more like content curators and advisors and less like graders and slotters. Session and abstract submissions are still an important part of the process, but a greater reliance is being placed on curated sessions. Program assembly of submission-only sessions will never yield the best the industry has to offer.

Sometimes, introverts get a bad wrap. “They don’t like being around people.” “They just want to be alone.” Not true!  Introverts do enjoy socializing. They just tend to prefer doing so in smaller groups or one-on-one. And not only that, but they often like to have (and need to have) a little quiet time to recharge. So when your conference centers so heavily around networking, how you can make it appealing - and valuable - for your introverted attendees?

Putting the right people on stage and making sure the experience is optimized for your audience is a lot more difficult than swiping right on an agency’s page of headshots. Smart Meetings asked veteran event professional (and Smart Women in Meetings Award winner) Sharon Bonner her tips for finding, negotiating, marketing and teaming up with thought leaders to deliver messaging to attendees. As CEO and founder of Bright Ideas Events in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Bonner has hired hundreds of speakers over the years, and says it starts with strategy.

Worried about re-posting content, getting the best lighting for you selfies or what hashtag to use for your business Instagram? Sheryl Shelton, manager of B2B marketing and social media for Hilton Hotels & Resorts shared tips for engaging attendees through Instagram in a Smart Meetings webinar. She was joined by professional food photographer and cookbook author Justin Fox Burks who gave expert advice on lighting, styling and editing photos.

Don’t be a ‘chill host’ is the advice Priya Parker offers in a recent episode of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop podcast. Podcasts have become the new commute activity, weekly entertainment, news source and buzz for everything from fitness to career motivation. For businesswomen, podcasts can be indispensable in explaining how to handle stress, squeeze in a workout at the end of the day or advance a career. We have rounded up five female-run podcasts to inspire and empower businesswomen and planners.

When you think of the word “team,” what is the first thing that comes to mind? Most of us automatically associate teams with some kind of organized play. And if you want to generate a sense of team spirit among a group of co-workers, games are one of the most effective ways to make it happen.

Food and floral arrangements are critical pieces to an event, but they are also two elements that inevitably get dumped in the trash once guests have left. Coordinating the delivery and donation of food in an efficient way is a difficult challenge for planners to execute on their own. However, more planners are coordinating the donation of leftover food and flowers to waste less and serve their communities more.

From enhanced guest experiences to the power of reserving your parking spot in advance, smart technology is becoming more common in the hospitality industry. Apps that anticipate guests’ needs help hotels and planners design events that deliver more of what people really want.

Meeting planners have been using virtual reality to check out new destinations for a while, as it’s inexpensive to don a Google Cardboard headset and virtually walk through meeting halls to narrow down a list of potential host venues. But for the most part, meeting professionals have left VR activities to exhibitors or speakers with technically advanced presentations. 

What is creativity? So much has been written about it and there’s probably no other topic, which is as mystified and glorified as creativity. Finnish creative director, Saku Tuominen, defines creativity as the ability to see and the desire to do things better. What I like about this definition is that it doesn’t only focus on planning and ideas but emphasizes the point of making an effort for attaining better results.

Tribalization (aka “Take Me to My Peeps”) has ruled supreme at many events. And let’s face it – our brains are hard-wired to prefer mingling with like-minded people. People of the same gender, age, ethnicity, professional experience, etc. But there are unintended and sometimes dire long-term consequences for this short-term tribal play.

Planning a menu for an event can be a hassle, especially in our gluten-free, keto and vegan world. Whether an attendee has a food allergy, is health conscious or stands firmly by their personal or religious beliefs on how food should be prepared, creating a menu that accommodates everyone can be a headache.

Luckily, most venues are pretty accommodating to dietary restrictions. They just need to know ahead of time.

Phone interviews are a great way to connect with a candidate without the time and effort investment (on both sides!) that an in-person interview requires. If the position you’re hiring for includes time on the phone with those you serve - even better! You get to test drive the experience.

I have been struck by the disparity in how an association’s organizational culture translates (or doesn’t translate) to the on-site implementation or planning of its live events. There are many associations that tout their open and supportive cultures. But when it gets to “go time,” does that culture manifest at your conferences and meetings?

Uber-novelist Stephen King once offered some deep insight into hype and buzz. He said when the message lands, and there then becomes a groundswell of genuine interest, that becomes “buzz.” It almost always portends good things (the success of your product launch, new feature rollout, etc.)—and creating that spark is what marketers live for. Marketers should pay attention to this insight because it goes straight to the heart of why consumers get excited about certain things.

In 2018, 281 billion emails were sent and received. That causes a problem for event creators trying to compete for attention in event-goers’ cluttered inboxes.

There are many email marketing strategies you can use to stand out in event-goers’ inboxes, but the most important is your email copy. Here’s what you need to know to stand out with your event invitation email copy.