Meeting Strategies Worldwide



	Welcome to this issue of the Daily Plan-It, a publication designed to inform and inspire your meetings and conferences to higher levels of success! Read on for ideas and tips to expand the strategic importance of your meetings, enhance your delegates’ satisfaction, reduce costs and help the planet. Further ideas and information can be found at www.meetingstrategiesworldwide.com. If you prefer not to receive future issues of the Daily Plan-It, please contact editor@meetingstrategiesworldwide.com. In the News & Announcements Congratulations to Amy and Nancy on the publication of their first book, Simple Steps to Green Meetings and Events: The Professional's Guide to Saving Money and the Earth. We're very excited by the great responses we've received. The book is available for purchase at https://www.meetgreen.com/book.php. After several inquiries for green meeting seminars in other parts of the country, our "Simple Steps to Green Meetings and Events" seminar is going national this spring. The first 25 registrants for each seminar will get a free copy of the book plus access to the MeetGreen^SM Calculator. For more details and to register, visit: http://www.meetingstrategiesworldwide.com/services/seminars/. Taking Your Registration Online and To the Next Level By Cija Huntley The registration process is one area that has great potential to be environmentally conscious and can save you time as well as resources. Paper-based registration for conferences and events is an incredibly labor intensive process that generally requires a number of people touching the same piece of paper. Thanks to some wonderful online tools, we are now able to have registration forms online and available 24 hours a day, which allows the registrant more control over what goes into the system. Depending on your attendees, moving from a paper-based registration system to an online one can pose challenges in the beginning. If your registrants have always registered by snail-mail or fax , they may be a bit resistant to change. Some issues that may come up are: they may want to send a check or pay by PO. They may have concerns with the security of the website and their credit card transactions. There are ways to deal with all of these concerns. It really comes down to educating your registrants about the online process and making sure that they are armed with accurate, easy-to-find instructions. Below are the basic steps to get started with an online registration system: Identify the online software you plan to use. You can enter 'online registration system' into a search engine and you will find a number of companies that can host your registration system. Be sure that their site is secure and that its look and feel will be a good match for the rest of your website. Some will build the site for you and some allow you to have total control of building the website. It is standard for companies to charge set up fees, and they generally charge per registrant transaction. It takes a bit of looking around to find a right fit for you. Gather all of the appropriate registration information. Whatever company you use will require that you provide them with the registration information essentials: location, rates, dates, registration roles/types (member, non-member, press, volunteer etc.), coupons and/or special discounts, and extra events that you want your registrants to sign up for. Remember that with an online registration system, registrants have to go through it in a certain order, and unlike a piece of paper they can turn over, you may want to provide them with particular information (rates for instance) before they have to actually make certain choices on their online registration form. Set up an online merchant account. Make sure that you credit card company allows you to receive online credit card charges. It is best to check with the company hosting your website to see what merchant account providers work best for them and what information they will need to make your merchant account operational. Outline your registration policies and procedures. This is something that should be done regardless of the media you use for registration, but is particularly critical when you are relying on the web to be your primary vehicle for communicating registration information to your attendees. Remember this may be your first (and possibly last) opportunity to let registrants know the in's and out's of registration, so make sure it is easy to understand and user-friendly. If you are going to allow them to pay by wire, PO, or check, be sure there is a way for them to fill in their registration information online and then pay later. Check and double-check your system. Once all of your information is in the system, be sure to check for accuracy and ease of use. Review the flow of the pages to make sure it will make sense to your registrants. If it does not make sense, determine how can you make it easier for them. Run some test transactions to test that the credit card function is working properly. Always have some co-workers put in some test registrations so they can alert you to any snags they may find. Give yourself enough time to test the site before launching. It's better to catch these issues now than when 500 people are registering. Manage your registrants. Once your system is running you will need to manage your registrants. Check that payments have gone through and watch for issues that might come up. Online registration can be a wonderful time-saving tool and a great way to cut down on paper use. It allows your registrants a more active role in the registration process and allows you to save time, money, and some trees. Once your system is set up and running you will wonder why you didn't try it sooner! Case Study - What to do when your registration area doesn't exist? -- Be Creative! By Ms. Mike Thomas, CMP Is it possible to register 967 people in 5 hours in a narrow hotel foyer, with limited staffing all while avoiding having long registration lines? Yes, it certainly is! The key to this accomplishment is the ability to be inventive and even create your registration space when a conference is too large for the selected venue. We recently completed a conference for Agile Alliance, in which we were challenged to provide a quality atmosphere for the conference attendees with very limited function space. Meeting Strategies Worldwide was hired by Agile after the conference hotel contract had been signed. The venue was originally constructed to comfortably accommodate a 600 to 700 person conference. Registration for the Agile conference was maxed out at 1000 people. All venue function space was allocated to the conference sessions and the only area available for registration was a foyer adjacent to the main escalator, which also served as the principle access to the meeting room level. The challenge was to somehow position 36 feet of kiosk structures into a 1600 square foot section and still maintain adequate space for people to approach and stand comfortably in the registration area while still providing access to the meeting room level. A plan was devised. The hotel was asked to remove all furniture in that immediate area to allow space for the construction of the kiosks. Stanchions and ropes were assembled to create a structured pathway for efficient movement of the registrants. The element that had the potential of creating slow registration lines was the area needed to give away the conference bag and conference T-shirt. Creatively, the hotel was asked if the coat closet, on the opposite side of the escalator, could be utilized. With the acquisition of the additional space, the registration process was able to move swiftly forward. As the attendee registered at the kiosk, they were directed to the other side of the foyer to pick up their conference collateral materials at their leisure. By moving the collection of the collateral materials away from the registration kiosk, the registration process sped up with the result that the roped off pathway was not even used - there were no lines!! The attendees received their badge and had instant access to the agenda on the nearby meter boards, so if they were anxious to get to a session they could go directly there and come back to retrieve the collateral materials later. The lines flowed rapidly and on the first day of registration, 967 people were registered in 5 hours by just five registration staff. For planners, this example illustrates how you really can make a difference through the choices you make in selecting your registration area and the registration process. Just remember to look for inventive solutions when you find space challenges on site. Upcoming Events! Community Events: Oregon Food Bank, SAVE THE DATE: March 7, 2008, 1-4pm Dishing it out...again. Those of you in Portland are invited to join us on Friday, March 7, from 1-4pm for our quarterly volunteer time at the Oregon Food Bank. All you have to do is RSVP to Nancy Wilson and show up. We hope you can join us and spend a few hours with other folks in our industry volunteering for this very worthy cause. Oregon Food Bank 7900 N.E. 33rd Drive Portland, OR 97238 Volunteer Reception to follow During our last visit to the Food Bank in November, we packaged: 4,075 pounds (carrots/beans) 3,135 meals 112 meals per volunteer! Client Conferences & Events:* 2008 "Greening the Hospitality Industry" Conference — February 19-21, 2008, Vancouver, BC, Canada Hosted by the Green Meeting Industry Council, hospitality industry professionals will gather for the 4th annual Greening the Hospitality Conference to learn more about green meetings and share their organization's environmentally responsible practices. Leaders in the field will be on hand, sharing their insights on industry issues and environmentally responsible approaches to processes such as registration, site location, marketing and exhibiting, and much more. EclipseCon 2007 — March 17-20, 2008, Santa Clara, CA The 4th annual conference Meeting Strategies Worldwide has organized for the Eclipse Foundation, EclipseCon is the premier technical and user conference focusing on the power of the Eclipse platform. From implementers to users, and everyone in between, if you are using, building, or considering Eclipse, EclipseCon is the conference you need to attend. 2007 Spring VON 2007 — March 17-20, 2008, San Jose, CA One of Meeting Strategies Worldwide's oldest clients, pulver.com produces the bi-annual VON conferences. VON is the industry event for VoIP, and is now in its 11th year. The Spring VON Expo is the largest VoIP exhibition in the world, showcasing the very best of IP communications technology and solutions. Recommended Resources We don't often recommend resources outside of environmental issues or the meetings industry, but this time we'd like to make a notable exception for our leadership coach, Paul Werder from LionHeart Consulting. He just published his book, Building Unity. The book is an in depth exploration of how groups and businesses can contribute more through universal spiritual principles. Our success is due in large part to working closely with Paul and these principles. http://www.lionhrt.com/buildingunity.htm Green Registration Supplies By Britta Ehnebuske Implementing an online registration system not only organizes and simplifies the process; it also drastically reduces the stacks of paper that it is infamous for. In addition, here are some other steps that one can take to "green" registration. Choose green badges: There are now several options on the market ranging from badge holders that take advantage of post-consumer plastic to more durable badges designed to be used year after year and even to those made of biodegradable corn plastic. Another option is to eliminate the badge holder entirely and choose a single stiff cardboard or recycled plastic printable sheet. Encourage clients to select green lanyards: Several companies now offer high quality environmentally friendly options for the often overlooked lanyard. Look for lanyards made from natural, organic fibers or recycled soda bottles to add a low-cost, green spin to your conference. For more information, contact a green-friendly promo product sales professional, such as Adrienne Hartmeier at Brown and Bigelow. Contact Us Meeting Strategies Worldwide 6220 NE Glisan Portland, Oregon 97213 U.S.A. Phone: (503) 252-5458 FAX: (503) 261-0964 operations@meetingstrategiesworldwide.com www.meetingstrategiesworldwide.com

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