You’ve probably worked to improve your conference sustainability—waste diversion, less paper, fewer single-serve plastics—but have you thought about the carbon footprint of the food you serve? The Greenbuild International Conference and Expo has, and the 3,500 plated lunches it served at McCormick Place in Chicago at its November 2018 event were 100 percent vegan.

Within a few days of returning from a trade show, it’s important to get together with your team to review the event’s successes and failures. Your booth staff will have fresh memories of what went well or wrong, and those staff who didn’t attend the event will likely have early impressions of any resultant sales or leads. To ensure you capture this feedback in a way that can guide next year’s exhibit, we’d like to offer up the following list of staff questions.

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.

As event and marketing professionals, we are used to keeping it all under control while everything around us is constantly changing. You track the competition, manage the timelines and budgets, and do your day job at the same time – all while managing your personal life whether that involves caring for kids, aging parents, partners and, hopefully, a social life. This can all come to a grinding halt when emergencies come calling.

As we watch news on TV or online, our brains hear things that scare us. If it’s not the upcoming weather forecast or flood warning, then it’s the scare of contaminated food, causing illnesses. For meeting professionals, these nerve-pulsating newscasts could be creating extra stressors, as those items might also influence our conferences, such as weather that grounds planes or sicknesses that prevent travel.

According to a report released by CareerCast, event planners made it to the top five on the list of “The Most Stressful Jobs of 2018,” right after firefighters, police officers, enlisted military personnel and airline pilots. The survey was based on 11 factors, including travel, physical demands, meeting the public and deadlines. Smart Meetings planner, Maria Cruz, has a few tips to help planners reduce stress before, during and after an event.

There are so many theories in leadership ranging from vision to self-awareness to service. The simplest way to develop your leadership skills is to have a work ethic mixed with a solid foundation of core values. Inspirational leaders have commandments they work and live by. Commandments, or guidelines, lay the critical foundation for the development of leadership and business solutions.

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.

Mistakes happen — even to the most organized event planners. It’s hard to be perfect when you’re juggling endless details and deadlines, corresponding with dozens of caterers, and trying to woo sponsors.

Every organization has to figure out how to make meetings more effective. It’s a complex challenge. To be productive, each meeting needs to engage the individual talents of the people involved, work to achieve the organization’s specific goals for the moment, and do so in a way that’s both culturally relevant and contextually sensitive to the world around it—not an easy feat.

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.

I LOVE a good brainstorming session. There’s nothing like great minds coming together to form a new idea or solve a specific problem. But in order to actually do that, the brainstorming has to be, well...good. It needs to be a productive meeting of the minds.

To ensure that happens, be mindful of these five tips.

When I was the newly hired president of Burger King USA, I worked for the late and legendary restaurateur, Norman Brinker. I was in Norman’s office one afternoon after he had seen a memo that I had written to one of our senior leaders. I was noticeably thorough and prescriptive in terms of laying out the course of action, to which Norman offered an alternate approach.

“I saw your memo to so-and-so and have a thought for you,” he said. “Next time, why don’t you just focus on the objective and leave how he gets there up to him?”

He continued, “Two things will happen: one, you’ll find out how smart he is or ain’t, and two, he might just come up with some new ideas you hadn’t thought of.”

That moment 36 years ago has shaped the way I’ve operated ever since, particularly when it comes to mentoring. While many mislabel mentorship as giving advice, there’s much more to it.

This is just one of the top problems Teneo Hospitality Group found in its recent 2019 survey, comprised of responses from 150 meeting planners and hoteliers. The results continue to follow the trends; keeping up with technology is still crucial for successful events, while creativity cannot be lacking if you hope to have an interesting and engaging meeting.

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.

Do you spend a lot of time on the road? Do you feel unrested? Perhaps you’ve just switched jobs and you’re looking to overcome the inevitable strain that traveling has on your mind and body.

These tips can be used no matter where you’re going (or how you’re getting there) to help you get more shut-eye.

Oh, the irony! At a session on sustainable meetings at Pharma Forum 2019 at the Marriott Marquis in New York, there were plastic bottles of water on each table. It could have been worse; they were large bottles so that session participants could pour their own drinks into glasses. As session leaders Jennifer Romo Dowd, manager, meetings & conventions at BioMarin Pharmaceutical, and Jody Brandes, group manager at Genentech, made clear, single-use plastic is one of the biggest problems for sustainable events.

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.

In 2019, it’s harder than ever to get consumers’ attention. For that reason alone, it’s easy to see why brands are falling in love with experiential marketing. Immersive, live, and memorable, experiential campaigns help deliver your message without distractions. But the strategy lacks a standard definition, which can be confusing when you’re new to it. So, what, exactly, does experiential marketing mean?  Are there different types of experiential marketing? How does it differ from traditional marketing, or from live events more generally? And when is it a good idea to use an experiential strategy over other tactics?

When obtaining a conference budget, there are many facets that can determine your success. The same goes for any operation, possibilities increase with financing. If you represent an association that has just acquired event sponsorship and are looking for ways to maximise on the allocated budget, then carefully considering the following aspects is imperative. Never underestimate your value as an association, along with the value that an organisation will gain by attaching their brand to your conference.

You’ve heard it (and probably seen it) time and time again: Video content is growing in popularity. Now that may either excite you or terrify you, depending on your comfort level with filming video. But the good news is, you really don’t have to have ANY videography experience to put together a top-notch video. All you need is your phone, a vision, and a few best practices in hand.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere these days—from smart assistants, cars and homes to investing, advertising, security and medicine—and it’s evolving rapidly. The travel industry is not immune to the impact of AI. On the contrary, it is fertile ground for new applications and innovations. Travel management companies are increasing their investments in the technology in order to fine-tune the traveler experience and, in turn, achieve their business goals. AI is already making business travel less stressful. It can make baggage tracking more seamless, facilitate hotel check-ins, and help minimize the pain of flight cancellations. Travel managers reap the benefits of AI-enabled and automated business-travel bookings in the form of fast access to the most cost-effective and rewarding options for their travel programs.