Event Architects To Know in 2024 - Laura Kielbasa, MRA - The Management Association
Laura Kielbasa, MRA - The Management Company, discusses how she builds and plans meetings and events in the evolving hospitality landscape of 2024.
Luke Whalin
Nov 27, 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: Laura Kielbasa
Company: MRA - The Management Association
Job Title: Conference and Events Manager
Can you briefly tell us about your background in event planning and how you got started in the industry?
I started with an internship in college helping my cross country coach run our fundraising 5K race. After college, I was in roles that I would call “event-adjacent” for a couple of years, getting to support teams going to events, sometimes attending tradeshows, but not doing the planning. I took a step back into an internship role with Red Frog Events, where I was involved in the planning and execution of large-scale events. After that, I took a year in some non-profit event roles and eventually found my way to an association management company (AMC). I’ve been in the association planning realm for nearly 10 years now.
How do you go about selecting the perfect hotel or venue? What factors weigh most heavily in your decision?
When I was sourcing for larger events, I would put together a detailed RFP and distribute it through my National Sales partners in the hotel industry. Location and affordability are my top two factors from an attendee's perspective. From a planner's perspective, affordability is key, and I would also say the willingness of the venue to work with their clients, be responsive in communication, and have open dialogue make an impact on my decision.
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?
Once I receive the proposal, it gets plugged it into our comparison spreadsheet so we can compare apples to apples what each venue is offering. When it is narrowed down to our top 2 or 3 venues, we conduct site visits and get a sense of the space for our program. From there, we follow up with any outstanding questions or concerns and then make the final selection. For some clients, board approval is needed, so we sometimes present our suggestions and reasoning for their decisions.
Rising costs are always a factor when you’re booking several years out, as associations tend to do. I do my best to include clauses in the contract that protect us from any significant increases in room rate, food and beverage costs, and technology (wi-fi, using an outside AV vendor, package handling, etc.) The last thing you want is to be surprised by hidden costs. It is important to ask a lot of questions upfront and understand where additional charges could be incurred.
How do you leverage technology to boost efficiency during the planning, execution, and post-event process? What does your "event tech stack" look like?
We keep it pretty simple in this area. For planning, we have dynamic timelines set up in a cloud-based environment such as Monday or Smartsheet. We’ve started using Teams internally and that makes working collaboratively in documents a lot easier.
We’ve started embracing AI to help generate session titles, descriptions, speaker bios and event themes. Spark has been really helpful as it is geared towards planners. As part of a webinar series we ran, I used AI generated videos and avatars to recap the week before and introduce our host each week. For another conference, I used the AI video to create a tutorial for the virtual platform. This was hit or miss with attendees as they could still tell it wasn't a real person in the video, but it did eliminate a lot of the typical questions we would get in the chat regarding how to find or join sessions and where to reach out for tech support.
During the event, we use polling software such as Poll Everywhere to make sessions interactive (this platform works well for our hybrid events).
After events, we send out an evaluation via Qualtrics for attendees and post recordings and resources in our learning management system (LMS).
Do you use frameworks, templates, or other tools/documents to help you stay organized and manage the event planning process?
100 percent! I love having templates to work from whether that is a skeleton agenda or last year’s timeline. It is critical to have consistency across documents and events so that you’re able to find the information you need easily. I prefer to have standard folders and file every document (and emails in my inbox). You never know when you’re going to have to go digging through your digital clutter to find an answer. It has saved me more than once to save everything – even earlier drafts pdf documents.
Do you have any specific strategies or insights for enhancing the attendee experience at your events?
My brain always goes to the five senses. When attendees are walking into the event, are the hit with a DJ pumping jams and getting the energy up? Is there an activation where they can write a note on a sticky pad and physically put it on a board or a wall? Does the space visually draw them in? This is where site visits are crucial to understanding the flow of the space and walking it from the attendee’s perspective.
I’m looking forward to leveraging AI to elevate the attendee experience at our events and in the post-event experience. There are tons of opportunity for hyper personalization with AI, we just need to collect the data and create meaningful action items from there. If AI can summarize sessions with notes and pull-out key takeaways, we could send that recap to attendees and from there they can decide whether or not to watch the full recording of the session they missed. There are so many possibilities!
Effective communication is crucial in any planning process. How do you ensure you and your event stakeholders are always on the same page?
I work a lot via email. With planning communications, you’re often trying to convey a lot of information to someone who is volunteering their time to support your event. I try to make the material easily to consume with bullet points, highlighting key deadlines and calling out action items. Within the planning team, the timelines and operations manual are very specific in designating who is in charge of each task.
How do you facilitate networking opportunities among attendees? Are there any specific tactics or strategies that you recommend?
You need to know who your attendees are and what types of personalities are attending your event. There is no one-size-fits-all approach for networking. I would suggest defining 2-3 different personas at your event and developing networking opportunities that make sense for each one. For example, first-time attendees may feel lost or overwhelmed so you could offer a pre-event happy hour or lunch to orient them with the program and then have your board or a slate of past attendees also be there to be a friendly face throughout the conference.
What are the typical steps you take in the post-event phase?
Not only do we typically have an internal plan for navigating these situations in the operations manual, but making sure that I know who to connect with at the venue to implement their response plan. Staying calm is also a critical piece of managing these situations. Avoid a knee-jerk reaction if you can and think through your options quickly before making a decision.
Can you share an example of a significant challenge you faced while planning an event conference and how you overcame it?
There was an event where I came into a contract secured by a predecessor with a hotel where the meeting space and room block no longer matched my group’s need. As soon as I realized the issue, I got in contact with the hotel and started talking through our options. Long story short, it took a lot of open dialogue, compromise from both parties, and an agreement to continue our relationship for future events that got us to a workable solution. It goes to show that it never hurts to ask and that picking up the phone goes a long way versus just emailing back and forth where you can misconstrue tone and meaning.
What are the typical steps you take in the post-event phase?
For the attendees, they receive an email typically the day after the event with a link to a survey and a link to access any resources and recordings from the event.
Ideally, anyone on my team that was a part of the event will be part of a post-mortem meeting within a few days of the event. We talk through what went well, what didn’t work as well, and what we could change in the future. Lastly, when the survey closes, we put together a full post-event report with registration breakdown, attendance numbers, and attendee feedback.
What key performance indicators (KPIs) do you use to evaluate the success of an event?
Registration count and attendee feedback are the most discussed at a business level. As the planner, I view success when the attendees have no idea if there are any issues or hiccups throughout the day. You can feel the energy when you’re onsite and, while not scientific, it is a good gut check on how the feedback will come through.
What advice would you offer someone just starting their career in the meetings and events industry?
I have so many things I could share here so I’ll do my best to keep it short! I would encourage you to say “yes” as often as possible to the different opportunities, even if it’s something you haven’t done before or seems outside your skillset. As long as you are in a role where you feel supported to try and learn as you go, this is the best way to grow your skills and maybe learn what you do or don’t like in the events space. Make sure people know you're interested in helping or have a passion for "xyz" - if you don't express that, they won't know to ask you when the next opportunity arises. Next, when you feel overwhelmed, take a step back and write down what you need to get done that day and then that week. This will help you prioritize the necessary tasks above some of the noise that can bubble up around the event date. Lastly, find your people – whether that is a mentor or peers in the event world – because being able to ask them your “silly” questions or just vent, is a lifesaver.