Powerful Meeting Advisor Education

At many companies, employees are in charge of planning and booking events without knowing what the purpose or the objective of these events are.

If there’s no objective, it’ll be difficult to define whether an event is a success or not. You might compare it to asking for a train ticket at a station without having decided where you want to go. When you have a clear objective, it’s a lot easier to prepare a programme. This makes it absolutely essential to find out what the company’s goal for the event is, says Karin.

One purpose of meetings and conferences might be to comply with organisational changes, new learning or new functions in the company. It could be a conference that aims to increase job satisfaction or a sales seminar with an aim to increase sales of a certain product by 20 %.

It’s a widespread misconception that some events are simply held without purpose. Even a Christmas party serves a purpose and isn’t solely organised to please the employees. The objective might be to strengthen social interaction, which will lead to more employee satisfaction, which will in turn lead to happier customers, and this will generate more money for the company, explains Karin.

With a precise definition of your objective, it will become easier to prove the value or ROI (Return on Investment), since this enables assessment and impact measurement. You might for example do this by preparing questionnaires that will be handed out prior to and after the event – naturally with a time frame that allows implementation of what has been learned. Unfortunately there is a tendency to evaluate irrelevant matters.

Why spend the participants’ valuable time on evaluating catering? As a meeting planner, you know that these days most professional venues deliver a decent product, and if in doubt, you should choose somewhere else. Instead, use the evaluation to find out how committed the participant felt on a scale from 1 to 10, what they learned, and how much they contributed themselves. This might sound pretty self-evident, but in practice, it’s not, Karin insists.

No matter what your level as a meeting planner is, the five Meetovation principles are excellent tools for creating valuable and profitable meetings by for example working with active participant involvement and the creation of inspiring physical environments, but also by including local elements. In particular, participant involvement is a decisive element of any event, and this is also one of Karin’s favourite topics:

It’s important to be able to engage your participants with the help of an interesting and relevant content. If your listeners are bored with long PowerPoint presentations, they will quickly check emails, update their social media accounts instead or even think about completely other things. That’s why it’s important to hold their attention, inspire them and give them as much benefit as possible from the event.

Apart from learning the meeting design concept, the Extended Meetovation Education focuses on selling it or persuaing people to using it. This is why participants have a personal DiSC behavioural profile drawn up. DiSC is one of the world’s most used and recognised tools for personal profiling. Participants learn to communicate in the best possible way with different types of personalities, and this enables them to communicate their message to both customers and colleagues with more impact. When learning this, you increase the likelihood of getting your ideas through to customers and management. And speaking of getting your ideas through – another important element of the education is to learn how to present with power and personal impact. An element of the training is to give each participant a case that last throughout the entire session and is based on the individual participant’s everyday working life – no matter whether you work at an agency, a venue, are a secretary at a company or just organise events every so often.

It’s important to learn how to turn theory into practice in a project. On the final days of training, all participants must present the case they’ve worked on. Of course I’ll implement some trip-ups along the way – we all know that’s what real life does, says Karin and smiles.

Read more about Extended Meetovation Education at www.karinkrogh.dk

The Extended Meetovation Education

The purpose of the Extended Meetovation Education is to enable participants to deliver an even better meeting product and master the content related elements of Meetovation described in the Meetovation Manifesto 3.0.

The Extended Meetovation education spans a two-day residential course, webinars, two-day meeting and personal coaching sessions via Skype.

The five Meetovation principles

1. Return on investment, ROI
2. Local Inspiration
3. Responsible Thinking
4. Creative Setup
5. Active Involvement

Trip-ups from Karin’s own career

Karin Krogh lived and worked in Australia for a year, and at some point during this time she organized a welcome event for 300 people at a conference. The minute before the guests arrived, a powerful gust of wind tore up a pavilion, and it landed right in the middle of the food, which was, incidentally, catered by the country’s leading gourmet chef. Everything was instantly ruined. What do you do then?

The conference was held at an Emu farm miles from nowhere and more than an hour’s drive from the nearest town. Luckily, people in the countryside always have well-stocked freezers, and phone calls were made to all the neighbours who then arrived with everything they had. It all ended up as a gigantic barbecue, if only a little late according to the programme. In the meantime everybody had an extra drink, and all was well that ended well.