Meeting Planner Careers

When it comes to planning meetings or events outside the main offices often requires considering different locations. While most people think of hotels and convention centers, the best meeting planners consider the cities that these venues are in. Here’s why:

• It’s not all about the meeting – A city has many things to recommend it, from restaurants to golf course. All work and no play makes for bored staff members and participants. Keeping people happy after hours is often just as important as the contents of the meetings/events themselves.

• Certain cities have venues that offer special significance – The significance could be historical in general, or specific to a certain party to the event/meeting. Sending a message that a meeting was panned at a location for a specific reason could be flattering or it could be a massive warning sign. Therefore, consider this piece of advice one that cannot be ignored because every participant may read something into the choice of venue.

• Weather and allergies – The weather just happens to be sunnier and less humid in certain areas, and that may be perfect. Of course, planning to hold an event or meeting in a city without regards to the fact that the speaker at the event is deathly allergic to the local plant life could also be a major mistake.

“Positive thinking will let you do everything better than negative thinking will.” – Zig Ziglar

Things are different for meeting planners in 2009 than 2007 or even 2008.  Attendance is down, there are fewer events to handle, and that’s just work. No doubt, everyone’s personal lives have had a few setbacks or downright tragedies as well.

Welcome to life.  Accentuating the positive side of a situation simply means focusing on what you can do now instead of mourning what you could have done a year or two ago.

Clients may come armed with negative thoughts and anxiety levels through the roof. You can feed into that or offer positive solutions to meeting planning. Meeting planners have always had challenges to overcome; the speaker didn’t show, the audio visual system went haywire, it rained every day of the event and no one was able to use the gorgeous golf course close to the convention center. It wasn’t the end of the world then and it isn’t now.

Tough times have valuable lessons to teach. Meeting planners are more creative, inventive, and hard working than ever before. Be proud of every successful meeting you host and give yourself permission to learn from mistakes. You have probably discovered suppliers and host sites that you never heard of before the recession kicked in. You stayed the course and you’re better for it.