Published Articles by Snowden McFall
Fire Up! How To Hit A Home Run
A Checklist of Top Planning Tips
by Snowden McFall, MAT
Chair of Motivational Professional Experts Group, National Speakers Association
The success of your event depends on many factors you can't control. Having orchestrated dozens of conferences including chairing the 2000 and 1999 NE Speakers ConferencesI know this all too well. But, there are steps you can take to hit a home run. Here is my checklist of top tips for planning your successful events!
Welcome Your Attendees in Refreshing Ways
1. Have a volunteer greeting committee with special hats, badges or banners make everyone feel comfortable. Pick warm individuals with good people skills.
2. On nametags, have a sticker or color that indicates someone is new or a first-timer.
3. Place a greeting letter in every attendee hotel room to welcome them containing critical information and updates on any changes.
4. Buy your speaker's book and give it away as a welcoming gift to all of your event attendees as a way to anchor what they have learned.
5. Do volunteer recognition at the event, perhaps with awards and/or gifts to encourage future volunteers. Recognize those who excel in courtesy, positive attitude, customer service, etc.
6. Remember the little things: put the conference theme on nametags, give out promotional items provided by a vendor, serve snacks all day.
7. Have a spousal track and invite spouses if it's the appropriate time and place.
8. Have a trade show, with vendors displaying their latest innovations. Charge good money for this, minimizing your conference expenses and making it a win-win.
9. Consider exciting giveaways and raffles. Most vendors will donate something to get the free advertising. Sell ads in the notebook.
Good Advance Work Makes All the Difference
10. Use internal PR to create excitement 6 months of your event with themed posters, newsletters and fliers. Include interviews with the speakers.
11. Develop a conference time-line one year in advance. Keep adding items including who is responsible for each by when, and share this with anyone critically associated with the conference. Modify as you go. Review after the conference to see if deadlines need to change.
12. Thoroughly pre-screen your hotel or convention site- even if you have to fly there. Develop a conference map of all meeting rooms . Visit guest rooms. Check to see which magazines are in each room. A hotel, where I was scheduled to speak a month later, stocked a magazine which would have offended the attendees at my event. I had them remove it.
13. Have an AV liaison at the hotel and get all the phone numbers. If you have complex AV, have your AV specialist stay until everything works and call in hourly. At NE Speakers Conference 2000, we were on walkie talkies with the staff, so nothing was left to chance. It worked beautifully.
14. Take extra light bulbs for overhead projectors, extra batteries for microphones and extra extension cords.
15. Ask your speakers to create a cover page for worksheets or AV that feature your theme. Most will ask for this. Give them camera-ready artwork to unify your entire event.
16. Make your conference fun. Use dramatic introduction music before each segment. If you use recorded music, make sure you pay the ASCAP/BMI licensing fee to avoid costly legal hassles.
17. People learn best when they talk about what they learned right afterwards. Do this in pairs, not in front of the group. This holds the information in their memory more effectively than typical visual auditory learning.
18. Consider a 5-minute exercise/stretch break led by an aerobics teacher. Have them lead people in a stretch and movement session twice a day-- especially after lunch.
Follow-Up For the Future
19. For future conferences, have someone interview attendees and get testimonials!
20. Use creative evaluations. Ask about the topics, the theme, the hotel or site, the meals, the trade show, the speakers. Use a 1-10 scale and room for comments. Have them analyzed and modify next year's conference based on the feedback. This was the single most powerful thing we did for NE Speakers Conference. The 2000 evaluations said "You read our comments and made changes accordingly - Thank you!"
©2001, Snowden McFall, All Rights Reserved
