Planning a productive, memorable meeting hinges upon creating an experience that drives audience engagement — but the big question too often left unanswered is “How the heck do I get there?”
Somewhere between setting up KPIs and measuring the ROI of your meeting, you want your guests to leave feeling inspired by what they have learned and focused on their new business connections.
Strategic Planning is Key
Strategic planning is essential to any successful meeting and event. You need to have a clear understanding of what your strategic objectives are, along with executive buy-in, before you can ask your stakeholders to make a commitment. You need the full support and commitment of everyone involved, and it is essential to ensure that every member understands the importance of their role. It is for these reasons you define expectations for your stakeholders and ask for their acceptance. As an extension of your team, your meeting management agency will support you in achieving your strategic goals.
Understand That Measurement Will Differ from Meeting to Meeting
Even if meetings may seem routine, you need to consider that every event has its own goal – so how do we measure success? Connect the strategic objectives to the event experience and set clear Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to measure them, these are used to measure results and the success of your goals.
Know Your Audiences
You need to be aware of your audiences when doing your strategic planning — the executive team and the external participants — but understand that both of them cannot be measured with the same metrics.
While working on your KPIs, make sure you consider these audiences to establish the right metrics to measure each one of them.
A good example of why this is relevant could be taking the Engagement KPI, which can be measured by the number of interactions that your executive team make on-site vs your audience’s engagement, which can be measured by the number of interactions they make in your social media channels.
Don’t Let Logistics Eat Your Brain
As event planners, we are always going to be spending a significant amount of our time in making sure that all the logistical needs are being met, but you need to think beyond logistics. Don’t let logistics get all your attention and never lose sight of the strategic planning. Focus on making sure you are following the first three steps, and you will have a meeting that rocks!
What You Should Expect From Your Meeting Management Agency
We listen and ask the right questions to help define your goals, and outline a plan unique to your needs. We then craft a meeting tailored to you, blending cutting-edge technology, sustainable thinking, and a network of vendors ready to serve any need and to make you shine.
