34 Leadership After four decades of founding associations, serving on non-profit boards, and designing and facilitating countless association meetings, I’ve witnessed my fair share of mistakes associations make. In the last edition of Association Chat Magazine, I documented three less-common mistakes made by associations. Here are three more “Don’t do that!” warnings about common mistakes I’ve seen when planning association events. 1Don’t Contract Your Venue Before Designing Your Event! More often than not, clients ask me to help design their meeting after they’ve contracted a venue! Here’s why they do it and why it’s a mistake. The work of choosing and contracting a venue typically occurs early during event production, before tackling major logistical necessities like budgeting, marketing, food and beverage, accommodations, etc. Unfortunately, meetin g design is often a new activity for meeting conveners. So, they default to the familiar workflow mindset and bring me in post-contract, overlooking the need to think about how desired meeting outcomes might affect venue choice. Meeting planners and venue staff are generally comfortable determining space needs for traditional events once they know: » the type of event; » the number of attendees; and » the meeting duration. In my experience, however, they have little idea of the space and room set requirements for participant- driven and participation-rich meetings, which typically require: » larger general session rooms, because participants are moving about and/or sit so they are facing one another rather than sitting in fixed dense sets of tables and chairs; and » more separate breakout spaces for participants to meet. As a result, ~95% of the time I review floor plans or visit the contracted venue, I discover that incorporating the interactive work that is a hallmark of participation-rich meetings will require compromises and workarounds. Sometimes, I can figure out a way to make a truly participative event design work in the available space. But sometimes, the contract needs to be renegotiated (cue meeting planner shudder), or the quality of the resulting event suffers unnecessarily. Such extra work and expense can be avoided if you contract your venue after designing the event. Call a meeting designer first—you’ll be glad you did! 2Don’t Call Your Event an “Unconference” Because It Sounds Cool! I’m noticing that event marketers increasingly use “unconference” to describe a traditional conference. <Sigh>. Don’t do this! There’s a big difference between unconferences and traditional events. Associations— DON’T DO THAT! (Part Two) By Adrian Segar
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