It sounds like a meeting planner’s version of
Mission Impossible: Come up with a bigger, better event on a budget that hasn’t increased since the Clinton administration. And unfortunately, the assignment may not be presented to you with the classic tag line: “Should you choose to accept it.”
But local experts have plenty of ideas about how to accomplish this seemingly unattainable goal. They offered us 15 suggestions that’ll make your meeting both budget-friendly and memorable, from getting free planning assistance to keeping your attendees interested and engaged.
1. Use a convention and visitors bureau. Think you can’t afford a professional meeting planner? Think again. Amanda Smith Rasnick, group sales coordinator for the Lake Erie Shores & Islands Welcome Center, says almost every city and region has a similar organization that assists with finding appropriate event and meeting sites free of charge.
“We have knowledge of all the local accommodations, attractions and restaurants that can fulfill the needs of a convention or group,” she says. “We also have connections with local dignitaries and business owners, which can come in handy in getting [them] to not only attend the conference but also sponsor a session, dinner or outing.”
Some CVBs offer additional complimentary services. For example, the Lake Erie Shores & Islands Welcome Center sends out pre-registration mailings, staffs registration and welcome tables, and hands out welcome bags to all participants, Rasnick says.
2. Visit the conference site. It sounds like a no-brainer. But Christine Shelton, manager of Youngstown State University’s Williamson College of Business Administration Conference Center, is amazed by the number of clients sitting in local offices who balk at scheduling a tour of the facility.
“I’ve had people say, ‘Can you just describe it to me [over the phone]?’ ” she marvels. More often than not, these folks aren’t able to take complete advantage of the center’s spaces and technology.
“I had one group who said, ‘Oh, we wish we would have known how nice the facility is. We could have had our photographer take our board pictures here,’ ” she recalls.
But Shelton’s clients are the lucky ones. Fail to check out the conference site beforehand, and you could be horribly disappointed instead of pleasantly surprised after you book it.
3. Send save-the-date cards and email reminders. Mailing a save-the-date card long before invitations are dropped at the post office and sending an email reminder well before head counts are due takes some extra time, Shelton concedes. But meeting planners who make the effort generally see higher attendance numbers. And sticking to a firm RSVP deadline before final head counts are due prevents the costly consequences of optimistic overestimation. “You don’t want to order a lot of food and take a loss on the event because replies didn’t meet your expectations,” she says.
4. Create a themed event. Doing so can transform an annual gathering in an established location into something exciting and new without adding much expense, says Charles Klass, executive vice president of Executive Caterers at Landerhaven. For example, he says, using the movie theme “2011 — A Blockbuster Year” might include dressing support staffers as theater ushers, serving popcorn during breaks, and rolling out a red carpet, complete with premiere-style searchlights and theater marquee at the entrance to a dinner venue.
If annual sales have been particularly hot, a tropically themed sales meeting might be in order, complete with an end-of-day cocktail party lit by torches where staffers in brightly colored shirts serve frosty concoctions while a steel-drum band plays under potted palms.
“Take a concept and just run with it,” he encourages. “It creates an umbrella for what you’re doing.”
5. Ditch the classroom setup. Natalie Miller, event coordinator for the Lodge & Conference Center at Geneva On-The-Lake, observes that more groups are opting to arrange tables and/or chairs in a circle or semicircle. Some gatherings of 40 or less are even requesting a casual coffee-shop arrangement of sofas, tables and chairs.
“It makes for more of an interactive type of meeting,” she explains. “People don’t feel like they’re being lectured. So it opens up conversation and gets them thinking and sharing ideas.”
6. Provide intimate conversation areas. “A lot of business takes place on trade-show floors and at conventions,” observes Sharon Gronowski, vice president of convention and visitor services at Positively Cleveland. Fail to place a couple of easy chairs here, a couple of tables there, where attendees can sit down and conduct that business comfortably, and you could lose them to the Starbucks around the corner. As a result, Gronowski says, “they’re not on the floor; they’re not in your sessions.”
7. Take it outside (the conference room). The advice applies whether you’re hosting a meeting in the home office, nearby hotel or a different city. Moving attendees from one space to another for breaks, cocktail parties and meals keeps them engaged in the proceedings, according to Klass, of Executive Caterers.
“You get stagnant in one location,” he warns. Klass typically utilizes Landerhaven’s ballroom, banquet rooms, outdoor patios and gardens to stage a single event. “You want to keep people alert, alive and awake.”
Brian Proud, private event coordinator at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, notes that moving people around an attraction or town also allows them to do some much-desired sightseeing without taking the focus off why they’re there.
Maris Brenner, sales director at Kalahari Resort & Convention Center in Sandusky, believes putting attendees in unique settings — serving coffee at the entrance to the property’s animal park, for example — makes them more focused.
“Everybody is so time-starved,” she explains. “When you get pulled into any kind of conference, seminar or training, you’re thinking of all the other things you need to do. If you don’t add a little bit of levity to it, you do risk the chance of the attention span not being there.”
8. Plan a team-building exercise. One of the best ways to truly enjoy an attraction or activity is to use it for a team-building exercise. For example, Kalahari organizes races in which teams gather bags of puzzle pieces on the resort’s ropes course then put them together on the ground. A more unusual exercise is the surfing competition in a special pool that replicates the perfect ocean wave at Kalahari’s indoor water park. After a learn-to-surf class, each team member tries to stay on his or her board for as long as possible.
Other activities include making pizzas for lunch — a program that Brenner says keeps participants on-site and off cell phones during the meal break — and building bicycles, dollhouses and toy helicopters to be donated to needy families.
“They add to meetings, freshen people up, sharpen the competition,” Brenner says of the result. “And they’re fascinating to watch.”
9. Make getting there half the fun. Gronowski uses unconventional methods of transportation, such as Lolly the Trolley and police-escorted buses.
In one particularly memorable walk from a reception at the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel to a dinner at the Hyatt Regency, stilt walkers and entertainers accompanied 50 participants who beat drumsticks, banged tambourines, rang cowbells and played xylophones as they paraded down Superior Avenue.
“Everybody [on the street] was taking pictures, clapping for us,” she recalls.
Even a stroll from one room to another can be turned into an event in and of itself. Proud has planned scavenger hunts in the Pro Football Hall of Fame galleries for small groups moving from one museum space to another.
“It’s an experience rather than just going for a meeting or a dinner or a luncheon,” he says.
10. Mix up the event schedule. Theresa Hahn, director of meetings and special events at The Ritz-Carlton Cleveland, reports that groups are rotating participants through more shorter, interactive breakout sessions. More importantly, the evening trip to an attraction or off-site location is being taken in the middle of the day — say, from noon to 3 p.m. Attendees then reconvene until 6 p.m. and break again for dinner. The revamped schedule fights the dreaded afternoon drowsies and allows attendees to turn in earlier, a real plus at events where the days start at 7 a.m.
11. Invigorate the break. Hahn suggests arranging for a masseuse to give one-minute chair massages or a personal trainer to lead some quick stretching exercises. Both leave participants refreshed and ready for the next session yet leave time to hit the restroom, get a quick snack, and check phone and email messages.
12. Feed them to keep them. Jamie Belkin, president of Jamie Belkin Events in Cleveland Heights, remembers making the mistake of serving a hotel-recommended lunch of osso buco to a large group.
“People were nodding off in the afternoon,” she recalls.
Now she chooses light midday meals, perhaps a bowl of gazpacho and a salad topped with generous slices of tuna or Thai beef. Belkin stresses that “light” doesn’t mean “cheap.” Nor does it mean skipping dessert. But she generally chooses items such as chocolate-covered strawberries and fluffy chocolate bombes over decadent cakes and pies — at least for lunch.
For breaks, both Belkin and Hahn recommend healthful refreshments: popcorn, fruit skewers with a selection of dips, or a bar stocked for make-your-own trail mix, yogurt parfait or stuffed celery sticks, for example.
13. Make musical introductions. Jerry Mizer, executive vice president at Jamie Belkin Events, goes through the agenda for the Cleveland Clinic’s annual Medical Innovations Summit and selects rock and pop songs that cleverly suit each session topic. The most lyrically appropriate 15- to 20-second clip of each tune is played over the InterContinental Cleveland conference center’s sound system as the corresponding presenter takes the stage. For example, last year a clip from Bobby Darin’s version of “Mack the Knife” introduced a gastric-bypass demonstration beamed in from a clinic operating room; a snippet of the Pink Floyd classic “Money” blared while a panel set to discuss investing in health care took their seats.
Belkin points out that the musical intros cost almost nothing to do and prompt audible chuckles from the audience. “There were actually people calling the innovations office saying, ‘Who did that for you? We want to do it!’ ” she says.
14. Go green. Miller points out that you can reduce your event’s impact on the environment with simple, but often forgotten, measures such as encouraging attendees to take notes on laptops instead of paper pads, substituting drinking glasses and china coffee cups for paper and plastic counterparts, and making sure any necessary disposable cups are made of recycled materials. The Ritz-Carlton Cleveland offers biodegradable paper cups as well as cold-water dispensers that eliminate the need for the bottled stuff, notepads and flowcharts made of recycled paper, and a menu heavy on locally sourced produce and sustainable fishes.
Entrepreneurs for Sustainability in Cleveland maintains an extensive vendor directory of everything from providers of high-quality compostable cups, plates and cutlery to caterers using locally produced ingredients to facilities with recycling programs, according to network coordinator Megan Conway.
“Not only are we familiar with the businesses, but we know that they are sustainability certified,” she says.
15. Stream the event live. Jim Mahon, marketing and communications director for the Akron/Summit Convention & Visitors Bureau, says choosing a facility with the technology to do so allows people to “attend” who otherwise wouldn’t have the time or travel budget. Virtual attendees can sit in front of their computers or in a conference room with other off-site attendees. “It also can be archived so that the content of the meeting is captured and can be reused,” he says.