Planner Resilience: Stephanie Arnone, Activity Planners Inc.

How were you able to adapt during COVID-19 when the meeting and events industry got disrupted?

Choosing not to venture into the virtual event world, we put our DMC skills to use to support our local community. We kept in contact with our field team, providing support where needed in assisting them with filing for unemployment benefits and later vaccination information.   We organized and executed a “Coronavirus Cleanout” campaign to keep our local contacts and field team engaged. For months we organized drives to collect prescription eyeglasses, household items, clothing, coats, school supplies, non-perishable food items, and even greeting cards and soda-pop tops to donate to local 501c(3) charitable organizations that either redistributed them or used them in their fundraising efforts.

With the assistance of our longtime photography vendor, we organized a “Headshots for Hospitality” event to provide complimentary professional headshots to industry personnel in exchange for a donation of gently used business attire. The clothing collected was donated to the Salvation Army’s local half-way houses to be distributed to their clients to prepare for their next job interview. Our favorite service to provide our clients are Corporate Social Responsibility efforts, and we were blessed to be able to make use of the time by organizing and executing our own CSR events to engage our local network and benefit the greater community as we waited out the storm.

This post is part of the HopSkip Planner Spotlight Series where we celebrate the extreme resilience shown by planners across the industry when navigating the turbulent waters that COVID-19 has brought to the meetings and events industry. Keep an eye out as we release more stories like this over the next few months.