Meeting Planner Careers

It is impossible for an event planner to control events such as natural disasters and pandemic flu outbreaks. What the individual can do is to create back up plans for as many scenarios as possible.

Begin with the words “what if?” and create a back up plan around the answer. What if one or many of the guests at your event had a medical emergency? Do you know which hospitals or minor emergency centers are closest to the hotel or convention center?

No one likes to think of natural disasters, but even a temporary power outage can ruin an event. Do you have the cell phone numbers for the key speakers and event leaders? Is it better to text key personnel rather than speak into a cell phone when privacy is hard to come by.

Keep a cool head. Conference with hotel personnel well in advance and find out what the procedure is in case of a bomb threat, tornado, hurricane, or flooding situation. Chances are you won’t need to use any of this information, but forewarned is forearmed.

In a time of crises, the event planner needs to be a leader and have the resources and knowledge to help clients over the rough patches.

Crises are always followed by change. It’s not only necessary, it’s inevitable–humans want to fix things that are broken. However, when the crisis is on a global scale, the change has to be in proportion. For the modern meeting planner, this means that other people may try to steer your business until you have little to say.

Whether of not they succeed is up to you. For instance, the recent government regulations on meetings may have caused the demise of small meeting planner businesses. Those business owners may have simply felt like they were not only swimming upstream, but up some giant waterfall. Read more…