Inspiration Hub

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.  

On the heels of multiple studies showing that event professionals are increasingly being asked to do more with less, Smart Meetings asked a veteran planner for tips on how to create “wow” on a budget. Doug McPhee, Experient senior global account manager, recently spoke at CMP Conclave in Birmingham, Alabama, on this very topic and shared the 10 things that can trim the bottom line without sacrificing the end-product.

Four out of five people will consider flaking on an event they’ve already bought tickets to. In fact, 47% of people flaked on an event in the last month, according to new research from Eventbrite and OnePoll. What’s going on here? Are people just jerks?

To the uninitiated, booking speakers or headline entertainment for a meeting or incentive program might seem like the least of a planner’s worries. But the reality of bridging the corporate world and the entertainment world can be tricky, with the possibility of lengthy riders, big egos, and unexpected cancellations all adding complexity to the relationship.

According to a Crowne Plaza Hotel and Resorts survey of 2,000 employees, some people will go to great lengths to avoid attending unproductive meetings. The most common excuse used for opting out was a heavy workload, which nearly a third of respondents (30 percent) have admitted to blaming for their absence. Heavy traffic came in second (15 percent), and six percent of respondents even admitted to calling in sick.

Event planners are notorious for being hyper-organized. But there is one unspoken chaos in your life that few people know about — the overflowing state of your email inbox. You know the feeling — with every notification, you see the giant pile of unread messages getting bigger. Some persistent emails clog every event manager’s inbox, languishing unresponded (or, worse, unread) for days then weeks at a time.

It is becoming exponentially hard for associations to survive today’s competitive landscape without a good strategy for growth. Change management initiatives are worth the investment to instill new life into your association and ensure it remains relevant for the ever-changing communities.

Planning at least three months ahead could save as much as 10 percent on the bottom line, according to a new 2019 Meetings & Events Future Trends study from Carlson Wagonlit Travel Meetings and Events (CWT M&E). The optimum time for booking meetings for small groups was pegged at more than 30 days; for large groups, that window expanded to more than 75 days. Outside of these booking windows, potential savings dip by 5–10 percent, the report found.

It’s impossible to put together an event on your own. Even if you had the bandwidth for everything, which you likely don’t, there’s also the huge variety of skillsets required. You can’t be in multiple places at once. Skimping on event planners means the event will skimp in other ways, too. It’s simply impossible to have one person take care of the VIPs, welcome guests, and coordinate food and activities at the same time. That’s why a team is so important.

Team-building activities have gotten a bad rep in recent years. Even the mention of the term can quickly result in snarky comments or at least eye-rolling from employees. And honestly, who can blame them—team-building activities are often dull, awkward and, in the end, useless.

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.