Meeting planner's guide: Attention, please

Attention, please

MEETINGS NEED NOT MORE, EVEN WITHOUT BIG BUDGET

by Sarah Brouillard   Businesses have few constants: Employees come and go. Profits rise and fall. Ownership changes hands.

Meetings, however, are here to stay. But unlike visits to the dentist, paying your taxes, and other inescapable things in life, meetings and other corporate-related events don’t have to be painful. And a business owner or manager doesn’t have to have the creativity of a Martha Stewart or the deep pockets of a Bill Gates to add an unusual twist that livens up the atmosphere and makes the event more memorable, say event planners and presentation experts.

“People need to bring fun into the environment, instead of the same old classroom tables,” says David Graves, senior vice president-events at metroConnections, a Minneapolis-based destination management company and event producer.

Simple ideas — serving the food in an unpredictable way, using a new tech tool to make a presentation or holding the meeting in an unusual venue — can help participants retain information and make the experience more enjoyable.

The trick, says Jeff Prouty, managing partner of Eden Prairie-based The Prouty Project, a five-person management consulting firm, “is to always weave in music, humor, movement,” he says. “Those things stimulate creative thinking and innovation.”

First, the food
Boxed lunches are an easy and fast way to feed employees — a popular catering standard. But for companies planning to tie in their food to a clever presentation theme, it’s time to think outside the box.

Doug Anderson, director of operations at Minneapolis-based Joseph Catering, says his staff has added neon dye to sauces and food items, and put dry ice in punch bowls to accentuate meetings for companies who desired a “looking to the future” theme.

Other caterers have accompanied presentations for a client company’s “hot” new product with spicy foods, like tacos and peppery salads.

Wine-tasting also can be used as a clever presentation vehicle. Between wine samplings at a client-appreciation event in November 2001, clients of Edina-based broker team Winsness-Eisenberg at RBC Dain Rauscher listened to a brief presentation on a stock from their portfolios that was based in the same world region as the wine brand.

Tricia Nordby Hamrin, founder and CEO of Minneapolis-based UpFront Productions, a brand development, graphic design and direct mail company, applied a similar principle to a multi-course meal she hosted for a staff meeting.

“Between each course we delivered a new business idea,” she says, referring to a recent dinner meeting she had with her leadership team. Presenting information in stages, she says, is an effective way to pace the meeting.

Also, people feel more comfortable when they’re not expected to socialize for hours on end with co-workers they might not know very well.

If you’re planning simple appetizers, meeting planners don’t have to resort to plates of veggies and fruits, says Pat Olson, owner of Minneapolis-based Mary Martha Catering. Olson, who’s catered for 20 years, suggests using baskets to serve food, such as pastries and breads. Or, use waffle-cone bowls to serve different ice cream flavors, she says.

Linda Hurtley, president and owner of Stacy-based The Linwood Group Inc., has had clients create their own trail mixes. Attendees choose from bowls of M&Ms, peanuts, raisins, granola, sunflower seeds, cashews and chocolate chips, and mix the stuff in small paper bags. She adds one caveat: “If attendees bring the paper bags back into the meeting room, the noise can be distracting.”

If your heart is set on boxed lunches after all, Jon Anderson, CEO of St. Anthony-based A Season to Taste and Blue Fish Corporate Catering, suggests stuffing the boxes with a few fun toys such as rubber balls, notepads, pens and pencils.

Fresh technology
For those company owners who’ve tired of PowerPoint presentations and podium speechifying, there are many fresh alternatives.

Patty Griffin, director of live learning at Burnsville-based ChartHouse Learning — creators of the popular FISH! customer-service philosophy  — offers some helpful hints: “Ban note-taking,” she says. “Watch business people take notes sometime. They aren't really listening — they are writing so they can justify their time when they get back to the office.” She suggests giving each attendee an index card at the end of the day to write down three key messages gleaned from the presentation. “If they can do that, it has been a success.”

Other thoughts: “If at all possible, ban PowerPoint,” she says. “Shoot the presenter who reads to you from their screen. If you have a presenter that uses only photos and can make their point or tell their story from a visual cue like a photo, you are a long way towards keeping people awake.”

But not all technology is stuffy, reports several business owners.

Tom Salonek, CEO of e-business and e-commerce consulting firm go-e-biz, and technology/software training firm Intertech, conducts daily meetings with his sales team via cell phone during his morning commute.

The unique part is that Salonek isn’t the only wireless one during the meeting — typically, each participant is on a cell phone at the same time. Staffers dial into a conferencing system and plug in an access code to begin the conversation. At each daily meeting, which Salonek calls a “huddle,” staffers submit a “metric,” or a quantifiable, clearly stated goal to hold them accountable. The early morning interchange is also a forum for updates on the previous day’s progress.

Prouty of The Prouty Project uses a wireless tech tool that enables anonymous voting and opinion-taking among attendees at meetings. By pressing numbered buttons on small hand-held keypads, attendees can tacitly submit answers to multiple-choice, true-false, and other questions offered by a proctor. The proctor controls the process from a laptop.

Prouty has used the product, called the Wireless Audience Response Device, at team-building events for about 13 years, for groups as small as 10 and as large as 350.

“Interaction is the key determinant here,” says Alan Yelsey, vice president of Minneapolis-based Machine Dreams Inc., the company that rents out the wireless equipment to Prouty and numerous other business clients. The equipment is also available for sale. Rental fees are $2,000 for 100 people, and $10,000 for 1,000 people, for one or more days typically, he says.

Eliciting opinions on probing and controversial issues, like sexual harassment and race relations, is one benefit to the system, says Yelsey. Data compiled from questions can then be broken down by demographics.

It can also be used to test people on what information they retained from a presentation, or direct the conversation based on a majority-rule vote: “If you have a loudmouth who shuts everybody else out, you might leave feeling the meeting wasn’t worthwhile,” says Yelsey. But by a simple press of a button, attendees using the technology can vote to bring closure to a topic.

Yelsey says the proctor can ask the group to vote on whether to shut up the overly assertive person for a period of time.

Toys engage audience
Another way to keep people interested is to provide them with toys to manipulate.

Judith Bergeland, general manager at Brooklyn Center-based conference and event center Earle Brown Heritage Center, says one professional she hired for a staff customer-service training session brought tic-tac-toe pads and Etch-A-Sketch boards. Arranged on tables for staff members to grab during discussion breaks, the games helped stimulate brainstorming and debate, she says.

“Sometimes people think better when they have something in their hands,” she says.

Lynn Rivera, event manager at Minnetonka-based Twin City Catering Inc., offers a trivia game-show package to clients. Attendees use buzzers or bells to beat out each other in the race to answer questions. The questions can be derived from a previous presentation, and the answers seem to stick better, she says.

Venues can surprise
Choosing an unusual venue to host a meeting or corporate event is another way to surprise attendees. While a company’s headquarters or a local hotel are the most popular places because of their convenience, event planners and business owners say picking non-traditional spot, or even the outdoors, is a great way to shake things up.

“I like the element of surprise,” says Graves of metroConnections. Getting people out of their comfort zones, or even getting them into an environment where they can let down their guard, can build group solidarity at meetings, say event planners and presentation experts.

Prouty of The Prouty Project once put attendees of a team-building event on Harley-Davidson motorcycles, rented from Minneapolis-based Midwest Motorcycle Rental and Tours, for a quick road trip. It’s one example, he says, of making people face a challenge or a personal fear and grow from the experience.

St. Louis Park-based A.C.E.S. rents several in-house flight simulators for people to experience the sensation of flying and landing a fighter jet, which owner Mike Pohl says fires up people and gets them motivated. The firm employs a former Blue Angels pilot to present at corporate team-building events hosted on site. A team-building package costs $69.95 per person, according to the company’s Web site, www.flyaces.com.

Then there are those business owners simply looking for a change in scenery. Lauren Segelbaum, executive assistant at Minneapolis-based event management and production firm The Design Group, says she recommends Minnesota landmarks as prime meeting sites, especially if you’re looking for instant ambience. “Your exhibit is your décor,” she says.

Also, company owners should realize that not all venues are built equally. Older buildings and historic sites, such as mansions, are sometimes ill-equipped for complex technology needs, lighting and sound, says Graves.

Holding down costs
If penny-pinching is the main objective while planning a meeting, event-planning professionals have several suggestions to keep down costs.

Rivera of Twin City Catering recommends community centers to those meeting planners who want access to state-of-the-art audio-visual equipment, but not to pay through the nose.

While other venues often use their own caterer, many community centers allow meeting planners to choose their own off-site caterers, she says.

Booking community centers is easy; usually the most challenging part, says Rivera, is convincing clients to consider them as appropriate meeting venues. But there are “at least 20 community centers I can think of all over the Twin Cities that are beautiful,” she says. Furthermore, says Rivera, fees are low, ranging from $30 to $125 for a conference room, depending on the size of the meeting.

Molly Mulvehill Steinke, senior account executive at St. Louis Park-based public relations firm Nemer Fieger, says meeting planners with their minds set on upscale restaurants can negotiate lower fees if the media might cover the event.

“Providing the space, labor, food and beverage costs are worth it to some restaurants in exchange for publicity,” she says.

Or, she says, a firm might consider trading in its services as a means to pay the restaurant.

Companies with limited budgets “want to focus on where they want their wow!” says Segelbaum of The Design Group. “In this economy, it’s important that people still do events.”