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).