This is going to be the first in a series on why an organization might want to hire an independent meeting planning company.
Hiring an independent meeting planning company allows for:
a) Your Volunteers to be Industry Experts
b) Your staff to focus on the job you hired them to do.
It is really the same reason – it allows the person to do their job.
Industry volunteers are wonderful people. They stand up to support and assist their industry.
They are experts in their own industry and we need them to be that. And an organization needs us to be experts in our own industry. We are very good at planning events. We are only okay at identifying who the sponsors or best speakers are in the (insert your industry here).
That’s where you get an excellent partnership of a professional planner and industry volunteers. The volunteers can help identify the politics of the tradeshow floor, what educational topics need to be covered, who is new to the industry to attend. And the professional planner can set up the conference using the latest and greatest in our own industry to push the event to the next strategic level.
Using industry volunteers to actually plan and manage the conference can lead quickly to volunteer burnout and a sense of dread that someone “has to do it”. Plus it has the potential to create stagnant events and conferences because the volunteer might not know of new technologies or techniques to incorporate (although I know there are great volunteers out there who would).
Let industry experts be just that. Your volunteers are experts in their industry and professional planners are experts in managing events.
It is a wonderful, productive partnership.
Plus….it will most likely save you money (but I’ll save that for another post).
The title of Daniel Pink’s TED talk is “Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation” and it caught my eye as we look at how to change our meetings and events.
So often we create incentives with rewards – or as Dan Pink calls it – the carrot and stick or the if/then rewards. If you do this, you will get that. Recently at a tradeshow I walked around and got my passport stamped and then I was rewarded with the possibility of winning sunglasses.
However, the science shows that the way we do business is wrong. Other than rudimentary tasks – performance declines with incentives. My tradeshow experience was a rudimentary task so it did work in that instance (although I don’t think they had the participation they were looking for). But what about a company that offers trips as incentives? What about those sales teams that are rewarded with great prizes?
The science shows that people work better when given autonomy, mastery and purpose (according to Dan Pink). People given the freedom to work creatively, on their own and for their own good purposes will achieve greater things.
Imagine what would happen if rather than creating a great trip for the best salespeople you created an event with ALL the salespeople and let them be creative at whatever they liked and let them share the information.
Imagine what would happen!
Imagine what else we could do. If the tradeshow format encouraged participants to be creative and to find their own purpose to visiting the booths. Could that work?
As meeting and event planners we need to continue to look at new ways to do things. I don’t have all the answers but I’m willing to keep looking for them. Just like incentives – if what we are doing is not working, we need to look at what will work.
It’s time for us as meeting planners to start taking risks. Recently I attending Meeting Professional International’s conference “MeetDifferent” and the resounding message was that we should be risk takers.
But we rarely see it in meetings and conventions. Everyone wants to maintain the status quo – this is the way educational sessions are done and it is the way it will continue. We need to change it!
Not everyone learns in the same way. So continuing to have a speaking head at the front of the room with chairs in theatre style prohibits some people from learning. We need to maximize learning and incorporate new methods to help people.
The collective knowledge of the group is greater than the speaker. We need to tap into the collective knowledge of the attendees and learn from each other – which will provide greater learning than just listening to the speaker at the front.
Open your meeting up to new formats. There are other formats that encourage better discussions, networking, and learning. Open Space, Unconferences, World Cafe, Fishbowls – are all terms for alternative ways to meet.
It involves a risk. It is doing something different. And the results could be amazing. It’s time we tried.
We stick like glue to our friends and business associates at conferences and seminars. Yet people always claim that one of their primary reasons for attending a conference is “networking”.
The next time that you are in a conference session leave your friend at the door.
Go up to new people and introduce yourself, spend the time to get to know them better.
As planners, encourage speakers to get people to do this.
Play musical chairs at the beginning of a session. Get attendees to move around and sit with people they don’t know.
Encourage discussions during the session. Now – because you aren’t sitting next to your friend, you are more likely to learn something new. You probably already know how your friend and associate will solve a problem but you can learn from a new person.
Leave your friend at the door, meet new people in the room, talk to them and you’ll have a better return on your investment of time.
The 2010 Winter Games begin today and all eyes are on Vancouver. After going to the Calgary Flames game last night I starting thinking about the hockey teams. Currently most players are still playing for their NHL teams. They aren’t practicing together, they aren’t building team camaraderie. The Canadian Olympic Hockey team has 23 players from 14 teams, and that is just Canada.
Olympic Hockey Teams are like Conference Teams.
We assemble a team that comes together at the last minute to put out a great effort and deliver results. We don’t practice together ahead of time.
As Managers we assemble the best team, much like coaches:
As conference organizers we pull together the best of the best to highlight during our conference. We have keynotes as our starting line-up. These are the people who are going to kick our event off right.
Everybody has their job and we expect them to do it to the best of their ability:
The Olympic Hockey teams rely on the players to be the best defenceman they can be, for the goalie to block the shots, for the forwards to score the goals. It doesn’t matter that they haven’t worked together for months. They are the best hockey players in our country and we want them to go do what they do best. We expect the same from our speakers – come and do your best at our event and share your knowledge with our attendees.
Work together as a team:
Even though we haven’t practiced together, or come together before the conference. If everyone does their part, and does it well, our conference will be a gold medal winner. When the AV team rocks, and the chef is amazing, and the speakers are great – even though we all come from different teams and haven’t worked together before – we can pull off amazing things.
We need to work together and we will accomplish great things.(Go Team Canada!)
