Inspiration Hub

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.

Fear has been described by the acronym FEAR: False Expectations Appearing Real. We know that change is often accompanied by fear, as well as a sense of risk, uncertainty, and excitement. It’s also true that if we change the way we see things, the things we see change. 

Did you know that 46,2% of event planners identify the need to increase delegate attendance as one of their bigger challenges? Getting people in a room is not difficult. The great challenge lies in getting the attendees that matter in that room. The right people are in most cases in high demand, hence competition skyrockets. Just when you thought sending out bulk invitations to as many people as possible was enough, in comes the simple – and yet never fully utilised – rule of delegate attendance: creating an irresistible RSVP strategy that will jostle competitors.

In the annual Convene Salary Survey, we asked readers a number of opened-ended questions, including “What do you like least about your job?” One is six responses included some aspect of working with others. But here’s a nice twist — when we asked what readers like best about their jobs, the most popular response, by far, was the people they work with and meet. Readers also liked the constant challenges that arise on the job and the perks of travel. Here’s what you said you like most about your job.

You just unpacked your suitcase full of swag from IMEX Frankfurt last month, and the world’s largest matching organization for event professionals is already teasing you with glimpses of the creative connections that will await you Oct. 16–18 at IMEX America in Las Vegas.

“Should I get a master’s degree or a certification?” It’s a question I’ve been asked a lot over the years. And my answer is usually an ironic, “Yes.” Asking, “Should I get a master’s degree or a certification?” is like asking, “Should I have an apple or should I have turkey and dressing with giblet gravy?”

Email—a great invention, though it occasionally can feel like the bane of an event professional’s existence as we try to meet deadlines and separate the must-reads from the deletes. With regular sign-ups for white papers, subscriptions for nuggets of key information and personal messages all combined in one inbox, it can feel overwhelming to open your mail app to tens of emails throughout the day. But there are ways to combat this without sacrificing your sanity, and few barely take more than a few minutes.

Event planners are a special breed of hard-working, hyper-organized adrenaline junkies. Consistently named as one of the world’s most stressful jobs, the role of event organizer is uniquely challenging — yet equally rewarding for some. Think you were born to be an event planner? Check out these must-have event planning skills to see if you’ve got what it takes.

One element that is constantly under serious scrutiny by event planners, is the budget. Event budgets of course vary depending on the event’s scale, however, throwing a large amount of resources into it does not guarantee  success. Cost-effective doesn’t have to mean cheap in the world of event planning, therefore experiences with a smaller budget can be equally impactful and engaging, as long as event planning is executed strategically to activate and excite attendees. After all, it is the value that needs to be high, not the price.