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Different Ways to Improve Your Meeting Outcomes

Different Ways to Improve Your Meeting Outcomes

by | 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

Organizing a Global Conference Tour: What You Need to Know

by | 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.

American Meetings Network Prime Member: Soliman Productions

American Meetings Network Prime Member: Soliman Productions

by | Apr 22, 2019 | The American Meetings Network

Meet our Prime Supplier: Soliman Productions

Our Prime Supplier Member, Soliman Productions joined The American Meetings Network as Prime Supplier in 2018 and they are already seeing the benefits of becoming a Prime Member Supplier in The American Meetings Network by meeting 1:1 with AMI’s Meeting Planners and Sourcing Managers at Global Procurement Day.

About Soliman Productions: Video with a vision

Your event is a year-round opportunity to capture and create cohesive marketing material that include video and photography. From script writing, show flow, pre-produced content, on-site video and photography, content capture, live streaming and much more, Soliman Productions is your one-stop shop for strong visuals that tell your association’s story.

We have the technology, the experience and the expertise to help your organization craft video content that tells your story and builds a platform for organizational growth.

The power of video stems from its ability to build connection and trust. From our social media video expertise, to our content curation at events, Soliman Productions is the trusted partner for the age of digital video.

American Meetings is an official partner of the 2019 SPLC Summit

American Meetings is an official partner of the 2019 SPLC Summit

by | Apr 19, 2019 | Sustainability

American Meetings is pleased to be an official Partner of the SPLC Summit. At the Summit, you’ll learn actionable and innovative sustainable procurement strategies that you can apply at your own organization, all while building relationships with 500 procurement and sustainability professionals, suppliers, and NGO experts. Held May 20-22 in Portland, Oregon, the Summit features over 50 educational sessions, exhibits, matchmaking, tours, and ample networking with fellow change-makers in a fun setting. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to take your organization’s sustainable purchasing to the next level!

Save 10% with our special partner discount code P10AMI 

AMI’s Sustainability Strategy

Whether you’re hosting meetings and events in your own backyard or you’ve chosen a global destination, the last thing you want to do is create excessive pollution and waste in the course of planning and executing your gathering.  Not only is this detrimental to your host city, but it could offend attendees and perhaps tarnish your image in the process.

This is why so many event hosts and their event management teams are working to find ways to make events, both large and small, more sustainable.  The good news is, there are several avenues to explore, and some could even save money and add convenience for guests.  Here are just a few strategies you and your event company can employ to add sustainability to your upcoming events. Read more…

The Impact and Effect of Meeting Space Design

The Impact and Effect of Meeting Space Design

by | Apr 18, 2019 | Venues and sourcing

People are creatures of habit, even if they don’t always understand the instinctual nature of their habits.  If you are a student of human behavior, though, you can gain some insight into how people are likely to react to certain settings and situations.

If you’ve ever been on the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, you know what happens when the doors of the elevator first open and people crowd inside.  The first ones in head for the walls and line them, then subsequent rows fill in until people finally fill the room.  Nobody goes to the center of the room until forced there.  This has something to do with survival instinct.  Nobody wants to feel exposed when surrounded by strangers.

What does this have to do with planning meetings and events with event management services professionals?  It can help you to plan a layout and design your space with specific goals in mind, such as putting attendees at ease and creating opportunities for interaction.

 

Plan Your Layout for Your Purpose

Your event is sure to have a slate of planned activities, from speakers and panels, to workshops and networking opportunities, to exhibit halls and interactive game stations, just for example.  For each activity you present to attendees, you should turn to experienced professionals at corporate event planning companies to create an appropriate layout.

For example, an event featuring a speaker will require everyone to face toward the main attraction, and this could be best accomplished by orienting rows of chairs to face a stage.  This isn’t the only option, though.  You could also create a theater-in-the-round type setting to increase engagement and a feeling of intimacy.

Says Tessa Cameron, VP of Strategic Sourcing at AMI, “With careful planning, you can meet multiple goals with your layout.  Do you want people to focus on a speaker?  Do you want them to interact with each other?  Do you want to support group participation?  Your layout can contribute in a big way to accomplishing your goals if you take the time to consider what different layouts are likely to yield in terms of audience reaction.”

 

Consult with Corporate Event Planning Companies on How to Create a Mood

There are so many logistical concerns to consider when planning an event, not to mention the burden of creating relevant, timely, and engaging content.  As a result, creating a mood and ambience for your event could fall low on your list of priorities.  However, working with experts from corporate event planning companies to develop a suitable atmosphere for your event is important.

It can not only create a more immersive and engaging experience, but it can help to put attendees at ease, add cohesion to disparate activities, and set expectations for the event as a whole.  Your event management services partners can lend their expertise to the process.

 

Work on Branding and Theme with Your Event Management Services Pro

Your event space design includes more than furniture and mood lighting – it also entails décor, and corporate event planning companies can help you to come up with ways to add cohesive messaging and design elements to every facet of your event.  With the right décor, you and your event management services partners can unify the entire event while embracing a theme and reinforcing branded messaging throughout.