Planners Moving Forward Series- Gianna Gaudini, Airtable
Gianna Gaudini, of Airtable, brings awareness of how they adapted to COVID-19, communicating and lessons learned and sharing how they are viewing the meetings and events industry in a post-pandemic world.
Luke Whalin
Sep 11, 2022
This post is part of the HopSkip Planner Spotlight Series where HopSkip spotlight's planners across the industry to bring awareness of how they adapted to COVID-19, communicating and lessons learned and sharing how they are viewing the meetings and events industry in a post-pandemic world.
Name: Gianna Guadini
Company Name: Airtable
Job Title: Head of Events
Years of Experience: 18
How do you think you are positioned, after months of persevering with the pandemic, to take advantage of our new and disrupted meetings/events landscape?
For those of us who soldiered through the past two years, we've developed grit, flexibility and the ability to be creative within constraints. I, like many others have honed skills in digital marketing and content amortization across different formats that weren't as front and center to my event toolkit and strategy in 2019. I now apply a more scalable model when planning events to provide far more ROI than a single synchronous event could provide. I have also gotten better at doing more with less, and pivoting gracefully with plenty of contingency built into plans.
As our community moves forward with planning in-person meetings, what new technologies or processes are you implementing that you may have not looked at before?
Airtable is a wonderful tool to market since my team can use it ourselves for so many aspects of our event. We use it for project management, speaker management, surveys, registration, and running team meeting (to name just a few use cases). We also use it as a source of truth that can quickly highlight workstreams that are at risk and dependencies between workstreams - the power and beauty of a low code relational database. We "eat our dogfood" at every chance so we understand our customers better but it also builds internal morale since we're all so excited to be developing sophistication with such a powerful tool.
As we see virtual meetings transition back to face to face, hybrid meetings are beginning to be the vehicle to return to normalcy. What are your thoughts on hybrid meetings versus traditional fully in-person meetings?
I am of the position that a hybrid event strategy doesn't need to be synchronous. To plan a truly hybrid event with synchronous audience interaction requires double the time and resources with questionable ROI, so the approach I prefer is a digital-first, or in-person-first with hybrid component. For instance, you might choose to have a large virtual event to get global reach, scale and showcase high level product messaging, but can also leverage that digital event as a CTA to smaller regional events for community, in-person training, or Decision Maker audience. This way, your team has more runway to plan both experiences well and you can better target unique audiences at each event type rather than trying to be everything to everyone at one event.
In your opinion, what do you think the biggest value for your attendees is in regards to returning to live events?
People come to live events for three C's: Connection, Content, Context (i.e. the setting). I think all need to be strong, but often it's the content and context that are most important to GET people TO the event, and the connections that really make in-person an ROI to the attendee over a virtual experience.
As the pandemic fades away and we return to face-to-face events what do you hope changes, either for planners or hoteliers, in the traditional RFP and proposal process as a result of all of the learnings from the last 20+ months?
More transparency in the pricing structure and up front conversations around what clauses are nice to have vs need to have. If a hotel isn't willing to add in a rebooking clause, for example, better to know that up front than after you've done a site visit and gone through multiple rounds of contract reviews.
This post is part of the HopSkip Planner Spotlight Series where HopSkip spotlight's planners across the industry to bring awareness of how they adapted to COVID-19, communicating and lessons learned and sharing how they are viewing the meetings and events industry in a post-pandemic world.