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Digg it UP - Successful Event & Meeting Planning: How to Boost Attendance
I recently returned from the idea incubator seminar hosted by Stu McLaren. This event is for anyone trying to improve their online business and delivers a multitude of on and offline business ideas from a panel of top-notch speakers.I had the pleasure of talking one-on-one with Stu at the event over lunch one day. I always get a lot of “ah-has” after speaking with Stu, but this particular meeting really opened up the flood gates.Stu was saying that the biggest question many of the students have is “How do I get started?” He felt this was a very tough question because there are many answers to this query. Stu was saying asking a more specific question is a much better way to begin.He went on to say that many of the participants (including myself) have been to a ton of courses and listened to hours of instruction by the speakers at the course (including himself). He felt that too often people get wrapped up in trying to ally every technique they have ever learned.The trick is to pick one or two strategies and then apply them…take action. Stu himself only uses 20-25% of all the strategies he has ever learned and he has been taught by the best.I then told Stu that this is the same thing I do in my personal and team training with clients. I first find where they are successful and then “tweak in” the things that need improvement.That is w
• Are you missing opportunities to promote your meeting? Frequently missed opportunities include e-mail signatures, broadcast fax cover sheet
Business professionals are often stymied by the problems they encounter when trying to implement change. Their frustration can then create even more of a roadblock. Following are a few tips for dealing with resistance.1. Realize that the resistance is a normal, rational human response. Studies of the brain indicate that we prefer the familiar, since it takes less energy to deal with and there are fewer potential fears. If one responds to resistance in a manner that causes others to feel as though their concerns are invalid, they will simply feel more threatened.2. Try to determine the most significant reasons for resistance (their fears and/or concerns), and find ways to help resolve them. This works much better than trying to convince them harder that the change is in their best interests.3. Don’t spend a lot of time trying to work with those who resist nearly everything. It’s part of their psychological makeup, so you’re better off working with those who are more likely to take some risks. Once they’ve done so and succeeded, others are more likely to get on board.Organizations often create much of the resistance due to a lack of communication. We all need time to assimilate new ideas, so letting people know in advance what is coming, why it is being done, and what will be done to ensure that it will be successful can go a long way.
Planning a Meeting? Do Your Homework
Before drafting the marketing plan for your next meeting, ask yourself the following questions:
• Are you certain that you’re offering the best educational program to your audience? Do you ask your attendees and members (including those who do not attend) what they need to know and learn to prosper professionally and personally? Are you responding to their needs? Do you actively seek grants, partnerships, and sponsorships that will help you afford to bring the best to your delegates?
• Are the cities you choose affordable and accessible? Are the room rates suitable? Are your registration fees reasonable and competitive while yielding acceptable profit margins?
• Are the time of year and the day of week pattern easy to sell to your audience? (Educators are usually free in the summer, while entrepreneurs of any ilk may have a hard time pulling away from their source of income on weekdays.)
• Is your event scheduled so as not to compete with other industry (public and private) events or your own organization’s regional events?
• Is your marketing database the most comprehensive and accurate it can be? Has it been tested, corrected, and USPS-certified? Have you captured the names of all potential attendees from Web inquiries, product purchases, membership inquiries, exhibitor surveys, and marketing alliances with related associations?
• Are your conference mailings frequent enough and timely? Do respondents have sufficient time to budget for the event, get permission to attend the event, and benefit from the early-bird registration cutoff date and the hotel cutoff date in general? Is your program printed far enough in advance to allow you to take advantage of the significantly cheaper, yet slower, nonprofit or bulk mail rates?
• Are you missing opportunities to promote your meeting? Frequently missed opportunities include e-mail signatures, broadcast fax cover sheets
As human beings are advancing day by day the world is squeezing or shrinking. It is not just easy for the humans to commute from one part of the world to another but also to send the goods or packages from place to place. Shipping thus perhaps stands as one of the best way to shift one’s cargo.Shipping is meant for all sorts of goods preferably the heavy, immovable ones, which cannot be easily moved like machines, household goods, vehicles etc. These goods are safely packed in large picked up from one’s place through lifts and safely packed in containers. A container is a huge box of metal. There are a variety of sizes of containers or boxes. Usually they vary from the kind of package to be transported. The shipping company one selects and provides its own containers and also insurance for the goods packed by them i.e. only the professionally packed goods. The customer should not go by the little increment in his bill due to insurance for insurance saves from many expected and unexpected pitfalls. Thus it is recommendable to get your shipment insured.There are various shipping companies like UPPS, FED EX etc. The efficiency of a company firstly lies in its speedy delivery of goods. The lesser number of days a company takes reduces the chances of one’s packages to get naturally deteriorated, damaged etc. However time limit is not the only parameter to adjudi
Planning a Meeting? Do Your Homework
Before drafting the marketing plan for your next meeting, ask yourself the following questions:
• Are you certain that you’re offering the best educational program to your audience? Do you ask your attendees and members (including those who do not attend) what they need to know and learn to prosper professionally and personally? Are you responding to their needs? Do you actively seek grants, partnerships, and sponsorships that will help you afford to bring the best to your delegates?
• Are the cities you choose affordable and accessible? Are the room rates suitable? Are your registration fees reasonable and competitive while yielding acceptable profit margins?
• Are the time of year and the day of week pattern easy to sell to your audience? (Educators are usually free in the summer, while entrepreneurs of any ilk may have a hard time pulling away from their source of income on weekdays.)
• Is your event scheduled so as not to compete with other industry (public and private) events or your own organization’s regional events?
• Is your marketing database the most comprehensive and accurate it can be? Has it been tested, corrected, and USPS-certified? Have you captured the names of all potential attendees from Web inquiries, product purchases, membership inquiries, exhibitor surveys, and marketing alliances with related associations?
• Are your conference mailings frequent enough and timely? Do respondents have sufficient time to budget for the event, get permission to attend the event, and benefit from the early-bird registration cutoff date and the hotel cutoff date in general? Is your program printed far enough in advance to allow you to take advantage of the significantly cheaper, yet slower, nonprofit or bulk mail rates?
• Are you missing opportunities to promote your meeting? Frequently missed opportunities include e-mail signatures, broadcast fax cover sheet
Viral Marketing has exploded within the last couple of years. Placing your business and products in front of hungry eyes has morphed from static advertising to audio, video and other forms of viral content. Through the birth of Internet-ready cell phones, text messaging, blogging, wireless laptops, websites that allow video content to be uploaded, 24/7 and services such as iTunes, the ways of promoting yourself are as vast and widespread as your creativity allows.Thinking "outside the box" has never been more important than it is now. There is cash to be made and the need to go where your customers are hanging their hats is vital to the survival and growth of your business. Don't look at it as extra work, but a new challenge and an exciting time to live and work.BLOGGINGBlogging is something that every business owner needs to learn to do. Why? It is an everyday medium that is sweeping the Internet. There are blogs for every interest and on any subject you can think of. From breeding dogs to the correct usage of a lawn trimmer, people are out there on their blogs, informing and interacting with others who are interested in what they have to say. Taking it a step further, when you create a blog of interest and begin to generate traffic to it (and you will!), your visitors will want to share their thoughts about what you are talking about. People love to gi
• Are the cities you choose affordable and accessible? Are the room rates suitable? Are your registration fees reasonable and competitive while yielding acceptable profit margins?
• Are the time of year and the day of week pattern easy to sell to your audience? (Educators are usually free in the summer, while entrepreneurs of any ilk may have a hard time pulling away from their source of income on weekdays.)
• Is your event scheduled so as not to compete with other industry (public and private) events or your own organization’s regional events?
• Is your marketing database the most comprehensive and accurate it can be? Has it been tested, corrected, and USPS-certified? Have you captured the names of all potential attendees from Web inquiries, product purchases, membership inquiries, exhibitor surveys, and marketing alliances with related associations?
• Are your conference mailings frequent enough and timely? Do respondents have sufficient time to budget for the event, get permission to attend the event, and benefit from the early-bird registration cutoff date and the hotel cutoff date in general? Is your program printed far enough in advance to allow you to take advantage of the significantly cheaper, yet slower, nonprofit or bulk mail rates?
• Are you missing opportunities to promote your meeting? Frequently missed opportunities include e-mail signatures, broadcast fax cover sheet
Are you wanting to be a success online (or offline)? You are not alone in this target. The entrepreneur craze is sweeping all of America- and with good reason. Many entrepreneurs have become rich through going into business for themselves- and many have watched them, wanting a piece of the pie. We all want a piece of that pie and the pie is big enogh for all.In a free enterprise system, anyone can create a business and run it successfully. With the downsizing of many corporations as of late, and with an increase in business students going to college, many have received the title of ‘entrepreneur’. Things such as franchising have also made it easier for entrepreneurs to thrive, as well as new technology being developed.Getting started in the market is easy, and the results are obvious. Things such as Paypal, Facebook, and Microsoft have all been started by young entrepreneurs- an increasing trend. If you are one of the entrepreneur types, there is no better time now than to enter the industry. Many business colleges now offer entrepreneurship as a course- as well as numerous other business classes that would be of extreme benefit to a prospective entrepreneur.With the invention of the internet, came more opportunity. Now entrepreneurs have more than just the physical world to capitalize on- an online digital world. Advertising, running a business, and fin
• Is your event scheduled so as not to compete with other industry (public and private) events or your own organization’s regional events?
• Is your marketing database the most comprehensive and accurate it can be? Has it been tested, corrected, and USPS-certified? Have you captured the names of all potential attendees from Web inquiries, product purchases, membership inquiries, exhibitor surveys, and marketing alliances with related associations?
• Are your conference mailings frequent enough and timely? Do respondents have sufficient time to budget for the event, get permission to attend the event, and benefit from the early-bird registration cutoff date and the hotel cutoff date in general? Is your program printed far enough in advance to allow you to take advantage of the significantly cheaper, yet slower, nonprofit or bulk mail rates?
• Are you missing opportunities to promote your meeting? Frequently missed opportunities include e-mail signatures, broadcast fax cover sheet
The Job Interview is usually the most stressful and difficult part of any job. On the job stress falls a distant second to the interview required to get the job in the first place. So, what can we do to reduce the stress and impress our future boss at the interview? That's where preparation comes in. This article is about job selection, employer investigation, pre-interviews and practice to show you're prepared for the job and not just the interview questions.Career And Job Selection is the most important step in preparing for the interview. We must do a thorough job search to find careers and jobs that are an actual match for the skills, education and experience we have. You may be able to craft a deceptive resume that makes it look like you're qualified where you aren't, but how do you get past the interview, or worse, do the work once hired? There are skill sets you develop in certain fields that work in other jobs, as well. If you're in doubt, get a professional career counselor to help you find your good matches. It will make all the difference when you're interviewing if you already have a good match. As a side note...if you're changing careers, take some classes to fill in gaps in your experience toward the new field. Of course, to make sure it's a good match and to prepare for the interview, it's a good idea to inve
• Are you missing opportunities to promote your meeting? Frequently missed opportunities include e-mail signatures, broadcast fax cover sheets, letterhead, ads and articles in every newsletter and magazine you produce, inserts in dues renewal letters and all other outbound correspondence, announcements to the trade press, and splashy unveilings at the previous year’s convention and all mid-term events. Do you provide your local chapters and exhibitors with turnkey packages that enable them to support the marketing of the national meeting?
Keep in mind that many activities are competing with your conference for a share of a potential attendee’s time and discretionary funds these days. Less personal time; shrinking educational budgets; and an increasing number of educational opportunities available locally, regionally, and on the Internet are forcing meeting planning managers to create a more sophisticated, quantifiable approach to marketing than ever before.
Do the Math
According to the Professional Convention Management Association’s Ninth Annual Meetings Market Survey, marketing and promotion account for 11.1 percent of event expenses. Compare this figure to the amount that you are spending to promote your event. Are you spending enough? Too much? Let’s calculate.
Assume your attendance goal is 1,500 — an increase of 5 percent over the previous year — and your registration fee is $500. If you achieve your goal, you would generate $750,000 in gross revenue. If you spend the industry average of 11 percent to secure this attendance, your out-of-pocket marketing expenses would be $82,500 or $55 for each registered attendee.
Given that the acceptable rate of return for direct mail is at most 3 percent, you would need to mail at least 50,000 total pieces to net 1,500 attendees (.03 x 50,000 = 1,500). With a budget of $82,500, your cost per mailer would be $1.65 including postage. But since research has shown that people need to see your message at least three times before they respond, your cost per mailer would drop to 55 cents. Since this is a low unit cost, you would need to be creative with your distribution costs by including the
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