Retreats and meetings matter.  Whether you are booking a staff retreat or your organization’s annual conference, remember these 8 quick tips to help you create a successful event:

1. Pick a destination where your attendees WANT to go. While you would hope they want to attend because you’ve planned a great agenda, it doesn’t hurt to hold the meeting in a location where people want to go.
2. Create a sense of anticipation. Help them see this is a retreat or conference they simply don’t want to miss.
3. Enhance your evening gathering by creating a theme to provide a unique experience. Try to give them something they will remember when they get home.
4. Build a little free time in the schedule. Hopefully you’ve chosen an interesting location so be sure to give them some time to enjoy the local area. It amazes me how some groups that come to Ridgecrest don’t allow time for their folks to enjoy all the areas of Asheville and Black Mountain have to offer.
5. Use technology to your advantage. Look for ways to provide information and allow registration via technology. Many of your attendees are packing smart phones and want to use them. Let ‘em!
6. Don’t plan every meal. Give your attendees some private time and opportunity to check out the local dining scene. It will save you money too!
7. Give attendees easy to read information. Be sure to tell them the who, what, where, when and how.
8. Offer a variety of activities to better meet the varied interests of your attendees. Not everyone enjoys a screaming run down the zip line!

What about you? What are some tips that have worked for you? Please feel free to share them with our readers. Thanks!

OK, I know. This is supposed to be a blog focused on Christian meeting planners so you may be wondering why is he writing about the flu?

Good question, but it’s actually quite simple. As someone responsible for bringing groups of people together, you can also help prevent the spread of flu (and other illness) among your attendees. After all, it’s pretty hard for someone to get much out of your great conference if they’re sick and stuck in their room.

With a little help from the CDC, here are 3 things you can do to help keep the flu from wrecking your event!

• Talk about flu prevention - Educate your planning team and others about all they can be doing to help prevent the spread of the virus. Things such as covering your mouth when you cough, not touching your eyes, nose or mouth, washing your hands with soap and water, etc.
• Protect yourself and your planning team - Encourage everyone, including yourself, to get a flu shot. As they say, an ounce of prevention…
• Provide hand sanitizers - Talk to the facility hosting your event and insist they provide hand-sanitizer stations for your meeting or retreat. At Ridgecrest we provide these at various locations throughout campus.

Curious…how many times have you come home from a conference sick? Unfortunately it happens more than we’d like to admit. All the more reason to do all we can to prevent it.

I know, hard to believe, but 2011 has come and gone and ready or not, 2012 is here!

As you prepare for what God has in store for your ministry in 2012, I thought the following 2 articles might be of some help as you plan your retreat, meetings or conferences.

Meeting Trends for 2012 – Here are a couple of the projected trends that really jumped out at me:

• Meetings are moving towards being more interactive, with less dependence on talking heads. This gives attendees more opportunity to share their knowledge and experiences with an expert/facilitator.
• Moving away from standardized activities. Instead, more groups are looking to take advantage of unique, lcoation specific options. Even better if the activity incorporates in a learning component.
• A renewed interest in simple, fresh food with a creative local twist.

5 things meeting planners will have to do this year – These 3 things are all related:

• Bandwidth – It may not be enough just to make sure your event venue provides WiFi. If there’s not enough bandwidth, your attendees are not going to be happy with slow, slow speed. Even if it’s free!
• Mobile – With as many as 85% of smartphones able to access the Internet, does it make sense for your conference to be accessible via the Internet? Be it an app, or a mobile-friendly conference website, chances are your attendees want to be able to get it on their phone.
• Tech-free zones – I know, I know. After the first 2 this one may not make a lot of sense. However, people can get connection overload and providing time to disconnect allows people to connect the old fashioned way…face to face.

What about your thoughts? Where do you see retreats and conferences going in 2012? Are you planning to make any changes in how your church or ministry connects with people?

On Wednesday, January 18, our friends at Collinson Publishing/Rejuvenate are hosting a live one hour webinar for meeting planners. The webinar is FREE and promises to provide listeners with at least 106 budget saving tips. Even if you only take way a couple of ideas that work for your church or ministry, it could still be time well spent. We encourage you to check it out before it’s too late.

The webinar is scheduled to begin at 2:00 PM EST. For more information, click here. To register, click here.

When a potential customer first comes in contact with your ministry or business, do they encounter a selling or buying environment? For many of us, I would venture to say it’s a selling environment. In other words, you center your marketing and sales efforts primarily on you and your product.

While it’s important to tell people about your ministry or business, this should not be the main focus. Instead, concentrate on creating a buying environment, where the focus is on customers and what they want. A great way to create this environment is through building personal relationships with your potential customers.

At LifeWay’s Ridgecrest and Glorieta conference centers, our sales staff emphasize building relationships with both existing and prospective customers. Our desire is for our customers to connect personally with their salesperson. We strongly believe that people buy from people they like and to whom they feel connected. This means that making sales is all about the relationship.

You can do many things to build relationships with your customers, but here are three to focus on first and foremost:

1. Be a good listener. Too many sales people talk too much. If you do all the talking, then you’re creating a selling environment. Remember, it’s not about you and your facility. The goal is to give your attention to the customer and to create a buying environment. Concentrate on asking questions to get to know your customer. This will help build rapport and get the relationship off on the right foot. Find out what’s important to them, what they want, what they need, etc. The more they talk, the more engaged they become in the possibility of buying from you.

2. Partnership. We are a ministry, serving other ministries. We want our customers to know that we see ourselves as their ministry partner. This means we are willing to do whatever we can to help their ministry be successful, even if that means they don’t hold their event or conference with us. Putting their ministry first, above our desire to sell our facilities, helps us demonstrate our commitment to the relationship. Time and time again, this commitment has resulted in groups looking for ways to buy from us.

3. Frequency of contact. It’s difficult to build a personal relationship with someone you only contact once a year. The same is true in business. Most sales people only get in touch with their customers when they need something from them (i.e. a signed contract, a meal guarantee, rooming list, etc.). Instead, focus on maintaining regular, ongoing contact with your customers. These contacts can be in the form of a phone call, an e-mail, a handwritten note or even a link to an article you think they may find helpful. The “how” is not as important as the fact that you are willing to invest time in building the relationship.

A word of caution when it comes to contact frequency: Just as some friends need to be touched more than others, the same is true here. Be sure to get to know your customers well enough that you know how frequently you need to contact them.

Regardless of who the person you’re speaking to is , they all could be potential customers for your organization. How are you building your relationship with them? The answer to that question could go a long way in determining your ministry’s future direction.

Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.

The form that the observance and celebration of Labor Day should take were outlined in the first proposal of the holiday — a street parade to exhibit to the public “the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations” of the community, followed by a festival for the recreation and amusement of the workers and their families. This became the pattern for the celebrations of Labor Day. Speeches by prominent men and women were introduced later, as more emphasis was placed upon the economic and civic significance of the holiday. Still later, by a resolution of the American Federation of Labor convention of 1909, the Sunday preceding Labor Day was adopted as Labor Sunday and dedicated to the spiritual and educational aspects of the labor movement.

Here is what we’ve added in August by category:

Budgeting/Cost Saving Ideas
Coming Soon?  The Sellers Market – Get ready for a seller’s market with our experts’ negotiating advice on how to work with your hotel partners…

Marketing/Promotion
5 Steps to Get Attendees to Return – If your meeting takes place on an annual basis…
5 Rules for Creative Success – As I see it, the future for everyone in my business…

Site Selection
Take Charge of Attendee Safety – The safety and security of attendees is your responsibility. Here’s how you can reduce risk…
Manage Risk:  Create a Plan – As meeting planners, one of our most important roles is to take responsibility for our attendees…

Contracts
Minding the Legal Pitfalls of Resort Contracts – Meeting planners frequently ask me for standard contract language…

Retreats/Meetings
Ageism and Meetings – How different age groups learn differently…

Meeting Planners
Going for Certification – The need to receive a certification in the hospitality and meeting planning industry is often…
Presentation Skills – Being comfortable behind a podium is a strong asset for meeting planners…
Lagniappe-Style Service – Lagniappe means “a little something extra…

I hope you find these helpful and remember we have many more than might interest you  in the Meeting Planner Resources section of the blog.

As a guy who’s been to all manner of meetings I would like to speak on behalf of the person in the seat at your next event. You may well know that attendees have a lot more influence now. Social media tools packed into mobile devices give them broadcast, publishing, recording, and distribution accessibility before you’ve even started the program. Have you considered the ramifications of that?

If your event is great, people are likely talking about it. If your event stinks, I guarantee you they’re talking about it. The social media savvy attendee will either be your biggest advocate or your biggest threat and you may never even meet the person.

Suffice it to say, it’s worth knowing what keeps this kind of person happy. Here are seven ways to keep the social media savvy person at your next event:

Give them some space. Nobody likes to be crowded and it’s especially uncomfortable for a long event. Try to let them have as much room as possible while still accommodating the group as a whole. Can you add an extra table or two so there’s more room per person at each table? Is there room for people to spread out in the venue or should the Fire Marshall be concerned? Giving extra space is valuable the personal space conscious attendees out there.

Give them power. If it’s going to be the kind of meeting where they need to plug in laptops, be sure there are enough power outlets within reach. That may mean power strips around the room or reconfiguring the space into power and non-power zones, but at least make it clear where it is and how to get it.

Give them good wireless Internet. Events are notorious for bad wireless Internet connections. The people most likely to talk about your event are the very people who will be frustrated with a poor connection. Ramp up your wireless signal in anticipation of a group that might use it a lot and don’t even think about charging them for access. You’ll never hear the end of that.

Give them good food. Ben Franklin once said, “A full stomach makes a man happy.” Actually, he never said that but he should have. Food is tricky but they want quality and quantity. If it’s a lunch or dinner please don’t serve that chicken dish with the funny sauce. Get good food and keep it coming. P.S. Nobody eats the radishes in the salads either.

Give them a super-simple schedule. When they arrive at an event make the schedule simple. Time, location, event, done! Let them dig into the details elsewhere. A cheat sheet version of the schedule is really nice to keep them on track. You get bonus points if you create a mobile version of the schedule, a downloadable PDF that’s mobile friendly, or a version they can sync to their calendar.

Give them real-time information. You may not know this but there’s an entire channel of dialog happening behind the scenes whether you want it to or not. You can join this dialog or choose to observe, but either way you should watch the Twitter feed. Try using Twitter search or a tool like CoTweet to monitor conversation. If you provide a hashtag for the event you’ll make monitoring even easier and be appreciated by the attendees also.

Give them a fast pass. Believe it or not, people don’t like to feel like cattle. Herding is rarely appreciated but is still a common aspect to attending events. Have you considered ways to let some people in early? Is there a way to beat the rush? Can an additional entrance be opened? Think about rewarding the people who get there early with early entrance or at the very least do something nice for people while they wait like handing out doughnuts. If they’re going to be cattle at least give them some hay.

Bill Seaver is the founder of MicroExplosion Media and has consulted numerous organizations to help them understand and apply social media into their marketing initiatives.

Here is what we’ve added in July by category:

Budgeting/Cost Saving Ideas
Skipping the Site Visit – As more and more properties provide tools to expedite the booking process, meeting planners are tempted to…

Retreats/Meetings
Rethinking Strategic Planning – Planning-ness is a crowdsourced conference best defined by its philosophical tagline, “Get excited and make things happen.”…

Meeting Planners
Growing demands advance planners’ skills – Qualifications and strategic management skills are major discussion points among industry membership groups lately…

Email Vendettas – If you’re overwhelmed by the demands of email, as I am, read…

MPI Outlines Core Meeting Planner Skills – Welcome to the future of the meeting industry. For decades, we have been asking for a metrics…

I hope you find these helpful and remember we have many more than might interest you  in the Meeting Planner Resources section of the blog.

Here are a few good books we have been reading here at LifeWay Conference Centers.  We’d love to hear what you’ve been reading, please share a few of your good books in the comments…

Same Kind of Different as Me
By Ron Hall, Denver Moore and Lynn Vincent

It begins outside a burning plantation hut in Louisiana… and an East Texas honky-tonk… and, without a doubt, in the heart of God. It unfolds in a Hollywood hacienda… an upscale New York Gallery… a downtown dumpster… a Texas ranch.  Gritty with pain and betrayal and brutality, it also shines with an unexpected, life-changing love.

Linchpin
By Seth Godin

In bestsellers such as Purple Cow and Tribes, Seth Godin taught readers how to make remarkable products and spread powerful ideas.  But this book is different.  It’s about you – your choices, your future, and your potential to make a huge difference in whatever field you choose.

The Millennials
By Thom S. Rainer and Jess W. Rainer

At more than 78 million strong, the Millennials—those born between 1980 and 2000—have surpassed the Boomers as the larger and more influential generation in America. Now, as its members begin to reach adulthood, where the traits of a generation really take shape, best-selling research author Thom Rainer (Simple Church) and his son Jess (a Millennial born in 1985) present the first major investigative work on Millennials from a Christian worldview perspective.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
By Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It’s a fast-paced tour of idea success stories (and failures)—the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of the Mother Teresa Effect; the elementary-school teacher’s simulation that actually prevented prejudice . Provocative, eye-opening, and funny, Made to Stick shows us the principles of successful ideas at work—and how we can apply these rules to making our own messages “stick.”

Today We Are Rich:  Harnessing the Power of Total Confidence
By Tim Sanders

A decade after his meteoric rise in the business world, Tim realized that his success and generosity stemmed from his confidence, taught to him as a child by his grandmother, a remarkable person named Billye. She taught him that rich was the belief that “you have enough to go around, enough to share. And when we share, we are worth something.” She knew from her experiences, including the Great Depression, that the key was to possess total confidence: In yourself, the others you rely on and a power greater than yourself.

UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging.
By Scott Stratten

UnMarketing shows you how to unlearn the old ways and consistently attract and engage the right customers. You’ll stop just pushing out your message and praying that it sticks somewhere. Potential and current customers want to be listened to, validated, and have a platform to be heard-especially online. With UnMarketing, you’ll create such a relationship with your customers, and make yourself the logical choice for their needs.