Simple Headache Cure For Event Managers
My Booking Manager asked:
Managing or administering a seminar, workshop, roadshow or other type of event, even the seemingly simple, can provide you with headaches that you never thought possible. Being crystal clear about what you and your company actually needs the event to deliver at the earliest possible stage is critical to so many issues.
Although holding an event like a seminar or a workshop often evolves out of discussions about sales, marketing and even technical issues like product failures, it is almost always critical to establish clearly in everyone’s mind what the true purpose of the event is. This can have a substantial effect on:
* how you go about organizing the event
* who you involve
* which venue you choose
* what you choose to include and exclude
* the dates and times of the various activities
* and significantly why you are holding an event at all
The event manager should get together with the prime-movers in the organization who effectively “own” the event and discuss the true objective or perhaps objectives to be achieved.
The word “objective” is used intentionally here because there may already be an objective-setting ethos in your organization. If there is, then use the same framework to arrive at consensus for the purpose of the event.
The minimum requirement is that the objective should be SMART;
* Specific
* Measurable
* Achievable
* Relevant
* Time-bounded
Specific
The word “specific” has been chosen as shorthand for the question:
“What, specifically, will have changed as a result of the success of this event?”
To illustrate this consider the example of a Financial Services organization that was having difficulty selling one of its new investment product (Product Y) because of its complexity. They were convinced that the product was a winner but needed Financial Advisers to spend more than a ten minute telephone call learning about how it was structured and how it would perform over time. They also needed to connect with more Financial Advisers than they already knew, so the idea of a conference to debate the new generation of financial products for the 21 st Century was born.
The Financial Services company defined their specific requirement from the conference as follows:
To present, along with other Financial Products, a detailed technical explanation of Product Y to an audience of 250 or more Financial Advisers who operate within our region in order that they can understand its benefits and sell it on to their customers.
Measurable
In almost every project there is a well understood relationship between cost, quality and time. You can achieve anything to a very high standard in a very short time if cost is no object. Similarly you can produce the best product to a tight budget as long as time is not an issue. The third option is probably the world you operate in; the budget is small and we need it yesterday. This, of course, means that quality is the issue most likely to suffer and is probably worth some debate about what level of quality is expected and how it should be measured.
Post-event questionnaires and follow-up telephone or Email communication should be asking the right questions to ensure that quality data is available.
Achievable
The event organizer needs to be set up for success and needs to feel that they have the support of the event “owners” on the route ahead. In short, they need to know how to get rapid decisions made if quality, cost or time are affected by issues that develop as the project proceeds.
Relevant
It is sensible to confirm with the overall aims of the organization that the event and the way it is being envisioned correspond. If a company mission or vision exists, then there should be a straight line of logic linking it with this seminar, roadshow or workshop.
Timebounded
Priorities can often be forgotten when an attractive project happens along. So, not only should the relevant dates, times and durations be spelled out in detail, the effect of this project on other work should be discussed and appropriate action taken to ensure that all timescales are properly managed.
Equipped with this seemingly simple step of devising a comprehensive objective, you, as the event manager, are better equipped to make informed decisions about almost any issue that crops up in the design, delivery and follow-up processes associated with your event. Even better, it will reduce your consumption of pain killers by minimizing headache inducing changes and problems down the line.
Home Insurance Quotes
Managing or administering a seminar, workshop, roadshow or other type of event, even the seemingly simple, can provide you with headaches that you never thought possible. Being crystal clear about what you and your company actually needs the event to deliver at the earliest possible stage is critical to so many issues.
Although holding an event like a seminar or a workshop often evolves out of discussions about sales, marketing and even technical issues like product failures, it is almost always critical to establish clearly in everyone’s mind what the true purpose of the event is. This can have a substantial effect on:
* how you go about organizing the event
* who you involve
* which venue you choose
* what you choose to include and exclude
* the dates and times of the various activities
* and significantly why you are holding an event at all
The event manager should get together with the prime-movers in the organization who effectively “own” the event and discuss the true objective or perhaps objectives to be achieved.
The word “objective” is used intentionally here because there may already be an objective-setting ethos in your organization. If there is, then use the same framework to arrive at consensus for the purpose of the event.
The minimum requirement is that the objective should be SMART;
* Specific
* Measurable
* Achievable
* Relevant
* Time-bounded
Specific
The word “specific” has been chosen as shorthand for the question:
“What, specifically, will have changed as a result of the success of this event?”
To illustrate this consider the example of a Financial Services organization that was having difficulty selling one of its new investment product (Product Y) because of its complexity. They were convinced that the product was a winner but needed Financial Advisers to spend more than a ten minute telephone call learning about how it was structured and how it would perform over time. They also needed to connect with more Financial Advisers than they already knew, so the idea of a conference to debate the new generation of financial products for the 21 st Century was born.
The Financial Services company defined their specific requirement from the conference as follows:
To present, along with other Financial Products, a detailed technical explanation of Product Y to an audience of 250 or more Financial Advisers who operate within our region in order that they can understand its benefits and sell it on to their customers.
Measurable
In almost every project there is a well understood relationship between cost, quality and time. You can achieve anything to a very high standard in a very short time if cost is no object. Similarly you can produce the best product to a tight budget as long as time is not an issue. The third option is probably the world you operate in; the budget is small and we need it yesterday. This, of course, means that quality is the issue most likely to suffer and is probably worth some debate about what level of quality is expected and how it should be measured.
Post-event questionnaires and follow-up telephone or Email communication should be asking the right questions to ensure that quality data is available.
Achievable
The event organizer needs to be set up for success and needs to feel that they have the support of the event “owners” on the route ahead. In short, they need to know how to get rapid decisions made if quality, cost or time are affected by issues that develop as the project proceeds.
Relevant
It is sensible to confirm with the overall aims of the organization that the event and the way it is being envisioned correspond. If a company mission or vision exists, then there should be a straight line of logic linking it with this seminar, roadshow or workshop.
Timebounded
Priorities can often be forgotten when an attractive project happens along. So, not only should the relevant dates, times and durations be spelled out in detail, the effect of this project on other work should be discussed and appropriate action taken to ensure that all timescales are properly managed.
Equipped with this seemingly simple step of devising a comprehensive objective, you, as the event manager, are better equipped to make informed decisions about almost any issue that crops up in the design, delivery and follow-up processes associated with your event. Even better, it will reduce your consumption of pain killers by minimizing headache inducing changes and problems down the line.
Home Insurance Quotes
Managing The Reputation Of Your Event.
My Booking Manager asked:
As a Consultant in Quality and Customer Service, Roberta Meier often attends seminars and workshops as a “Mystery Shopper”. As well as checking out how well delegates are catered for by the training teams, she also takes great delight in testing how tenaciously event organizers pursue her for her true opinion about their reputation.
If and when they do catch up with Roberta, how do they quantify reputation anyway?
The easiest thing to do is to use the happiness sheets (event evaluation forms) and the post event questionnaires, remembering that this is not a popularity contest but a search for factual information.
If your questionnaires ask for a numerical score against each question, finding the average score (adding all the scores together and dividing the total by the number of delegates who answered) is a useful guide. It is also constructive to look at the spread of results. Check how many people rated the presenter a 6, how many a 7 and so on. A small cluster of very high or very low scores can give a false average, pulling it up or down. You should be interested in what the majority (60%) of the attendees thought and usually these valid results are centered on the true average.
Stress Avoidance
Also consider which elements of the project were the most stressful for you, for your team and for the delegates. Events management will never be a completely stress-free activity but, on occasion, poor planning, poor preparation or badly selected people can cause unnecessary anguish. Think back over the event and identify situations that you would prefer not to repeat if and when you run a similar event in the future. Use a cause and effect grid to home in on the real cause of problems and identify a course of action to avoid this happening again.
Effect
What actually happened?
Cause
Action Plan
Guest speaker was late arriving.
A rail strike was called on the day and we had to fly her in at the last minute.
We tried to save money by avoiding an overnight stay.
In future guest speakers will be put up in a hotel the night before the event.
One of our key delegates had to leave because of an allergy to marker pen solvent.
The interactive sessions of the workshop required lots of flip chart work and we only had solvent based markers with us.
We didn’t ask and he didn’t tell us about the allergy.
Only use water based markers in future and update the registration questions to include all allergies.
The statistics of customer satisfaction can make distressing reading, however, if you have a proactive system, you can track down the 60% of delegates who found it difficult to tell you they had a problem. If you then listen carefully to them and attempt to resolve the issue; you will convince a large proportion of them to do business with you again and you will prevent them from damaging your reputation through non-recommendation.
Life Insurance Quotes
As a Consultant in Quality and Customer Service, Roberta Meier often attends seminars and workshops as a “Mystery Shopper”. As well as checking out how well delegates are catered for by the training teams, she also takes great delight in testing how tenaciously event organizers pursue her for her true opinion about their reputation.
If and when they do catch up with Roberta, how do they quantify reputation anyway?
The easiest thing to do is to use the happiness sheets (event evaluation forms) and the post event questionnaires, remembering that this is not a popularity contest but a search for factual information.
If your questionnaires ask for a numerical score against each question, finding the average score (adding all the scores together and dividing the total by the number of delegates who answered) is a useful guide. It is also constructive to look at the spread of results. Check how many people rated the presenter a 6, how many a 7 and so on. A small cluster of very high or very low scores can give a false average, pulling it up or down. You should be interested in what the majority (60%) of the attendees thought and usually these valid results are centered on the true average.
Stress Avoidance
Also consider which elements of the project were the most stressful for you, for your team and for the delegates. Events management will never be a completely stress-free activity but, on occasion, poor planning, poor preparation or badly selected people can cause unnecessary anguish. Think back over the event and identify situations that you would prefer not to repeat if and when you run a similar event in the future. Use a cause and effect grid to home in on the real cause of problems and identify a course of action to avoid this happening again.
Effect
What actually happened?
Cause
Action Plan
Guest speaker was late arriving.
A rail strike was called on the day and we had to fly her in at the last minute.
We tried to save money by avoiding an overnight stay.
In future guest speakers will be put up in a hotel the night before the event.
One of our key delegates had to leave because of an allergy to marker pen solvent.
The interactive sessions of the workshop required lots of flip chart work and we only had solvent based markers with us.
We didn’t ask and he didn’t tell us about the allergy.
Only use water based markers in future and update the registration questions to include all allergies.
The statistics of customer satisfaction can make distressing reading, however, if you have a proactive system, you can track down the 60% of delegates who found it difficult to tell you they had a problem. If you then listen carefully to them and attempt to resolve the issue; you will convince a large proportion of them to do business with you again and you will prevent them from damaging your reputation through non-recommendation.
Life Insurance Quotes
Event Management, Body Language And Qualified Release
My Booking Manager asked:
Stuart Burns was having a bad day. Not only had he arrived late for the seminar because of the server problem at work last night, he was finding it difficult to concentrate because of the stream of text messages coming in to his cell phone. He couldn’t bring himself to turn it off just in case something catastrophic was happening back at base so he set it to mute and tried to keep an eye on it while he listened to the presenters. Now the effects of his disturbed sleep were catching up on him and his extreme body language shouted that he was in the wrong place.
Audiences suffering from information overload will give very clear signals that they are ready for a break. Their eyes start to glaze over, they slump in their seats and when you ask them questions, it is as though you are rousing them from a deep sleep. Bladders may be straining, nicotine and caffeine cravings may be kicking in and vibrating text messages are surreptitiously being viewed. It’s time to declare an unofficial break! If you push on regardless you may lose your audience completely.
This situation can often happen on hot, humid days when the air-conditioning is underperforming or in windowless rooms where the lack of outside views can have a profound psychological effect on your delegates.
A ten minute unscheduled break in these circumstances can make the difference between success and failure for your event.
Manage the coffee and meal breaks rigidly as a few 5 or 10 minute overruns can soon lose you half an hour from the program.
Managing early departures
It is a fairly frequent occurrence that a proportion of your audience will be unable to stay for the entire event. This is understandable in these times of full schedules and instant communication. The more polite amongst them will forewarn you of this and tender their apologies. Some will make a dash for the door with their heads down and others will mumble an excuse as they walk sideways past the presenter towards the exit.
If you have prior warning, try and sit your early leavers close to the exit even if they have been sitting elsewhere during the event. That way, when they have to take their leave, they can do it with minimum fuss and interruption.
Whichever exit routine your early leavers use, make sure that they have an opportunity to give you some instant feedback before they leave and take the time to thank them for however much time they have been able to spend with you. Their early exit is unlikely to be an insult to your organizational or presentational skills. More likely they have a plane or train to catch, so treat them respectfully.
Stuart was so relieved when one of the seminar administrators approached him during a coffee break to ask if there was a problem. She listened and, promising to book him on the next seminar, helped him organize a taxi.
Stuart Burns was having a bad day. Not only had he arrived late for the seminar because of the server problem at work last night, he was finding it difficult to concentrate because of the stream of text messages coming in to his cell phone. He couldn’t bring himself to turn it off just in case something catastrophic was happening back at base so he set it to mute and tried to keep an eye on it while he listened to the presenters. Now the effects of his disturbed sleep were catching up on him and his extreme body language shouted that he was in the wrong place.
Audiences suffering from information overload will give very clear signals that they are ready for a break. Their eyes start to glaze over, they slump in their seats and when you ask them questions, it is as though you are rousing them from a deep sleep. Bladders may be straining, nicotine and caffeine cravings may be kicking in and vibrating text messages are surreptitiously being viewed. It’s time to declare an unofficial break! If you push on regardless you may lose your audience completely.
This situation can often happen on hot, humid days when the air-conditioning is underperforming or in windowless rooms where the lack of outside views can have a profound psychological effect on your delegates.
A ten minute unscheduled break in these circumstances can make the difference between success and failure for your event.
Manage the coffee and meal breaks rigidly as a few 5 or 10 minute overruns can soon lose you half an hour from the program.
Managing early departures
It is a fairly frequent occurrence that a proportion of your audience will be unable to stay for the entire event. This is understandable in these times of full schedules and instant communication. The more polite amongst them will forewarn you of this and tender their apologies. Some will make a dash for the door with their heads down and others will mumble an excuse as they walk sideways past the presenter towards the exit.
If you have prior warning, try and sit your early leavers close to the exit even if they have been sitting elsewhere during the event. That way, when they have to take their leave, they can do it with minimum fuss and interruption.
Whichever exit routine your early leavers use, make sure that they have an opportunity to give you some instant feedback before they leave and take the time to thank them for however much time they have been able to spend with you. Their early exit is unlikely to be an insult to your organizational or presentational skills. More likely they have a plane or train to catch, so treat them respectfully.
Stuart was so relieved when one of the seminar administrators approached him during a coffee break to ask if there was a problem. She listened and, promising to book him on the next seminar, helped him organize a taxi.