Inspiration Hub

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.

Who wouldn’t want to come to a free event? Lots of people, it turns out. You build, they RSVP — but they don’t come. Even the most successful events have no-shows. Things come up; people can’t make it. But for free events, there’s no financial consequence to skipping the event. So free events tend to see much higher dropout rates — up to 50%, according to a survey of free event creators.

Unproductive business meetings cost companies an estimated $541 billion in lost productivity and employee time, according to the 2019 State of Meetings Report from the meeting scheduling platform Doodle. Forbes  reports that this figure does not include additional spending on things like travel expenses involved in sending employees to meetings. Such costs could be significant, since the US Travel Association estimates that American companies spend $154 billion annually on business travel.

In a world where more and more meeting attendees are addicted to their phones, used to the excitement of virtual reality, and have an ever-shrinking attention span, associations face a significant challenge as they design their in-person events: How to find learning formats that will drive learning and, as a result, ensure attendee value.

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.

One person isn’t responsible for coming up with the look of a house, ordering the wood, laying the foundation and selling the home. That wouldn’t be practical. Experts in each of those areas play a role and then pass the job off to the next person.

When meeting organizers gather enough data to understand certain key personality traits among their attendees, they can build event sessions that deliver meaningful impact to every participant. That was the overarching conclusion from a year-long research project by German Convention Bureau, the European Association of Event Centres, and Fraunhofer Society, Europe's largest application-oriented research organization. The research results were presented earlier this month at the Professional Convention Management Association's Convening Leaders conference in Pittsburgh.

Experiential Design is not new. In fact, we have been doing it for thousands of years. Each time tribes gathered together to celebrate, or travelled to meet, converse and trade, experiences were intentionally designed and history was written. We have connected through ritual, regalia, food, storytelling, performance, pageantry and entertainment all designed to drive emotive human responses. From caves to castles, these connections built and overturned empires and changed the course of history as participants enjoyed spectacles of shared art, music and artistic extravagance.

Event planners spend ample time putting together all aspects of an event from the food to the decor, the stage experience to the entertainment and to every fine detail in between. Often times, their designs are inspired by their peers, other events and industry trends; however, this can be a challenge when audiences or event objectives are different. After all, what works for someone else may not be the best solution for your event.

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.

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.

According to our Eventbrite Survey, Millennials will account for 75% of the UK workforce in a decade and spend over £419,556,233 each month on attending live events. But while this is good news for event creators, the demand for live experiences also means more competition.

Meetings are made for extroverts. They’ll talk to anyone about anything. They’re gregarious, and they get their energy from interacting with other people. But extroverts only make up about half your attendees, says Sharon Fisher, president of experiential communications company Play with a Purpose. The other half, she says, are the introverts whose personal style is almost the opposite, and those attendees need to be considered in your meeting design.

For the longest time, the ”breakout session“ felt like the forgotten stepchild of event marketing. Throw in a stage and a projector, invite a category expert and hope for the best. Because all the killer keynotes were on the plenary stage, a decent breakout was considered a bonus.

One of the most daring and complex high-wire acts is organizing a citywide event. Spanning multiple hotels, thousands of rooms and millions of square feet of event space, a citywide requires a planner to manage a long list of responsibilities to make it successful. According to recent Smart Meetings webinar hosts Elaine Williams and Sallee Pavlovich, however, the answers are right at planners’ fingertips.

Event Design is constantly evolving, and participants are starting to expect a lot more from the design of an event. There needs to be a synergy between all event design elements. Coming directly from MCI Germany’s finest, Dr. Christina Buttler and Thomas Wüthrich, here are some insights into what participants are expecting:

Events are a great member benefit but can become a huge expense without proper planning. Here are 30 great ways to consider saving money:

It’s been gratifying to see the evolution of the concept of Event Design over the past decade. Where once “design” was restricted to the province of aesthetics, now event planners all over the world understand that events must, yes, delight the senses, but they must also motivate, engage and move individuals and organizations to action.