What Is The Purpose of Your Conference or Event? Have you been planning the same conference every year? Are you planning a new conference? Whichever response you have made to the above questions, the first step that you need to take is exactly the same:
What is The Objective or Purpose of the Event?
So often, many of forget this and like a robot just do all those steps to put together a well organized event, Yes, robots are getting smarter, like Watson, but we still must use our experience, logic and knowledge of planning, to do the very best job.
Consider this: you’ve been planning your company’s annual sales meeting for the past 5 or 6 years. Each succeeding ear, is a clone of the [past year, except for a couple of twists. Of course, your presenters may be different, but everything else is the same. The only difference that are noticeable, is you’re in a different city and therefore can have the golf outing at a different golf course, or your dine around has different types of choices.
When you first planned this meeting in collaboration with your Director of Sales, most likely, let’s say that it was at the beginning of the recession. Although, the economy is much better, are your topics and approach the same as it was in 2008 or 2009? Maybe you need to reconsider your agenda. Perhaps, you need to vary the types of presentations. Did you stop using polling because it was too expensive? It just might be time to add that back, but using one of the many smartphone and tablet apps. IT’s so important to get immediate feedback.
Now that the economy is better isn’t possible your company bottom line is as well?
Why not increase your budget a bit (don’t go crazy now) and video record the sessions to be made available to stream on demand to everyone that attended. This way if your director of Sales thinks a region needs some additional sales help, one or more of those session videos could be used as tutorials. This is really easy and cost effective.
Maybe you haven’t increased your budget very much. Why are you still printing hard copies of the program? Consider having the entire agenda on your company intranet or a password protected page on the company website.
Mix things up a bit more. Do you consider teambuilding activities? Or interactive entertainment? Of course, these would be with hour meeting objectives in mind rather than something mindless.
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