Inspiration Hub

Event planning is a mix of fast-paced excitement and mind-boggling stress. You know it’s worth it when you see the smiles on your attendees’ faces — but sometimes it’s hard to remember that feeling during a last-minute crisis. Whether you need to get pumped up to power through an event-day marathon or a tricky sponsorship negotiation, mantras can help you feel centered so you can take action.

Writing contracts and negotiating terms with suppliers can be tricky. How do planners protect themselves and their attendees from cancellations? Are attorney fees included? In a recent Smart Meetings webinar, veteran hospitality contracts attorney Lisa Sommer Devlin shared some tips for creating win-win contracts. Here are the contract clauses you shouldn’t do without.

A post-event recap provides useful information to your stakeholders and community on key takeaways from the event. But sometimes this important step is forgotten or postponed in the flurry of activity. However, this essential tool is most useful in the days after the event. In fact, the best time to publish this report is within 48 hours of the event ending. After two weeks, the information gets a stale. Following are some tips from a veteran planner on writing the perfect event recap.

The motto “there are no bad questions” does not apply to surveys. There is definitely a right and wrong way to ask attendees for feedback. The wrong way can confuse and annoy attendees — and ultimately lead to them giving up on your survey. It can also affect the accuracy of the answers you get. If you’re getting biased answers — and making critical changes to your events as a result — it could seriously undermine the success of your future events.

“Our departments are too siloed.”

“I don’t understand how my role makes an impact.”

“There isn’t enough transparency!”

Sound familiar? It can get easy to become so focused on our initiatives that we put our head down and barrel through - especially when times are busy and resources are limited. That said, this approach often leads to an unnecessary disconnect among staff.

Let's be honest, event planning is a stressful job. At any given time there are a number of jobs that need to get done and it can seem like every deadline comes right down to the wire. The 18 tips in this blog post will help you save time during the event planning process and ensure your next event is wildly successful. Let's dive right in.

It’s easy to get into an afternoon/end-of-day slump. But how you end your day can have a great impact on how you begin your tomorrow. Obviously, you want your work days to be as productive as possible, so to make that more of a daily reality, try ending each day by completing the following six tasks:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

63% of event creators today base their decision to participate in future events on past performance. But if you’re only measuring total revenue or ticket sales, you don’t have clear visibility into your marketing and event performance. If your analysis stops there, you’re missing out on an opportunity to grow your audience and boost your event’s return on investment (ROI).

At this point in a new year, your event management resolutions are faltering. Old challenges — and some surprising new ones — have already made you question your goals for your event’s growth in 2019.

But you’re not the only one facing these challenges. In fact, we surveyed more than 1,200 event professionals across the United States and Canada on their common struggles in 2019, and three core challenges rose to the top.

Use these trends to brainstorm new ways to tackle your most persistent challenges — and take solace in the fact that you’re not alone.

While the featured speaker at your conference may only be on stage for 40, 60 or 90 minutes, as a meeting professional, you are most likely “on stage” throughout the entire conference. From corporate clients to team members, venue partners to service providers and conference chairs to attendees—the variety and number of people you are in contact with seems to be endless. Making a stellar first impression on them should always be at the forefront of your mind. This is because once one an opinion has been formed, it can be hard to change and will dominate someone’s view of you regardless of how often it is contradicted by new experiences. Therefore, your “stage performance” prior, during and after a conference should be a top priority for you and its success will depend on four basic elements.

Meeting professionals often find themselves managing multiple priorities. After all, we all have a variety of responsibilities that need to be handled adroitly. That is simply the nature of our work today. Unlike factory workers of 100 years ago, hardly anyone today focuses solely on one specific task repeatedly. Today, we are all knowledge workers to greater or lesser degrees. Meeting planners, especially, are required to balance time management, self-management and effective allocation of resources. At no time, however, should such workplace skills be confused with the current, if ill-advised, phenomenon known as multitasking.

Event professional’s New Year’s resolutions are often predictable variations of the same goals: selling more tickets, achieving a better work-life balance,  or learning how to relax. It’s human nature to want to grow and improve — but resolutions are doomed to fail if you keep making the same ones year after year without a game plan. Keep reading to see which of these New Year’s resolutions you’ve likely broken in the past — and how just a little tweak might make this the year that you finally follow through.

Social Darwinism argues that progress is a result of conflicts in which the fittest or best-adapted individuals or societies prevail. The event industry is in the midst of such a conflict and you need to decide which path you want to take; do the work to adapt and evolve or do nothing and at best languish; at worst, get left behind or replaced.

Are you planning an event? Do you need to attract more people to your business, make your company stand out and get noticed? If so, a good event goes without saying as a major prerequisite for that. Of course, it’s easy for big companies to host events. Well, it’s not that easy but it’s certainly better when you have loads of money at your disposal, right? Well, if you belong to the less fortunate group here, where you have to allocate each buck carefully, take a look below and you’ll find useful tips that will help you do just that.

As the year wraps up, I think it is important to examine strategic meeting management program success. When was the last time you took a close look at your yield? Specifically, what benefits does the SMM return to your organization? I have identified 10 outcomes to consider when examining an SMM program.