HOW TO CHOOSE MEETING PLANNERS FOR YOUR CONVENTION


Delegate The Daunting Task To Meeting Planners

For meeting planners outsourcing the planning and organizing of a big corporate event to convention organizers is a great way of avoiding stress and ensuring its success. Just communicate to them what your requirements are and other details and decisions for the convention and leave the daunting responsibility of seamlessly orchestrating the details to meeting planners. After all, it is their bailiwick. So instead of fussing over where to hold your conference or what food to serve, just focus your energies in finding a competent meeting planning company. Here are some tips to help you get started.

Shop Around and Meet With Candidate Meeting Planners

Just like interviewing a candidate to fill a position in your company, take time to interview potential meeting coordinators, even if their role in your company is just ad hoc. Get to know the capabilities and personalities of members of the event planning companies during your interaction with them. Find out about how you are to communicate and coordinate with them during the span of the undertaking and their billing arrangement. During this initial meeting, you should already have an idea of the basic details of the event, such as estimated number of attendees, the type of event, a target date, initial budget, and other details which they may need to use as basis in giving you a ballpark figure of their fees.

Consider The Experience of Meeting Planners

To confirm your first impressions of the meeting coordinators during your initial meeting, ask for references and contact previous clients, ideally those who held events similar to the one you are planning. Should the event coordinating company be mum about previous clients due to privacy clauses, then you can just survey the portfolio highlighting previous events of the meeting planners. Take note of how many years the company has been in operation and the number of functions, particularly those which are similar to your upcoming meeting, that they have handled.

Size Up The Capabilities of Meeting Planners

Review the services that the candidate meeting planners offer and check if they match your needs. A full-service company would more likely be able to deliver all your requirements, from start to finish. Be sure to assess what each of these event planners are capable of doing. Choose the outfit that can provide you a broad range of services including stylizing the venue of the convention, coordinating with entertainers, producing media elements, and many more tasks. In other words, they must be able to take care of all the tasks for the event planning so that all you have to do is coordinate, make major decisions, and approve.

Witness Meeting Planners in Action

Verify your assessment of the capabilities of the event planners by personally witnessing them while at the helm of their job. During your first meeting, request them for you to watch them in action during one of their upcoming corporate functions. This experience will give you a glimpse of how they handle pressure and event logistics during the actual event. You will also witness how they can seamlessly orchestrate the entire event with the different elements.

Selecting meeting planners to organize your convention is easy if you know what to look for: the right personalities that mesh with yours, ample experience and capabilities, validated by client references, a rich portfolio and your observation during one of their stints.

Recent Posts