Inspiration Hub

In a world where more and more meeting attendees are addicted to their phones, used to the excitement of virtual reality, and have an ever-shrinking attention span, associations face a significant challenge as they design their in-person events: How to find learning formats that will drive learning and, as a result, ensure attendee value.

Organizational complexity is strangling innovation, productivity and engagement. It is fogging people’s ability to proactively focus our time and energy on the top strategic priorities. We get sucked into low value, reactive busy work, which contributes to ordinary performance. But we, individually, are also responsible for allowing complexity to drive constant distraction, low focus and low energy. We live highly cluttered lives, have become addicted to checking our phones, are too responsive to interruptions and do not nurture, protect and direct our most productive energy.

Planning your company’s trade show for the first time can be overwhelming, but successful planning and execution can yield rewarding results. The most important thing to remember is that a trade show goes beyond selling your product or service. It’s about people; the connection between the people staffing your booth and the people visiting your booth. It may be helpful to remember the 4 E’s as you embark on your first trade show planning and execution: educate, engage, empathize, and evolve. The 4 E’s are based on the research stated in the CEIR Industry Insights Series article titled It’s Not Your Father’s or Mother’s Trade Show Anymore – Engage with Caution.

The Bangkok Manifesto started as a series of workshops with SITE’s international board of directors, trustees of the SITE Foundation and a cohort of global experts in the field of incentive travel, facilitated by Martin Sirk, former executive director of ICCA. The final 10 statements of The Bangkok Manifesto were then crowdsourced with the full conference assembly using Slido, the online, audience engagement platform.

At last month’s Davos, one of the most eye-opening events for participants was an activity that literally kept them in the dark. The Sensory Dinner in the Dark experience took place in an unlit restaurant where participants were lead to their seats and served a meal they could not see. The diners were dependent on the wait staff to reach their tables and find silverware and food, and the waiters were remarkably adept at navigating the environment and serving in the dark. At the end of the meal, the lights were turned on and diners discovered that the wait staff that they had depended on so completely were people with visual impairments, showing that competency is not limited to the non-disabled.

On January 24, the Events Industry Council, comprising more than 30 member organizations within the meetings and events business, unveiled four principles designed to guide and motivate event organizers worldwide to embrace and implement sustainable practices in their work. These principles can be found on a new page within the Sustainability section of EIC's web site. 

Two news stories this week gave a conflicting vision of the use of AI robots as hotel staff. A Reuters’ story on Alibaba Future Hotel Management’s FlyZoo hotel in Hangzhou, China, describes sleek little robots delivering towels and cocktails, which, according to the story, Alibaba claims cuts labor costs and eliminates the need for guests to interact with people.

Benchmarking with similar companies is a valuable way to gather data on strategic meetings management best practices. I know many meeting managers who have developed strong relationships with their peers over the years. Their candid sharing provides them with new ideas and quick wins for program improvements. Additionally, benchmarking will help you understand how your program compares to that of your competition, which provides is powerful information for C-level executives. Below are six tips for your benchmarking journey.

Remember that glorious 2017 music festival in the Bahamas that garnered headlines for its excellent planning, exceptional execution and gorgeous attendees? Fyre Festival was all the rage, until it was supposed to happen and attendees found themselves stranded on an island with no infrastructure, F&B easily surpassed by your average soup kitchen, leftover FEMA tents for housing and, well, no festival.

As professional event planners, we understand the value of time; but what happens when your work requires you to collaborate with someone on the other side of the country, or even the globe? A few simple best practices can help make this an easy transition for many event professionals.

Investors and developers see the meetings and events technology space as ripe for disruption, and over the past four years have invested in or launched nearly 400 event solutions. The reasons for this momentous interest in emerging event technologies are many. (See my previous article “The Current State of Meetings Technology”).  What are the impacts of so many new disruptive technologies: the pros and cons for event participants, end-user organizations, and meeting planning intermediaries? With at least 20 new solution types now available (see below), I will only focus on general trends in this article, but in future articles will look at specifics of particular solution types.

Organizations are in the midst of a massive shift toward more teamwork. In the average company, up to 80 percent of employees’ days are spent working collaboratively. However, only 14 percent of executives are satisfied with their employees' ability to collaborate and make decisions as teams. This represents an opportunity for meeting planners to help, by putting on educational sessions that make people better at working in a team.

There is a lot of talk about brands taking stands in today’s marketing world where doing the right thing has become vital to an organization’s reputation and customer base. In the 2018 Edelman Earned Brand study, statistics show that 65% of consumers now buy on belief or buy from brands having similar morals, values, and beliefs on social issues and politics. This is up 13% from 2017.

Creative event marketing is the easiest way to increase the number of people who eventually attend your meeting—directly contributing to the bottom line. Email best practices such as segmenting lists, tracking key metrics and using an email verifier tool to reach as much of your audience as possible is a great way to reach maximum return on investment. That is why sometimes it pays to return to the basics.

One person isn’t responsible for coming up with the look of a house, ordering the wood, laying the foundation and selling the home. That wouldn’t be practical. Experts in each of those areas play a role and then pass the job off to the next person.

As the New Year starts, so does a wave of new conference trends. From kimchi and chatbots to delegate wellness and themed events, 2019 is set to be an exciting year for the conference industry. Creating memorable experiences and promoting attendee interaction will be at the top of planners’ wish lists. Due the advance of event technology, real-time data and wearable technology will soon become the norm. Delegates have high expectations and it’s now up to meeting planners and venues to provide innovative meeting experiences to wow their guests and streamline events.

Qantas passengers would like to see virtual reality experiences, exercise spaces and cafés on board the airline’s future ultra long-haul flights, research conducted by the airline shows.

The Australian carrier in 2017 announced its goal to start non-stop services between the east coast of Australia and New York and London by 2022. Named “Project Sunrise”, these ultra long-haul services follow the launch of Qantas’s non-stop service between Perth and London in March last year.

In conjunction with Sydney University’s Charles Perkins Centre, Qantas surveyed passengers on board its Perth-London service, along with separate focus groups, late last year to determine the features they would most like to see on the carrier’s future 20-hour flights.

When meeting organizers gather enough data to understand certain key personality traits among their attendees, they can build event sessions that deliver meaningful impact to every participant. That was the overarching conclusion from a year-long research project by German Convention Bureau, the European Association of Event Centres, and Fraunhofer Society, Europe's largest application-oriented research organization. The research results were presented earlier this month at the Professional Convention Management Association's Convening Leaders conference in Pittsburgh.

Last week I wrote a proposal for a great client and sent her all the information I knew she would need to make a decision. But unlike some clients who just don’t get back to you or follow up weeks later to tell you that they’ve gone with someone else, this client responded with a list of questions that she had been using to evaluate all the different proposals she got to compare apples to apples. Some of what she asked had already been covered, but some of it had not been addressed in my proposal.

Planning and managing multiple events is a constant juggling act. You’re not just managing your venue, vendor, caterer, staff, and sponsors for one event — you’re managing multiple sets of them for each event! And while the highs can be exhilarating, the lows can make you seriously question why you’ve picked a career that leaves you so little time for friends and family.

While top travel advisors are adept at preparing their clients for stress-free trips, including advice on what to pack, how do they ensure their own needs are met while on the road? Skift reached out to veteran travel advisors to get some insight into what essential items they themselves never leave home without.

Nowadays, brand awareness is virtually invaluable. Companies are paying a premium for exposure in an era where competition is immense. If you are the head of marketing for a company, you will have profound insight into how challenging it can be to get your brand noticed in the digital age. You will also have an idea of how beneficial event sponsorship is. Not being sponsored, but instead, sponsoring an event, exhibition or trade show as a business. Just think about all the attendees live onsite you will essentially be advertising to. Not to forget new digital platforms which offer additional room to position your brand accordingly.

So I’ve been on a kick talking about thought leadership lately, as you’ve probably noticed, but I truly believe this is a difference-maker in so many businesses. And yet – not many businesses even know what thought leadership is, let alone are focused on building it. I talked a few weeks ago in my blog about how you can be a thought leader, even when you don’t feel like an “expert“, but I think it’s also important to talk about why thought leadership and influence is really important.