Inspiration Hub

Virtual meetings require careful design to keep attendees engaged and deliver value for the hosts. But how do you translate the energy and insights from a face-to-face meeting through a computer screen? Marteen Vannest, senior consultant at Meeting Design Institute, which produces a free masterclass and certified training on producing online meetings, suggests starting with the “why” of the meeting.

Meeting professionals are behind the scenes at big conferences, but they’re front and center for the meetings with department colleagues, stakeholders, and suppliers that bring their events to life. Unfortunately, these everyday meetings can be time-wasters if they’re not well executed. In fact, Doodle’s 2019 State of Meetings Report calculates that professionals spend an average of three hours a week in meetings, and of those, two hours are unnecessary or ineffective, resulting in a cost to organizations of $541 billion per year in lost work.  

When it comes to entertainment ideas for corporate events, things have pretty much been done a billion times over. There’s the photo booth, cooking classes, live bands, not to mention the escape room. Aimed at creating bonding opportunities for employees, sharing company culture initiatives and sparking collaborations, corporate events usually have strong mandates in mind, yet one of the biggest challenges is that people are pretty much dragged into going there, and end up either leaving early, leaving drunk and/or missing the point entirely. 

Event planning never seems to go away — even on your days off. You might shut off your work email, but somehow you always get roped into planning in your free time. The school bake sale, your friend’s baby shower, or the community walk-a-thon — you name it, you’ve (begrudgingly) planned it.  

Today’s associations are at an inflection point. For many, event attendance is flat or declining, and there is no clear path to turn that around. The hard truth is that the world moves faster than the pace of most association events. With the introduction of so many new technologies and consumer experiences, attendee expectations rise every year. Our audience is thinking: If we can have these things in our daily lives, why can’t we have them at our events?

To really influence attendees, event professionals need to be intentional about the experiences they design. But how do you know what innovations will work? At PCMA EduCon 2019 this week at JW Marriott Downtown L.A. Live, PCMA Foundation and Steelcase Event Experiences released an in-depth study of the behavior of attendees from PCMA Convening Leaders 2019 at David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh. The report, “5,000 People, 5,000 Personal Journeys,” is a collection of reactions—positive and negative—to everything from multi-track sessions to creative networking ideas.

Event signage may seem like the most basic of all event details. But get it wrong, and your entire attendee experience is at risk. Without clear and concise signage directing your attendees and helping them find what they’re looking for, any event will quickly descend into chaos.

Most meeting organizers invest a significant amount of time creating the educational programming for their annual conference. Models vary, but most include a 15- to 20-person conference committee (slotters) and army of reviewers (graders). Progressive organizers are shifting to a blended model, where conference committees act more like content curators and advisors and less like graders and slotters. Session and abstract submissions are still an important part of the process, but a greater reliance is being placed on curated sessions. Program assembly of submission-only sessions will never yield the best the industry has to offer.

Putting the right people on stage and making sure the experience is optimized for your audience is a lot more difficult than swiping right on an agency’s page of headshots. Smart Meetings asked veteran event professional (and Smart Women in Meetings Award winner) Sharon Bonner her tips for finding, negotiating, marketing and teaming up with thought leaders to deliver messaging to attendees. As CEO and founder of Bright Ideas Events in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Bonner has hired hundreds of speakers over the years, and says it starts with strategy.

With 85 percent of responding planners saying that the latest generations of attendees are forcing greater integration of new technology into events, and 85 percent of planners also saying that “experience creation” is a more prominent task for them than ever before, the 2019 Meeting Room of the Future report from the International Association of Conference Centers shows that planners must work multiple angles in order to ensure the effectiveness of their events.

Dreaming of a bigger budget? You’re not alone.

The 2019 Eventbrite Pulse Report found that the second key concern for event organisers is insufficient budgets. Just under 45% of respondents said it was a challenge for them in 2018 and, although it looks like budgetary pressure is expected to improve this year, 37% of organisers still state that it will be a challenge.

To get a handle on some of the positives and negatives of your meeting, start your planning with a “sensory exposure audit” of what attendees will experience, from pre-meeting mailings through the meeting itself and afterwards. Just as political campaigns have “advance agents” who walk through every step of an event to consider all that might go right or wrong, you can mentally visualize each “vignette” attendees could encounter.

Meetings are necessary. We have to have them to move business forward, make decisions, plan projects and communicate with cross-functional teams. They are an intrinsic business component.

But what is not a given is an effective meeting. We all want them, want to be in them and want to host them. But often, we are faced with meetings that are either poorly managed, unnecessary or a huge time suck. How much time do you spend in meetings? I’ll bet it’s more than you think.

Since our work culture is mostly team-based, it’s about time we reflected it in our conference design. Teams that learn together actually implement together! The fact that it’s also a smart attendee acquisition strategy is the cherry on top.

We're all quite familiar with the Q&A portion of a meeting session: The final few minutes where the audience has its chance to drill down a bit with the presenter. But one participant asking a question to a presenter is the smallest form of interaction imaginable. What about all the other participants? They are simply listening. This means that, at best, three to five percent of the audience becomes actively engaged in that session. With a format called conversations & input (C&I), though, event organizers can radically improve audience activation and interaction, and deepen learning by orders of magnitude.

You don’t want to be the meeting planner in charge when your CEO, who’s vegan, gets served carrots for dinner at the awards banquet. And that cringe-worthy scenario will be the least of your worries if an attendee with an egg allergy is mistakenly served a salad dressed with a vinaigrette made with eggs.

Just like social media, event planning relies heavily on understanding ever-changing consumer preferences and behaviors. In order to make the best recommendations for clients in the event space, beyond examining platform updates and algorithm shifts, it’s important to evaluate broader cultural shifts and audience behaviors to anticipate the best way to deliver a strong message, while of course, ensuring those messages break through the noise.

The human mind perceives more than you might be aware of seeing. Our environment affects our emotions as images result in messages to our subconscious mind, having a profound effect on our brain function.

As the business world continues to grow, with multi-national companies opening offices in diverse countries, meetings and industry conferences will require more international travel than ever. But crossing international boundaries can cause concern for some delegates. Will there be a language barrier? How will attendees know where to go? According to a recent white paper, The World of Female Business Travel, 54 percent of respondents stated that they were concerned about cultural etiquette and customs when visiting a different country for business.

It’s time for meetings to evolve. Meetings are a benchmark of how efficient your company is and also how organized your team is under pressure. It’s easy to forget that meetings are an important element of the customer experience (CX), since they’re just, well…boring. You could have the best website in the world, incredible brand design and a variety of innovative experiences to offer, but these are not the only elements of CX you should be focusing on. If your in-person business meetings do not garner engagement, your customers will be less than impressed. In today’s hyper-competitive market, you absolutely must wow your potential customers if you want to strike a deal or cement a partnership.

Although planners do most of the heavy lifting in designing meetings, suppliers can provide invaluable support by sharing new technologies, strategies for room designs, or unique ideas to help create a memorable and engaging next meeting. No longer are there “basic” clinical investigator meetings, advisory boards, or international congresses. We have rapidly progressed from formulaic meetings to designing events that incorporate an array of engagement tools, neuroscience applications, and advanced event-design concepts.

In a world filled with endless distraction and instant connectivity, planners today are looking for ways to capture attendee attention and keep them fully engaged during long days of meetings. From phone check stations and interactive presentations to choosing a specific destination to disconnect from technology and reconnect with nature, planners can streamline a program in order to make the most impactful experience for attendees.

Chances are, you’ve already been inspired by (or at least have heard of) Marie Kondo, organizing consultant and author. Through her widely popular books and Netflix series, she’s helping us all create a more tidy, pleasant and peaceful way of living. Her approach? Simple and effective: She suggests gathering all of your belongings by category, holding each piece, one-by-one and evaluating whether or not it “sparks joy.” If it does, keep it, if it doesn’t — say thank you and goodbye.

Experiential marketing as a business is experiencing explosive growth. But with that growth comes added scrutiny. For brand-side marketers charged with partnering with experiential agencies to deliver breakthrough experiences for attendees, that means issuing more RFPs, more often, with more attention to the bottom line. But as the cultural landscape evolves, so does the search for the perfect agency partner. New priorities, such as inclusion and diversity, have surfaced. And the demand for standout creative has never been higher. Straight from the trenches at Salesforce, Accel, Facebook and Stripe, here’s how some of the industry’s most active event departments are reprioritizing their RFP processes.