Ultimately, You Have to Decide

These are crazy times. How many people have said that? How many circumstances could you equate this statement to? How many different generations would say they’ve used it? Well, these are crazy times. In the Hospitality and Tourism Industry, I think it’s safe to say we have a corner market on crazy these days.

As I helped plan a 3-day in-person conference with trade show for 2000+ people 22 months after Covid-19 became a big deal and the world came to a stop, we’re still dealing with the questions: “Do we set this room for full capacity or leave extra room between chairs?”, “Do we wear masks or don’t we?”, “Do we check for vaccine status or don’t we?”, “Do we require a booster or don’t we?” What variant of germ are we on now?

Almost daily we receive questions about how we are handling masks. Someone is always dissatisfied with our answer. We get questions about whether or not we are requiring vaccines or not, again, someone is dissatisfied with our answer. We are a small organization with finite staff members, budget, and capacity. We need to do our due diligence, perform our duty of care, make a decision, and move on to the next 100 tasks at hand.

Ultimately, you have to decide what is best for you. Nobody can feel your level of fear of the unknown. Nobody can determine how comfortable you are standing next to another person with or without a mask. Nobody else can tell you if you want to hop on a plane and travel to be with others to learn something new, be with other like-minded people, and see some new products, or if you want to continue to watch a computer screen. Just you.

Please, do your due diligence, then, take responsibility for yourself. Those who plan events are weighing a myriad of factors and considering what is in the best interest of multiple stakeholders. What is not our job? Deciding for you if you want to attend an in-person event given the set if variables we are working with at this split-second moment in time. It’s not personal. It’s actually way bigger than that.

Have you had questions from attendees asking you to make a decision for them? I’d love to hear which ones you’re getting. Feel free to email them to me.

Please share this blog with others you know are planning events. We need to be able to share what we’ve learned with others and help our industry get back in the game.

Planners on the Frontlines?

Absolutely! If you have ever run down a hall in the practical shoes of a Certified Meeting Professional (CMP)*, worked with a mother of the bride as Wedding Planner, or handed out Bingo cards at a school fund-raiser, you most likely have received some friendly fire.

I sub-titled my blog, “…from the frontlines of event planning.” It’s not just a pithy phrase, event planning can be a battle. It takes discipline, self motivation, and hours of chasing details, as well as a willingness to work long days, make tough decisions, and be the bad guy. However, it’s also a place where leaders are built, lifelong friendships are formed, skills are honed, and one has the unique opportunity to literally learn something new every day.

The wide array of information and skills required are endless. The type of events and professions which host events are also endless. No two days are alike. I think it’s one of the most rewarding jobs on the planet. To become a CMP, a planner must actively work in hospitality and event planning, have 25 credit-hours of classroom learning every five years, apply and be accepted to sit for the exam, recertify every five years, and be prove proficiency in these nine disciplines:

  • Strategic Planning
  • Project Management
  • Risk Management
  • Financial Management
  • Human Resources
  • Stakeholder Management
  • Meeting or Event Design
  • Site Management
  • Marketing

It’s not for everybody. Neither is being a public speaker, skydiver, or a lion-tamer. It’s a profession that requires the strength to carry others on your back, block “incoming” from reaching your people, make a split-second decision with only the information around you, and put aside your personal feelings for the betterment of others.

Being an event planner takes trial and error, successes and failures, and the ability to not take yourself so seriously. For more on the frontlines of event planning, check out my blog, “Put on Your Thick Skin.”

Have you planned an event and have a “frontline” story? I’d love to hear it.
Please email me or share it here.

*The Events Industry Council (EIC) oversees planner credentialing. The CMP program is recognized globally as the badge of excellence in the events industry. The EICs vision is to be the global champion for event professionals and event industry excellence.

Surprise & Delight

It is always nice when you can exceed your attendees’ event experience expectations (say that fast three times) or surprise them and make their time at your event just a little brighter. Here are six things you may want to consider delighting your attendees with if you’re not already incorporating them:

  • A Parking Team – If your event includes a large drive-in audience and has a specific start and end time, consider having a team of people who can assist with getting the attendees quickly and efficiently parked and released from the venue. This can ease tensions for many people who now don’t need to guess where to park or which way they should go.
  • Guest Service Staff – This team can be paid or volunteer, but they should be wearing some identifier, like a brightly colored shirt, and be strategically placed throughout the venue during entry, exit, and passing times to assist attendees with directions to rooms, restrooms, exits, and to answer questions. 
  • Ushers – If your event includes a General Session, an auditorium, or an arena where all attendees are being seated in one large space, having a team of people to assist attendees with finding their seats is incredibly helpful. It is especially true for general seating. It is much more comfortable for an usher to ask people to move down or stand to allow someone to pass by than for one attendee to ask another. 
  • Chair Drops – When exhibitors are involved in your event, this is a great sponsorship opportunity. Allowing an exhibitor to provide a product or resource of value to each attendee, that is already on their chair when they arrive, is a great treat for an attendee. This can be sold to an exhibitor as an exclusive access opportunity.
  • Room Drops – For VIP guests, surprise them with a treat by preparing a special welcome basket and asking the hotel to drop it in their room while they are out. The venue may also offer in-house options like chocolate-covered strawberries or a cheese plate. To take this a step further, your team could write welcome or thank you notes that they can go around and slip under the doors of VIP guests or attendees you’d like to surprise yourself!
  • Welcome Gift – Upon check-in, provide attendees with some item that they aren’t expecting. This can be branded by the event or the host organization. It can be a memento for the attendee to remember their experience or it can be something practical that is used throughout the event like a refillable water bottle or a personal bottle of hand sanitizer.

I recommend you alter the bonus features each time so attendees don’t come to expect a particular perk or it no longer surprises and delights them, it becomes a disappointment when it’s not available. There are an almost unlimited number of ways to surprise and delight attendees to meet any budget and have them remembering their experience for years to come.

How have you surprised and delighted your attendees? I’d love to have you share an idea or two! You can list them here or send me an email.

Don’t forget to share this blog so others who plan events can share their experiences too!

Know Your Limits

People often over-extend their limits: lift too much weight, eat too much food, or watch too much TV. When planning an event, this topic is rarely discussed; do you know an event’s limits? We take for granted that buildings and supporting structures are just going to function. They do every other day of the week right? Well…

Let me share an experience I had. During this particular event, we managed to discover, all in one day, the various limits of, not only the building our event was in, but the people serving as well. The basic outline of the event was a 3-day, 5-show concert. But not just a concert. It was a family-friendly outreach event with 2 hours of activities before and after each 1-½ hour performance. Over the course of the 3 days, 10,000 attendees crossed the threshold.

It was an incredible sight. Indoor ice skating rink, train rides, a room full of non-melting snow and snowball fights, igloo building with boxes, inflatables, a coffee shop, bookstore, and a 20-foot Christmas tree surrounded by the most amazing train display you can imagine. Within the concert, there were multiple contracts involved for the various performers including aerialists, musicians, spoken word artists, bands, contemporary dancers, and a choir, to name a few. 

It took 532 volunteers, 50+ technical and production people, and 150 staff members on top of the performers and musicians, to pull off this extravaganza. Here’s the incredible lesson we learned….

We were in a mega-church in a suburb that was on septic and well water. After two 70-minute morning church services, two hours of family activities, and a 1-½ hour concert, between the first and second show of the day, the building was running out of water. The pumps couldn’t keep up with the demand for toilets, coffee, dishwashing, handwashing, drinking fountains, and making snow that doesn’t melt….. We had reached the limit of the well. Of course, this was very shortly followed by the need to shut down the bathrooms. We had reached the limit of the septic field. The day wasn’t over yet, we still had another concert for 2000 people still to come who would be expecting two more hours of family-friendly activities, not to mention toilets…

Long story long, by the afternoon of the last day of the event, we met the event’s limits head-on. We had now established where the limit was for the well water and pump, the septic field’s capacity limit, the backup water tank’s refill rate, electrical output limit, volunteer team’s troubleshooting capacity limit, staff stress level limit, the fire marshal’s tolerance limit, and oh so much more. The silver lining, we now knew, without a shadow of a doubt, just where the line was when planning a future event in this facility. These are the moments in event planning that build that thick skin (see my previous blog “Put On Your Thick Skin“) and feel like being on the frontlines (check out “Planners on the Frontlines?”).

Do you have a crazy story about reaching your event’s limits? I’d love to hear about it! Share it here or you can email me.

Please share this blog on your social media and with others who plan events.

Do you work with volunteers? Check out Tracy’s book Cultivating a Healthy Volunteer Team on her website tracybaer.com.

Let Them Eat Cake

I came across this quote from Julie Child, “A party without cake is just a meeting.” I love cake. Birthday cake to be specific. Ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you my favorite breakfast is white birthday cake. But not just any piece; a corner piece with all of the sugary-sweet frosting with as many flowers as possible. As a Certified Meeting Professional (CMP) I love parties and meetings. Both can be equally as fun. The difference? You guessed it, the goals and objectives.

This is not another blog about setting goals and objectives, but as I thought about the quote and why I liked it so much is because, to me, the differentiator is not that one is fun and the other is not fun. They serve a different purpose. Julia could just have easily said, “A party without balloons is just a meeting.” I hate balloons. I have a severe latex allergy and balloons can be a baby choking hazard scenario nightmare. Regardless, the difference is not the balloons, it’s the reason for the gathering.

I felt it was a perfect example of why goals and objectives are so important to set at the onset of planning to not only drive planning, but also gauge the success or failure of the outcome. The planning process for a birthday party will be very different from planning a board meeting for 30 people. The task lists and time management would look very different for the two. 

The outcome of the party should be that the person whose birthday it is feels honored and celebrated. The outcome of the board meeting may be to approve the next year’s budget or vote on adding new board members. Voting to add friends to the circle at someone’s birthday party would make that gathering a failure. Eating, drinking, and being merry, while fun, would not ensure the organization’s budget is approved by the end of the board meeting. Both would prove to be failures by reviewing the goals and objectives set at the beginning.

Hopefully this silly little example clarified some questions around the value of goal-setting. Now, I feel a trip to Target’s bakery coming on…

Do you have a simple, easy way to remember goals and objectives? Share them with others here or you can email me.

Spread the love! Share this blog with others who plan events!

Visit tracybaer.com for resources and to schedule a consultation with Tracy.