The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre ran a Masterclass on 4 November titled ’Making Events Pay’. Speaker Erin Rigg, Client Services Manager of The Listening Company ran a session called ’How lean and mean are your events’. She shares some of her thoughts with CN:
Change is constant – and things are
changing rapidly. The approach we took to our events several years ago, or even
last year, may not necessarily be the best one for next year and beyond. Our
business needs and the needs and expectations of our stakeholders change just
as rapidly and so we must all ensure that our approach and the systems and
procedures that we implement in the delivery of our events are flexible enough to
respond to constantly changing environments.
My session considered the critical
internal and external evaluation we conducted looking at staff, systems,
processes, technologies, communications and perceptions – what we found out,
what we did to implement a new strategy across a calendar of events, its
rational, its impact across the organisation as a whole and how it’s shaping
our future direction, growth potential and objectives.
We must
evolve – and part of that process is critically assessing and evaluating the
efficiency and effectiveness of our internal workings and challenging the
processes and procedures of the past for the long term benefit of all. The
physical mechanics of how we put together our events, including how our staff
teams and responsibilities are structured, to internal and external
communication strategies and the technologies that we adopt to interact with
our stakeholders and manage data and reporting are all shaped and driven by a
vision of what we want the end result to be. We’re all looking to achieve
events that are considered professional, valuable, accessible, relevant – and
of course, at least financially viable, if not profitable.
Just
because a situation or a process doesn’t necessarily appear broken to those
closest, doesn’t necessarily mean that it wouldn’t benefit from being
challenged; there may be better, more efficient, streamlined ways of reaching
the end result that ultimately make the reward greater and more successful.
Sometimes
taking a step back can offer an invaluable degree of perspective on a situation
and even small steps or tweaks in the way activities are conducted can reap the
greatest of benefits.
At The
Listening Company (TLC) we experienced a situation that taught us a valuable
lesson and set us on a road to critically assessing the whole make up of our
organisation and approach to events delivery on behalf of our association
clients.
A company
take-over in 2008 by a far larger, commercially driven organisation invoked a
stream of activities that challenged many of the historical processes and
traditions – some larger scale, and undoubtedly more daunting changes,
particularly surrounding a re-structuring of job roles and responsibilities and
some simple streamlining. The net result is now a tight, efficient, flexible,
forward thinking and commercially astute operation firmly supporting its client
needs and targets, ensuring they retain a competitive edge in the marketplace.
Making your events lean and mean is more
than simply concentrating on just the balance sheet of one event. It’s a
strategy – an environmental analysis which considers the end to end experience
of your stakeholders – conducted with a critical and a commercial eye.
Awareness and evolving to create flexible approaches and systems to meet
changing environments and needs, both large scale and incremental changes help
us cope with the reality that what’s right today could be wrong tomorrow and
what’s wrong today could be right tomorrow.
Any comments? Email conferencenews@mashmedia.net
