Event Architects To Know in 2024 - Julie Honse, Trimble, Inc.
Julie Honse, Trimble, Inc., discusses how she builds and plans meetings and events in the evolving hospitality landscape of 2024.
Luke Whalin
Mar 25, 2024
Welcome to the HopSkip Planner Spotlight Series, where we highlight event professionals making waves across the events industry to share lessons learned and raise awareness of their invaluable contributions.
Name: Julie Honse
Company Name: Trimble, Inc.
Job Title: Senior Events Strategist
Can you briefly tell us about your background in event planning and how you got started in the industry?
I jumped right into event planning out of college, and over 30 years, I've been lucky to work on a variety of corporate, non-profit, and athletic events on both the client and agency sides. It was not the direction I thought I was going to go--I got my degree in journalism to cover conflicts in the Middle East, but I also adopted a cat and dog while still in college, so I had to find a new career quickly because I could not fathom leaving them behind. I truly "fell" into events!
How do you go about selecting the perfect hotel or venue? What factors weigh most heavily in your decision?
Budget, of course, as well as location, proximity to the airport, and ease of access along with the "fun factor" -- is the venue near to the action in the city, and are there a lot of walkable options for activities/entertainment? Our attendees are often on tight travel budgets so we must weigh the room rates carefully, as well. We tend to want to hold our conferences within the venue itself, which includes an expo hall, so either the venue must be able to accommodate all our meeting space needs, or we'll look at a convention center that has nearby/adjacent hotels that can hold our group within just 3-4 total hotels.
What does the initial planning phase of securing a venue look like for you? Could you walk us through your initial steps?
What common financial challenges often arise when organizing an event, what strategies do you use to mitigate them, and how do you avoid them?
We work with a fantastic sourcing agent who meets with us to collect our needs. She is already familiar with our program, so she works with us to understand how we might be changing things for future programs that could impact room block patterns/needs, the amount of breakouts we foresee needing, and so on. She puts out the RFP and reviews a detailed spreadsheet with us. From there, we set up site visits with our top 3-5 locations and then present our narrowed-down recommendations to our leadership team for their input before deciding. We are typically booking 3-4 years out each year.
For us, the challenges we have experienced most recently have come from the constraints of having to use in-house AV providers, where costs can really skyrocket, and you simply have no options other than to make cuts or reduce the wow factor in your program content. I think it really depends on the cities you're choosing and what the pricing standards are for those locations. It appears to me that coming out of Covid, many event suppliers are trying to recoup their losses quickly, so ultimately, we in turn, are trying to educate our Finance department partners on the degree to which costs have risen and increased our budgets to ensure we are not cutting back so deeply that it noticeably impacts the quality of our conferences.
How do you leverage technology to boost efficiency during the planning, execution, and post-event stages? What does your “event tech stack” look like? (For example, using Survey Monkey for surveying attendees post-event)
We use a variety of tools that we've found have made some great gains for our team--we look for tech tools that all integrate with each other fairly seamlessly. We use Swoogo for our registration, exhibitor/sponsor purchases and tasks, content submission, content review/grading, and speaker management/tasks. It generates a variety of dashlets and reporting that are so easy to build and send live links out to team members that this has saved us quite a bit of time.
From there, we bring in a mobile app that will easily integrate Swoogo and our post-session surveys, as post-conference surveys are all accessible directly through the app. We are still in the selection process for this year's mobile app, but this integration is a requirement.
Our extended Marketing team plays a massive role in uncountable ways, helping us to build and promote our conference so for the extended players, we use Monday.com and our project manager sets up boards for each sub-team to keep track of all of their tasks that ladder up to our overarching milestones in our timeline as we march towards our fall event.
Do you use frameworks, templates, or other tools/documents to help you stay organized and manage the event planning process?
We build out a pretty extensive project plan that is a massive Google sheets document, loaded with tabs--this is our living working document that our core Events team works in, side by side with our key external planning partners. We use individual Google Docs and Sheets for other Marketing team members and some external planning partners (for instance, a shot list for the photographer) that are more digestible and easy to share with an individual for a more limited role or need and link everything back to one "Important Links" tab so everything is easy for our team to find. All of these items are copied over into the next year and modified/updated from there.
Do you have any specific strategies or insights for enhancing the attendee experience at your events?
We really deep dive into survey comments and ratings from the previous year and put these into buckets--we look for trends and brainstorm together on ways to change an experience that perhaps came up short or enhance our content, food and beverage, etc., and determine what is feasible to change, what does and does not impact the budget--we really examine ideas from many angles before putting together our plans for the new year. We have a lot of repeat attendees, and we want them to feel heard and recognized. We also want to continually transform the conference experience for them so that it always feels fresh and new.
Effective communication is crucial in any planning process. How do you ensure you and your event stakeholders are always on the same page?
We have a very robust intranet and work with a talented team on internal communications, updates, and resources. They build microsite web pages, essentially, so that we can keep internal team members and stakeholders updated at all times. We also send out a regular cadence of emails with upcoming milestones or calls to action--we have so many teams that hold customer and prospect relationships that we truly need everyone to be informed and aware of what's happening and what's coming up next so that they can, in turn, encourage registration or sponsorship sign-ups. My manager and I also have a monthly meeting with our top sector leadership to keep them up to speed and give them the opportunity to weigh in on important elements. I think this is an area where we truly excel--there is definitely over-communication!
How do you facilitate networking opportunities among attendees? Are there any specific tactics or strategies that you recommend?
What's your go-to plan for handling emergencies or unexpected situations during an event?
We are very focused on ensuring our attendees get time to connect, so we build these opportunities into our agenda throughout each day. Last year's conference theme was "Driving Connection," so we honed in on weaving those networking opportunities into the schedule. What we've tried in the past was to set up official networking activities that were very structured and in certain time slots--they were hit and miss because they were a little bit more "forced networking."
While we have a new theme this year, we still believe that our industry is stronger together, which is part of our core messaging. We have gone with a festival-style conference format this year that will allow for more of a "something for everyone" type build-your-own-experience and incorporated the request from our surveys to bring customers of a certain type of product together or allow for "birds of a feather" conversations to happen. With that, we are going to be incorporating community hubs, central locations by topic, or product groupings that allow people to pick their community, join a lounge space, and meet like-minded attendees to have those organic conversations. We'll be including some surprise and delight moments throughout the schedule to bring people to their space for an impromptu treat and break along the way--we're excited to see the reaction to these changes in the next year!
We create a detailed emergency document with the contacts for the venue and instructions based on the type of emergency, and we send this out to our attending staff in advance. We also meet with the security team at the venue during the pre-con to reiterate our chain of command for communications to staff and attendees. Lastly, just prior to the conference kick-off, we hold a "pep rally" with all staff and discuss the emergency plan, what to do, and who to contact in great detail. We really want everyone to be able to be a part of an emergency solution should they be the only one there to assist--we arm our team and staff so that everyone is empowered.
What are the typical steps you take in the post-event phase?
We have our steps built into our timeline and know who is going to do what in our post-event phase so we are ready to go. We have someone pulling final financial reports, attendance reports by session, session survey results, conference survey results--all the stats! We start compiling, building out summary slides to share internally, and holding all of our debriefs by team to collect new ideas/ways to improve. We also hold our external planning partners' de-brief, and then finally, we get all the ideas into one combined doc for review, evaluation, and, in some cases, further research or pricing quotes. We also hold an Events team challenge where we have two weeks to come up with big, bombastic ideas on how to change our conference--the sky is the limit, don't worry about costs, feasibility, etc., just present your ideas and see what has legs. This is our gateway to how we approach keeping things fresh, and it's a really fun exercise!
What key performance indicators (KPIs) do you use to evaluate the success of an event?
Primarily, we look at the following:
How are our survey results?
Did our breakout sessions hit at least a 4 out of 5?
Did our speaker ratings hit at least a 4 out of 5?
Did we come in at/under budget?
Did we hit our attendee goals?
How much business closed through our sales staff because of our conference?
All of these items factor into our measurements for the success of the event, as well as help us to continue to improve our sessions (our content leads and presenters are told in advance that any session or speaker with an average rating below a 4 will not be able to repeat/participate in the next conference).
What advice would you offer someone just starting their career in the meetings and events industry?
I think getting an internship, if possible, is a great way to start--it's definitely hard to crack into the events industry with no experience. At the same time, those who have not worked in the industry tend to have a pretty glamorous view of event planning/production--it is definitely not all parties and weddings! Corporate events are a different beast; non-profit events can be wildly different from industry to industry (academic vs. clinical or medical vs. government, and so on), so dip your toe in and see if you're personality is naturally wired for all the skills that make someone a great planner who doesn't feel overwhelmed or stressed by the day-to-day of this job.