Before you begin planning an event or meeting, the most important thing is to know your audience.
“It’s like any other business,” says Mary Vanucci, event specialist at Ernst & Young for the Lake Erie region. “You need to know who’s coming and plan. If you know your market and get all the details right, it will be a success. Basically what I do is put myself in the role of who is coming to the event and what that person would need if they were coming to my event.”
Knowing your target market will also help you determine which venue is most appropriate for your event. When selecting a site, meeting planners have a wide variety of options, from hotels and convention centers to Cleveland Browns Stadium and state parks.
“With high level executives, you might want a more high-level venue. For an education seminar, you’d need something a little simpler,” Vanucci says.
Francis Girard, president of the Forum Conference Center, which hosts about 1,400 events a year, says it’s important to know what you want to accomplish at your meeting so the venue you choose can set up the best possible space for your needs.
“We always ask them what kind of a meeting it is,” Girard says. “What are you going to do? Is someone just going to stand up in front of the room and lecture all day, or is it going to be interactive? Are there going to be discussion groups vs. everyone in just one big group?”
The devil’s in the details
If you need to hold a meeting but your company doesn’t have a full-time event planner, using a place such as the Forum can save you both time and aggravation.
“We do everything in-house,” Girard says, from food service to set-up to providing audiovisual equipment.
That saves the person in charge of planning the meeting from having to call several different places for food, for equipment, for materials and for anything else that may be needed.
And while the meeting planner provided by the venue can be invaluable, Vanucci says it’s very important for the person in charge of the budget to keep control of the situation.
“While I welcome suggestions from my event planner (at the venue) because they know the chefs, they know the venue best, it’s also my budget,” she says.
Vanucci advises breaking down your budget into catering, technology, rental, cost of material and other necessities.
“Sometimes you have to be very creative,” she says.
Girard adds that even if your top venue choice seems out of reach because of budget concerns, sometimes a facility will work with a planner to accommodate the meeting.
“We’ll say, ‘Tell me what your budget is and tell me everything that you need, and we’ll try to go backwards into it. Usually we can work it out,” Girard says.
Don’t wait
The time it takes to plan a meeting varies by the size and type of the event, but unless it’s just a short meeting to make a simple announcement, it’s difficult to plan in just a week or two. Some venues are booked years in advance, and putting off booking the event could lock you out of a place that would have been perfect.
Because Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur Of The Year annual event includes nearly 500 guests, planning for next year’s event begins as soon as this year’s is over.
“It is actually becoming almost a year-round event,” Vanucci says. “We just finished up and we are already booking dates for next year, talking about the theme. It really is a very large and complicated event.”
Girard says it’s important to lock in a space as soon as you know there’s going to be a meeting.
“Get the space locked in and you can worry about the details later,” he says.
The Forum can sometimes accommodate those who call on Friday to set up a last-minute meeting for Monday, but meetings there are booked an average of 45 days in advance, and some groups plan years ahead.
“The ones that book that far out are usually the really big ones, where they need the whole place,” Girard says. “We do a lot of annual shareholders meetings. Those, by their bylaws, need to be done, say, the fourth Tuesday of April at 10 in the morning. Knowing they have to have that day and that time, they’ll just book three years out.”
But although planning a large meeting may take more time than planning a smaller one, the process doesn’t change much.
“The process is basically the same,” Vanucci says. “It’s like planning a dinner party for 10 vs. 20. It’s just more chairs and more food. It takes more time to do the budget, get the venue and do promotion,” but the process doesn’t change.
The payoff in all the planning comes from a successful event.
“It’s extremely stressful, but there’s nothing like opening day. It’s an adrenaline rush,” Vanucci says. “When someone comes up to you and says they had a great time at your event, or they got so much out of your seminar, you know your work over the past month, or six months, or year was worth it.” How to reach: Ernst & Young, (216) 861-5000; Forum Conference Center, (216) 241-6338
Eat, drink and be merry
When choosing the food and alcohol to serve at your meeting, look at the demographics of the people who will be attending, says Francis Girard, president of the Forum Conference Center.
“If you bring in people who are office workers and lower management, they eat differently than upper management,” he says. “Upper management people tend to eat less, but they want different kinds of food, they want higher-end food.”
He says age also matters — “If it’s an older group, eating habits change for those people” — as well as gender — “Eating habits are quite different for men and women.”
Another consideration is the ethnic makeup of the group.
“We ask if there are going to be any minorities in any number, and it’s not just a black and white issue,” Girard says. “We have a lot of people coming in from India now and the Orient, so we’ve got to be sure the buffets will cater to those people so they don’t find they don’t like any of the food we have. Those questions are becoming more important as the United States becomes more diversified.”
Food can also be customized to a meeting theme, such as hotdogs for a baseball-themed meeting.
And if there’s going to be alcohol, take a close look at who will be attending, Girard says.
“The age group is important, but where they are, their stature in the organization, is very important,” Girard says. “The really high-end people will drink mixed drinks or a glass of wine, and not too much. As you come down (the ladder), there’s more beer drunk, and more of it.
“A lot of that is because the higher up you get, you’re out a lot and you go to a lot of these things. It’s not, ‘Oh wow, I finally get to go out.’ For the lower levels, it’s more of a social thing, and they drink more.”
Planning for disaster
A hurricane, a flood, a major snowstorm, even an act of terrorism, can disrupt an event you’ve spent months planning and thousands of dollars on.
Mary Vanucci, an event specialist for Ernst & Young’s Lake Erie region, recalls being in San Francisco for an event in 1989 when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit.
“They didn’t have insurance, and because of the crisis, they had to cancel the conference,” Vanucci says. “It cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. They got insurance after that, because you never know what’s going to affect your event.”
That’s why many event planners, usually those of large national conferences, are now buying event cancellation insurance, which usually covers large, otherwise unrecoverable, upfront expenses in case of a catastrophe.
Below are several types of meeting/event-related coverage, according to Aon Association Services.
* Cancellation. All-risk coverage for the loss of revenue or expenses due to a cancellation, interruption or postponement. Also provides coverage for reduced attendance to a postponed event.
* Terrorism coverage. Covers cancellation or postponement of an event due to terrorism. Limitations include the site of the terrorism in relation to the location of the event.
* Labor disputes. Coverage for the cancellation, interruption or postponement of an event due to labor disputes.
* Physical loss of personal property and registration receipts. Covers property in transit to or from an event and at the venue, and registration receipts at the event or en route to the bank.
* Failure to vacate the facility on time. Covers expenses incurred for failure to leave the premise on time in accordance with the contract. How to reach: Aon Association Services, www.asaenet.org/services/insurance
