Thursday, April 12, 2018, is Global Meetings Industry Day (GMID), a dedicated date to focus on and promote the meeting and event industry and enhance your planning skills through free or low-cost professional education (it’s time to get more strategic in your planning). The tagline for the 2018 GMID “Real results, real impact, all around the world.”
MPI has a day-long free live steam planned for 12 hours (7 a.m.-7 p.m., ET), which will explore the GMID festivities from Asia to Europe to North America. This will include educational discussions with experts as well as partners from IAEE, IACC, PSAV and more. Some of the topics scheduled:
“How to Prepare for the Next Attack on Meetings”
“One Principle That Will Make or Break Your Negotiations”
“How to Grow Your Attendance”
“Inside the Industry: What’s Really Going on Out There”
If you want education in person, there are countless events, organized by numerous industry associations and destinations. Many of these groups are working together for true community gatherings.
For example, the GMID Spring Training! event in Atlanta (3:30 p.m.) is a collaboration between PCMA Southeast, IAEE Southeast, GSAE, SITE Southeast, the MPI Georgia Chapter and SPIN Atlanta.
Over in Chicago, the MPI-CAC Industry Xchange is organized by the MPI Chicago Area Chapter in partnership with a slew of other professional groups. There, participants will enjoy sessions with notable industry names such as Joan Eisenstodt, Tony Lorenz and Christy Lamagna.
The pressure that accompanies last-minute event planning and its twin, last-minute changes, contribute to making event planning one of the most stressful professions. (Unfortunately, event coordinator made Careercast’s most stressful jobs list again. It’s number 5 for 2018.)
Trying to educate clients about why they should plan events with more lead time hasn’t worked. (I’ve written a number of blog posts to convince organizations to change their approach—and I’m not the only one.)
Clearly, no one is listening. So, to preserve their own health and sanity, event industry professionals need to try a different approach.
1. Reach out to regular clients proactively and let them know of some options that may meet their requirements.
This may encourage earlier bookings.
2. Say “no.”
All the money in the world is not worth it if it takes a toll on your health and disrupts your family life.
3. Manage expectations and set boundaries.
This is a message that needs to be conveyed more often. It’s important to be flexible and provide exceptional client service, but there have to be boundaries.
This is important. I don’t recall who said it but it’s sound advice: “A lack of planning on your part doesn’t constitute an emergency on mine.”
If a client has left a booking until the last minute, it doesn’t mean that you should work all night and every weekend until the event in order to achieve the impossible. This flies in the face of current practices in the industry. It is intended to encourage event planners to carefully consider which assignments they accept and which ones they bypass.
4. Identify what is realistic.
Internal corporate event planners usually don’t have the option of saying no. As an internal planner, it’s all about compromise. Identify what’s realistic. Review the client’s expectations and be candid about what is and isn’t possible within the allotted time. Do your best to come to a workable and more manageable agreement.
As an external planner, it may mean that you lose the business. Is it better to lose business or sacrifice your health?
Pinpoint the tasks that need to be completed and identify joint accountabilities. I can’t take credit for it. Alan Weiss came up with the concept. My tweak is that one should never be afraid to reverse-delegate time-consuming tasks when faced with a last-minute booking.
5. Create templates for all aspects of event planning from supplier requests to catering.
Work with the client to quickly fill in the blanks.
6. Marshall additional resources and charge the client accordingly.
If you need to hire extra help, say so. Let the client know what that will cost. If they don’t want to pay it, move on.
7. Charge a premium.
Planning a last-minute event should be considered a premium service. Whether your premium is 5% or 10%, it conveys your value and may encourage clients to book earlier.
8. Ensure that you are paid in advance.
Some clients book at the last minute and then indicate that they can’t pay until well after the event. In this situation, you’re setting yourself up. I have had colleagues accept last-minute bookings and agree to a late payment schedule. They’ve jumped through hoops, burned the candle at both ends and ended up not getting paid or receiving less than the agreed upon amount. Rushing to plan an event at the last minute increases the likelihood that the client won’t be satisfied. They could push back on rates or delay your payment.
9. Build in downtime to re-charge after the event.
Rushing to plan a last-minute event is stressful. For this reason, it is important for event planners to build recovery time into their schedules. Identify the strategies that work for you and apply them regularly.
A radical change in mindset
This is radical thinking in an industry that places a premium on service, however, stress and burnout among event planners is at crisis levels. Radical surgery and a change of mindset are necessary.
Both Stephen Covey and Dr. Phil McGraw have said that we treat people how to treat us by what we tolerate. By failing to set boundaries, the abuse will continue and event coordinator will continue to make the list of most stressful careers alongside enlisted personnel and firefighters, year after year. We can keep burning out our have the courage to work with our clients to make the changes that are needed to ensure the health and welfare of event and meeting planners.
Thought leadership is a concept that many meeting professionals integrate into their own conference or event content.
But what about including it on a personal level?
Thought leadership is a fast way to accomplish many things in one’s career:
Learn about new ideas, concepts, emerging technologies and legal impacts before they actually arrive.
Understand how to implement them into your workplace with practical application.
Help your organization be poised to meet future challenges or opportunities head on, or be ready to springboard ahead of the competition.
By being an early adopter of new concepts, you can not only be a driving force for helping organizations evolve, but also grow your own career by being the catalyst that helps them get there.
Thought leadership, by definition, is literally getting ahead of the proverbial 8 ball.
Business Insider had a great quote about thought leadership in general: “Thought leaders are seen as trustworthy, go-to authorities among industry colleagues and peers,” said Jake Dunlap, CEO and founder of sales consulting firm Skaled.
“They possess an innate ability to contribute to the conversations happening today, while also being able to speculate on what is going to happen tomorrow. Rather than chime in on every topic, they set the pace for the industry and offer intelligent insights and informed opinions.”
So how does a meeting professional gain access to thought leadership?
If you haven’t had the opportunity to attend MPI’s World Education Congress, then you should. (This year, it’s happening June 2-5 in Indianapolis—visit www/mpiweb.org/wec18 for complete details.)
The wide-ranging subject matter at this event provides some tasty tidbits of the universe that’s out there.
But to fully capitalize on the menu of thought leadership available, you have to do some digging to uncover where the thought leaders are located, and then head to that conference or event to get fully immersed. Some thought leadership events are aimed at specific job functions, so the content is highly specialized.
Understanding what is about to hit and how that might impact a company or how it does business is a critical thought leadership trait.
Think of it is as the person in the crow’s nest looking at the horizon who yells, “Land ho!”—that’s what you’d be doing. You’ll spot the next destination before anyone else and can help navigate the ship in that direction.
Other types of thought leadership are what I call “Blow the Lid Off” types of learning.
This is the kind of thing that can fundamentally change how you see things, react to them and decide how you can work with or without them. TedX is a great example of this.
There is also a whole other world out there that is based on thought leadership, but it goes in entirely different directions.
Case in point: If you want to know what kind of emerging technologies and innovations are on the way in, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is a great show to check out. Not everything that gets buzz in this event limelight ends up having staying power in the consumer marketplace, but being exposed to so many new applications can be inspiring.
Similarly, SXSW is the annual digital and interactive media hotspot in Austin, with film, interactive media and music festivals and conferences all congregating within one area. Seeing what is attracting users can have tremendous applicability to your own work.
Recently, I read about C2, an “annual international business conference that helps established and aspiring leaders unlock their creativity in order to better face disruption and change.” It’s been getting a lot of buzz too, and could be a great place to really gain insights on disruption at the executive level. What are they talking about, and how is that going to impact your organization?
The World Business Forum is known as a thought leadership event that “brings together thousands of restless minds united by their passion for business.” With speakers that include CEOs, entrepreneurs, innovators, thinkers, artists and sportspeople, this event can provide inspiration beyond the daily grind and help you rethink how you do business.
Want to get truly savvy with social media? Try going to Content Marketing World which showcases speakers from top global brands discussing the innovations they are introducing with content marketing.
But what if you are fairly new in your career and desire to make a difference? Try the One Young World conference which brings together young leaders who are ready to find ways to solve critical global issues.
Similarly, a lot of women-focused thought leadership conferences have sprung up. BlogHer Conference is one of the most well-known for its networking and ability to inspire, empower and celebrate female influencers, but you might check locally to see if there are other such gatherings taking place closer to home.
Ready to really push your envelope? Burning Man is an off-the-wall gathering that is, well, not for the faint of heart. From what I understand, those that attend Burning Man find it to be completely inspiring (and, of course, sand is in everything).
If none of these get your innovation juices flowing, then a good way to find out what conferences to attend is to start asking colleagues and industry connections what they think is a good source of new ideas.
