Inspiration Hub

The meetings industry is changing, and this is good news. The Fall 2018 Meetings Outlook by Meeting Professionals International (MPI) confirms that the industry is alive, well and thriving. The report described the results of an MPI survey that underscored that these changes could result in events being more impactful for their attendees.

Sales and marketing teams are hungry for leads and the more data attached to these leads, the better. Yet some of the best, most promising leads often come to sales teams with few details about interests and behaviors attached. We’re talking about the attendees of your company’s in-person events. We call these prospects Event-Qualified Leads (EQLs) and they are the first step in linking events to sales.

Meeting professionals aren’t a shy bunch—but if you really want to get them talking, bring up the topic of cost savings. Everyone’s in the same doing-more-with-less situation and eager for new ideas to stretch the budget. At the Financial and Insurance Conference Professionals Annual Conference in Orlando this week, a packed educational session provided attendees a chance to share their cost-saving strategies. Here are 15 of our favorites:

Business-related events can often feel stale and predictable. But that doesn’t mean they have to be. To avoid awkward speeches, bland catering, and a conventional setting, all it takes is a bit of imagination. Check out these six common corporate event types and learn how to make yours more memorable.

As if meeting and event planners aren't dealing with enough negotiating and budgeting difficulty thanks to a multi-year sellers’ market, new data from the U.S. Department of Labor shows that wages are rising at the fastest clip in 10 years. The growth in wages between October 2017 and October 2018 was 3.1 percent, the strongest one-year rate of growth since 2009. This development will probably raise the cost of many elements not yet contracted for 2019 meetings and events. 

Planning a meeting, conference or company event can often be full of starts and stops and not always moving in the same direction. The focus, size or even location of the event can change, and the meeting planner may not have insight into the overall goals of the client or group for whom the training or conference is being planned. Yet, nailing down as many of these details as far in advance as possible can be the key to a successful meeting.

You have a vision for what your event will look like in five or ten years. But if you want to make it a reality, there are a couple of challenges that could stop you from achieving that dream. However, with insight gathered by your event technology, unexpected surprises can be minimised or avoided altogether. Find out how to identify and prevent two common pitfalls with these two strategies.

According to a recent survey, more than half of expo attendees said that event vendors are a deciding factor in whether to attend an event for the first time. That means retaining high-quality vendors is key to attracting attendees. Disappoint your vendors, and you’re risking potential sales. Keep on reading for three ways to keep your event vendors happy — and signed on for another year.

MPI’s Meetings Outlook 2018 Summer Edition planner responses indicated that while “66 percent predict favorable business conditions, only 3.1 percent say negotiations are becoming simpler.” In contrast, 54.9 percent of respondents claim contract negotiations are becoming more complex. Today’s hotel meeting contracts are getting longer and longer and that would certainly indicate more specificity, if not more complexity. Whether contract trends are new or old, it is the meeting professional’s responsibility to read every single word of the contract carefully and seek advice from their legal counsel as warranted.

There’s good reason why the position of event planner is consistently named to the top ten most stressful jobs each year. There are so many moving parts, demands, and unexpected complications that can arise. And through it all you not only have to find viable solutions, you need to ensure you keep your composure and remain gracious to attendees, sponsors, and vendors.

Before you can perform meeting magic, you first have to find your next gig. That requires a killer resume. When you have a lot to brag about, it can be easy to overlook important skills that you bring to an organization and emphasize irrelevant information. Let’s take your CV one section at a time to make sure your event cred is obvious even at a glance.

Building your event budget can be a daunting task. With details changing daily and even more unknown elements, it can be hard to know where to begin. But begin you must. Your event budget becomes your guide throughout the event planning process to help you make key decisions. Creating a detailed and realistic budget template goes hand-in-hand with a successful event. All good event professionals know the first step to making sure nothing gets left out is to start with a checklist.

Distractions—a constant in the workplace, a thorn in a boss’ side, the enemy of the common employee. While a few workers may be able to power through for eight hours, with only a short lunch break and a phone in their bag all day, distractions are inevitable.

Arranging a hotel block and finalizing the contract is one of the most important parts of planning an event. It can also be one of the most overwhelming and confusing processes. There’s hotel jargon, legal terms, and the idea of facing off against someone over the negotiating table. We’re here to walk you through the basics of negotiating hotel blocks.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon banned the PowerPoint. It’s a bold move, especially when it is the standard. But going through photos, graphs and data can be, well…boring. Meetings are difficult enough, let alone meetings that revolve around clicking slide after slide. Consider pulling a Bezos, or at the least, incorporating something unique to keep morale and spirits high.

You love meeting new people, are calm under pressure, and are a whiz at prioritizing tasks. But is the event planning business right for you? Whether you’re a student looking for advice on how to break into the event planning business or an experienced professional wanting to change tracks, this roadmap can help guide your way. Discover the skills, tools, and tactics you need to know before becoming an event planner.

We need to rethink the idea of failure. It is time to stop viewing it as something negative. Successful failure is when we use it as fuel to improve ourselves, our businesses and our events. Failure helps us take that (at times) much needed step back to rethink, regroup and refocus. After which, we start up again and discipline ourselves to take one step at a time moving forward from the experience.

Hotel and venue contracts for international meetings are often shorter than for those in the United States, and “may often look more like a banquet event order than a legal contract,” says Terri Woodin, CMP, vice president of marketing and global meeting services, Meeting Sites Resources. However, just because a contract is short and easy to read, it is not necessarily a cause for celebration. According to the international meetings expert, planners still need to protect their organizations and attendees. During a recent MeetingsNet webinar, Woodin laid out her must-haves for international contracts.

Business event strategists have a whole lot of people to thank when an event goes smoothly — vendors, technicians, venue managers, hotel staff, volunteers, etc. Once the dust has settled and everyone is back to their regular routines, planners might send a quick email (or go old school with snail mail) to express gratitude to the team that made the event a success.

We’ve all had that one disastrous event where hardly anyone turned up. It’s an excruciating experience, especially if you have stakeholders to answer to. But there’s no reason you should give up.

Every successful leader knows ongoing professional and personal development is the pathway to continued success. Which is why people pay big bucks to attend leadership workshops. While it’s important that your workshop provides leaders with a new perspective on an old problem, there’s also fun to be had. Let these five leadership workshop activity ideas inspire you to strike the balance between strategy and play.

Cognitive science acknowledges the powerful role that emotions play in shaping our understanding, our ways of thinking, the decisions we make, and the habits we adopt. In fact, if logic and emotion are at odds, most people act on their feelings when making a decision. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio proved how critical emotions are to decision making several years ago in a groundbreaking study. He found that all of the subjects in his study — people who had damage in the amygdala, the area of the brain where emotions are generated — shared an inability to make decisions, even simple everyday ones.

You do it all. As the owner of your own third-party planner business you are the captain of the ship—and the crew. To help you navigate the sometimes rough waters of running your own business, we put together this handy resource guide with tips for everything from marketing and taxes to technology and negotiating. Feel free to bookmark this page as we will continue to update it with new tools for managing and growing your company. Until then, we wish you fair winds, following seas and full agendas.

I define leadership as a person or organization that is always looking for ways to innovate, that is not afraid to push important and sometimes controversial issues ahead, that digs in to solve or build without waiting for others to do so, that doesn’t look for individual kudos, but rather for collective progress.