Meeting content and planning 2

6 Money Saving Tips Your Tradeshow Vendor Is Not Telling You.

by levi_hb | May 24, 2019 | Meeting content and planning

Let’s face it…trade shows work. They are an invaluable marketing tool, allows you to keep a pulse on your industry, and gain new clients. That doesn’t mean you should take bad service, huge fees, or be held hostage by your trade show vendor. Like anything else, knowledge is power.

Here are 6 tips on how to save money on your trade-show budget.

The Storage Wars

Trade-show vendors love to charge storage. It’s recurring revenue they can count on in space they already have. But Brands refresh, products are upgraded and teams change. All of a sudden you begin storing items you’ll never use again. While it can look affordable on the outset, many companies end up storing just to store, afraid to throw out an expensive item that they will never use. For example, we acquired a client paying $5,000 annually for a decade for a booth they never used again. That’s $50,000 dollars! Out of site/out of mind can be disastrous.

Take inventory of what you are storing and ask yourself, “Do I really need it?”

Rent vs. Buy

Like most industries, trade-show vendors make higher margins when selling vs. renting. They know everyone likes to have a shiny new toy. But is it necessary? With today’s advancements in the industry, renting can be more affordable than ever. Plus no storage or repair expense. It also makes it easier to match your branding and messaging down the road. Most importantly, there is no large upfront cash outlay and you can negotiate a pay overtime and have the leverage.

Cutting Dray-age Costs

Dray-age is the cost associated with moving your booth and supplies in and out of a venue. Since dray-age is charged by weight, renting/purchasing a booth that is light weight will significantly reduce this cost. Also, considering the weight of your promotional items and producing lightweight foam signage can make your dray-age costs go down.

Store It Where You Need It

Many times storage makes sense, but store where it can save you money. Don’t think you have to store with your trade-show vendor. If you do several shows in the same region, consider storing at a local facility. It will save you on shipping and wear & tear cost.

Outsource Signage

Signage and graphics is a hefty profit center for trade-show vendors. Technology has dramatically brought down the cost of signage, posters and banners. Eye catching graphics can be bid out to local sign shops for a much lower costs. Even better…send your graphic files to a local sign shop in the city where the show is happening. This way you will save on shipping as well.

Axe the Rigging

Rigging can be one of the most expensive costs associated with a booth and a hefty profit center for the trade-show companies. Consider high columns for branding and lighted displays to grab attention.

And finally our favorite…

Donate And Get the Tax Right off

Non-profits in your community, would love your used booths and furniture. Consider reaching out to local charities who may be interested in accepting your donation for either re-purpose or resale. If you are only using certain items at a show consider, donating to a local community center, and you will save on return shipping as well. With either strategy, you will be helping a community and your organization can benefit for the tax right off. Everybody wins!

With these simple tips, you can get control of your trade-show costs, and put that money back in to other marketing initiatives or your bottom line. Good luck!

Got questions? We can help. Call AMI toll free at 866-337-7799.

Different Ways to Improve Your Meeting Outcomes

by levi_hb | May 9, 2019 | Meeting content and planning

The main goal of any meeting or event is often to deliver information. You may have any number of secondary goals, such as creating opportunities to increase brand awareness and loyalty, providing a platform for networking, and encouraging attendees to participate, innovate, and solve problems, just for example. That said, you might assume that as long as you deliver intended messaging, you’ve done your job.

Unfortunately, meeting outcomes hinge on more than just your ability to convey information to attendees. The more important part of the equation is whether or not they receive the information, as well as the impact it has on them. Also of concern is their overall impression of the event and whether or not they have a positive and fulfilling experience. If not, you can’t expect glowing reviews or future attendance, and you certainly can’t assume that the information you delivered sunk in.

If you want to improve meeting outcomes and maximize impact, you need to consider how every aspect of your event contributes to overall success. Sitting people in a room and regurgitating information for hours might not be the most effective means of meeting your goals. How, then, can you and your event company engineer desired results? Here are a few things to consider.

Consider the Impact of Location

The content of your meetings and events is more important than the setting it’s delivered in, but this doesn’t mean you can discount the impact of location. The setting of your meeting contributes to the overall impression you create. Just consider the difference in mood created by moving a meeting from a board room to an outdoor space and you can see how location affects the expectations of attendees and your ability to deliver information.

Says Tessa Cameron, VP Strategic Sourcing at AMI, “Hosting meetings and events in the same spaces can create a sense of normalcy and even nostalgia over time, but it can also breed boredom and stagnation. If you want to re-engage your audience and improve outcomes, novelty is one tactic to try, and changing up your meeting location is a good place to start.”

It’s also important to work with the resources at hand, and different locations are bound to deliver very different opportunities for engagement. Your event management partners should be able to help you settle on suitable locations for your meeting or event and come up with creative ways to utilize the best that any given location has to offer in terms of immersion and engagement with your event.

Work with Your Event Company on a Thoughtful Agenda

One of the biggest culprits when it comes to meeting fails is a weak agenda. There are steps you need to take in order to plan a successful event from beginning to end. You should start with a solid foundation. This entails setting the goals for outcomes. What do you hope to accomplish with your meeting or event?

Next, you need to build on these foundations by nailing down your core messaging and weaving in branding and thematic elements. In other words, you need to craft your content in keeping with your set goals. From there you can begin to flesh out practical elements, from needed furniture, décor, and electronics, to the layout of meeting spaces, to an itinerary of speakers and workshops.

You’ll want to make sure to work with your event company to create an atmosphere conducive to producing optimal results, as well as set a schedule that includes breaks and downtime. Even though you’re sure to craft a fairly tight itinerary, it’s always wise to leave a little wiggle room for the unexpected.

Plan for Fun and Relaxing Breaks

It’s not uncommon for event hosts to think of breaks as perfunctory, but this perspective misses the point of taking breaks, which is to reset in order to return to the task at hand refreshed. Naturally, you’ll need to allow adequate time for meeting and event attendees to see to basic needs with food and restroom breaks, but you should also think about breaking up core activities like speakers, panels, and workshops with opportunities for attendees to become reinvigorated.

A tight agenda of information delivery can leave guests feeling overwhelmed and stressed. This, in turn, can decrease data retention, increase exhaustion and irritation, and generally make for a negative experience. In order to ensure positive outcomes, you need to break up the monotony with engaging activities like games, physical pursuits, or team-building exercises, just for example. You could also opt for something more relaxing, like spa treatments.

The break-time activities you choose will depend on your audience and the size of your group. An experienced event management partner can help you come up with creative ideas for activities that suit your event, your audience, and even your theme or brand messaging.

Find Ways for Your Event Management to Increase Engagement

Information overload and boredom are two pressing concerns when it comes to ensuring positive and productive meeting outcomes. The way to combat these common issues is by finding ways to get attendees engaged and excited about the process.

This can be accomplished in a number of ways. Creating an experiential event that encourages guests to participate is going to be a lot more engaging than simply dousing them in information. Along these lines, you can create opportunities for both in-person and digital or social media participation. You can also add elements of gamification, by which attendees can compete and earn rewards on an individual or group basis.

An experienced event management partner can help you to come up with all kinds of unique experiential ideas in keeping with your event, your brand, and your audience’s tastes. You can also crowdsource ideas from the event community, which is, in itself, experiential.

Set the Right Tone

In any meeting or event scenario, you want to foster an environment of openness and tolerance. The last thing you want is to stifle creativity or innovation. This means creating opportunities for both individual and group engagement and considering even off-the-wall ideas. If you and your event company are looking for ways to improve meeting outcomes, consider how the atmosphere and attitude of your event can help to encourage innovation and sharing.

Organizing a Global Conference Tour: What You Need to Know

by levi_hb | Apr 25, 2019 | Meeting content and planning

Any event, large or small, requires a lot of planning and organization. Putting together a global conference tour naturally multiplies the amount of work to be done. Even if you and your global meeting planner get preparations underway early and you have superior organizational skills, there are still a lot of elements to juggle and many things that could go wrong. Drop one ball and they might all come crashing down.

To say that organizing this massive affair is challenging would be an understatement. The good news is that you’re not reinventing the wheel. Many other events host before you have faced similar challenges and you can learn from their mistakes and successes. What steps can you take to eliminate snafus and ensure the best possible outcomes from your global conference tour? Here are a few suggestions to set you on the right path.

Get a Jump on Promotion

The sooner you start promoting your event, the sooner you can garner interest, followers, sharing, and of course, registration for your event. This can deliver early revenue, boost your overall numbers, and help to make for a much more successful event in the long run.

Even if you and your corporate meeting planner don’t have all relevant information early on, you can start with basics like dates, venue, and a few key speakers or topics, for example, just to generate interest and get people to sign on for updates. From there you can keep followers informed, dole out new information to keep people hooked, and hopefully meter sign up to avoid a huge rush at the last minute.

Ask Your Global Meeting Planner for Help Finding Partners and Sponsors

Any time you’re planning an event, you’re going to need help. No man is an island, and frankly, there’s just no sane reason to go it alone. When you’re operating on the scope and scale of a global conference tour, with multiple cities and events catering to an international audience, the task of management gets exponentially more complex and expensive.

This is why it’s so important to nail down trusted partners and sponsors early on, to help you manage logistics, spread out costs, and engage with a large enough audience to support your event (by tapping into partner contacts and communities). Your corporate meeting planner should be able to help you find and connect with similar businesses and partners in global locations to get collaborative efforts underway.

Select a Qualified Staff and Delegate Responsibilities

You certainly want professionals capable of managing logistics, so a strong background in the organization is essential, but you also need people who are skilled at customer service to interact with event staff, vendors, and attendees throughout the planning and execution phases. You simply cannot manage every aspect of a global conference tour on your own. You need qualified assistants so you can delegate responsibilities.

The importance of finding the right people to work under you cannot be overstated. You and your global meeting planner need to select experienced professionals with the right disposition to remain calm under pressure and provide helpful, kind and attentive service. This will not only significantly reduce your own burden and stress but also ensure a positive and fruitful experience for event attendees.

Create a Plan and Stay Connected

On the one hand, you don’t necessarily want to micromanage the many vendors you’re working with. These professionals know their jobs and once you provide them with the layout of your event, they should be able to manage their part so you’re freed up to attend to other details.

That said, communication is a key component of ensuring everyone is on the same page and your event goes off without a hitch. You need to schedule a time to connect with vendors throughout the planning and execution of your event to keep tabs on progress, iron out wrinkles, and stay on track for success.

Keeping the lines of communication open with event staff, speakers, and attendees is also imperative, so make sure you and your corporate meeting planner set up adequate and intuitive channels for communication and properly manage outreach efforts like sharing of information.

Let Attendees Participate

Engagement is essential to providing a positive and memorable experience for event attendees, and the best way to boost engagement is by encouraging participation. Says Todd Bludworth, President & Principal at AMI, “You can hire a dozen qualified industry luminaries to talk at event attendees for two days and deliver a ton of interesting and valuable information. Unfortunately, this tactic is also likely to put half the class to sleep. You need to engage your audience if you want to host a successful event.”

Encouraging participation could be as simple as adding workshops to the event agenda, where attendees have the opportunity to work in small groups or even receive the one-on-one attention that challenges the mind and creates a more immersive learning experience. You and your global meeting planner could also add gamification and experiential elements that provide a fun and competitive atmosphere. Both strategies can facilitate participation and help to make your event more memorable and successful overall.

Feed your audience

You naturally want to focus more on the speakers than the dinner menu, but you definitely need to provide food options, and you want to make sure they’re just as impressive as the people at the podium. Nothing will sour an otherwise positive event experience faster than insufficient or inadequate sustenance.

Don’t Forget to Collaborate with Your Corporate Meeting Planner on Plan B Planning for the best but expecting the worst is a wise attitude when it comes to navigating the tricky waters of organizing a global conference tour. All those moving parts make for a labyrinth of potential blunders and mishaps. You need to be prepared to pick up the pieces and hit the ground running without missing a beat, so try to envision potential setbacks and create a plan for how to handle them with minimal impact and downtime.

Different Ways to Enhance Audience Engagement at Your Next Event

by levi_hb | Feb 13, 2019 | Meeting content and planning

The first goal of any meeting or event is to impart pertinent information to attendees. On a secondary level, however, you also need to entertain and engage guests so that they have added incentives to talk up the event and/or return for subsequent events. In other words, you need to make an impression, endear attendees to your event (and your brand), and encourage participation and ongoing patronage.

Building relationships with event attendees is no easy feat, and it will require you to engage them in order to create a lasting bond. The good news is that there are a variety of ways to accomplish your goal, especially with great event management services and mobile communications technology on your side.

When you partner with a reputable and experienced global meeting services organizer like American Meetings, Inc. (AMI), you’ll gain access to the strategic and logistical planning that ensures your event goes off without a hitch, as well as the technological innovations that set the stage to truly impress and engage your audience. Here are just a few ways in which you can enhance audience engagement at your next event, and grow your reputation in the process.

Killer Content and Talent
This is an event planning 101 – you can’t hope to engage your audience without providing content and talent that compels attendance and infers value. Says Aurelio DeMendoza, Senior VP – Marketing & Strategic Alliances at AMI, “No matter how impressive your venue, your tech, and your gift bags are, the real reason people attend your meeting or event is because of the draw of notable speakers and timely and compelling topics. Some attendees need to complete education hours, some are star-struck by speakers, and others are striving to remain at the forefront of their respective fields. The speakers and topics at your event should serve all their needs.”

You might have some ideas of topics and speakers going in, and corporate event planning companies should be able to help you come up with winning strategies for nabbing top talent, choose topics that appeal to your audience and utilize relevant technologies to promote and add convenience to your event for the greatest overall engagement.

It’s important to choose topics that hold relevance and value for your audience, and this will almost certainly require some research on your part. You also need to carefully vet speakers to ensure that they’re not just notable names, but that they are also compelling and entertaining speakers that can hold an audience and create a memorable experience.

Ask Event Management Services about Mobile Apps
Dedicated websites, social media pages, and hashtags are practically a given for events these days, and more and more companies are going the extra mile and asking their event management services to help them create mobile apps designed to add convenience and engagement to meetings and events. However, you shouldn’t do this just for the sake of doing it – make sure you add actual value, convenience, and engagement potential if you’re going to bother creating an event-specific app.

Your app should provide basics like a venue map, an event schedule, and FAQs, but it could include features to create a personal calendar for the event, set activity alerts, and jump to peripheral apps that might come in handy (Uber, Hotels.com, etc.), complete with discounts and deals exclusive to event attendees.

Get Interactive
Increasing opportunities for interactivity before, during, and after your event is one of the best ways to engage an audience and create a more personally rewarding experience. You could start by crowdsourcing in advance, asking attendees and prospective attendees to choose among potential topics and speakers or even to suggest their own.

During the event, you could crowdsource questions for speakers or panels and have attendees up-vote them. Everyone has an opinion and attendees could have incredible ideas that hosts and corporate event planning companies might not come up with. You can also follow up after the fact to find out what attendees enjoyed, what they didn’t like so much, and what suggestions they have for future events.

You can add interactivity to events in a variety of other ways, as well, say with pass-the-mic sessions, breakouts into small group workshops, and opportunities for audience members to participate in panels, just for example. Selfie stops or photo booths located throughout the venue can help to encourage social sharing, and you can try to incorporate gamification strategies by planning fun activities or adding a Geo-tracking feature to your event app that gives points and prizes for check-ins, social shares, and so on.

Rethink Seating
You can reasonably rely on an experienced event management services company like AMI to manage your seating arrangements and choose suitable layouts for your meetings and events. However, you might want to consider shaking things up in order to boost engagement.

In a traditional speaker situation, all available seating might be arranged in neat rows facing a staging area where the speaker will present. This definitely encourages focus on the speaker, but it isn’t terribly conducive to interactivity. What if you create a sort of theater-in-the-round setup instead, where the stage area is in the middle of the room and seating is arranged all around so attendees can see other audience members, encouraging greater interaction and engagement? This is something you should definitely discuss with your event planner if enhancing audience engagement is a priority.

Track Engagement
There are a few good ways to track engagement at your event. At the very least, you’ll want to monitor social media channels and hashtags to see how attendees are using them. You can also consider inviting attendees to fill out surveys after the fact. If you’re interested in closer monitoring during the event, think about implementing facial recognition software that can gauge emotions, potentially giving you clues to how attendees are reacting to your venue or activities throughout the event.

Work with Cutting-Edge Corporate Event Planning Companies
Enhancing audience engagement is a tricky goal, especially if you’re not familiar with available technologies and trends where meeting and event planning is concerned. This is why it’s so important to work with knowledgeable and experienced corporate event planning companies like AMI. When you partner with AMI, you’ll get the targeted strategies, logistics, and technologies needed to increase audience engagement, enjoyment, and retention for future events.

2019 Industry Trends for Meeting and Event Champions

by levi_hb | Nov 7, 2018 | Meeting content and planning

Rising Costs, Event Technology, and Updating Security; Three Key Meetings and Events Industry Trends for Meeting Champions in 2019

For many of our AMI clients, focusing on meetings and events allows for personal connections with employees, business partners, or the public at large. As leaders in the event industry, it’s important for you to stay abreast of changing trends in order to make the most of every event. Here are a few meeting and event industry trends to consider as you plan your 2019 strategy.

Account for Rising Costs as a Meeting Manager

The Meetings and Events division of global travel management company Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT) recently released the 2018 Meetings and Events Future Trends report. One of the big takeaways is that meetings and events are likely to increase in cost over the coming year, much as they did in the past year. For the average meeting planner, this could mean obtaining a larger budget and more carefully managing costs.

Of course, finagling more money for event planning often means justifying the additional expenses, and this requires an understanding of value propositions. Although many businesses are learning that meetings and events offer untold growth potential, there’s just no getting around the bottom line. The concept of spending money to make money won’t fly without a forecast for return on investment around your meeting planning.

As a manager, it’s incumbent upon you to understand the value to be gained from particular events so that you can engage in meaningful goal setting and create a plan for success. Outlining clear objectives gives you a springboard from which to plan for positive and desirable outcomes.

Utilize Technology for Attendee Benefit

You probably understand the importance of incorporating technology into your event, but a convention planner that doesn’t first consider the utility of technological additions is likely to waste a lot of time and money.

Why are you adding technology and what benefit will it provide?

There are two main reasons to use technology at your next event: to add convenience and to facilitate interaction. If technological additions to your meetings and events aren’t delivering on one or, preferably, both of these goals, you’re not living up to your responsibility as an effective team member.

Update Security

Even if you host the same event at the same place annually, it’s wise to go over your security plan each time in order to make sure you’re not overlooking new or different threats and security solutions. If we’ve learned nothing else from recent security failures at large-scale events, we’ve learned that it’s essential to have a comprehensive security plan in place that accounts for potential risk scenarios.

That said, you need to be realistic about threat assessment so that you can plan and budget accordingly for proper safety and security measures. A meeting champion that implements Secret Service-level security for a small company meeting will likely raise the ire of executives.

Any event organizer responsible for planning meetings and events will face a lot of organizational challenges that may be beyond their particular expertise. Effectively managing expectations and delivering on promises can best be accomplished with the expertise and assistance offered by a reputable meeting services organization, like American Meetings, Inc. With AMI in your corner, you’ll have access to the strategic planning, technology, and logistics services needed to pull off a top-notch event that meets your many goals in 2019 and beyond.

Andy McNeill, CEO of American Meetings, Inc., a global leader in the meeting services industry says of these three trends:

“When preparing for your meeting strategy in 2019 as the meeting champion, it’s your job to provide your organization with the best possible chance of reaching the audience, delivering a message, making a connection, rising costs, and building lasting relationships. The advancement of technology, security and rising costs all need to be taken into consideration. However, each can be expensive to implement. Take a thoughtful approach to make sure the event technology and the additional costs are worth the investment for your meetings in 2019.”

11 Tips for Negotiating Your Meetings Audio Visual

by levi_hb | Sep 18, 2018 | Meeting content and planning, Technology

Audio Visual is one of the areas that most planners never really develop comfort around. Sure, we can all stand behind a tech table and call a show, but what is all of that equipment for and how much are they charging for it anyway? Why do some properties have union fees and high drayage while others don’t? Why do I see 4 techs at one location and 3 at another when the scope of the program is the same? Do I have to use the in-house AV group or can I bring in someone else? Why is the hotel adding a service charge to the in-house AV bill?

In order to effectively build your budget and truly understand what you are getting, start a very clear dialogue with your supplier and don’t be afraid to ask questions. Take the time to learn what you are paying for and carefully review a line item breakdown. I can’t tell you how many times I have received a proposal that has a bucket cost for the total services but also has a disclaimer that additional fees can be incurred. Our clients expect us to provide them with an accurate budget, so we need to be sure to have the same expectation from our suppliers.

And always get at least three bids! Even if you have worked with a group for a long time, you may be surprised at what you find when comparing apples to apples.

The following is a piece I found on www.velvetchainsaw.com by Jeff Hurt and it has some good advice. Enjoy! (more…)

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