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: Natalie Lowe
Company Name: The Sustainable Events Forum
Job Title: Co-Founder
Years of Experience: 37
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?
Firstly, we learned how to do virtual events, so that opened up a whole new world with incredible opportunities. Secondly, vendors and clients were in the same boat as we watched our industry grind to a halt. We worked during the pandemic to improve your relationships and invested in our network and we are now better positioned as a solutions provider with far better relationships with our clients.
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?
We are seeing more hybrid meetings, smaller meetings and covid testing and masking is a big deal. Duty of care has taken on greater importance so we are seeing a lot of processes that cover attendee behavior - i.e. masking, vaccination compliance, daily testing.
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?
We don't do hybrid well, yet. While there is a lot of technology out there, none of them seem to marry the in person and virtual experiences as well as they could. I expect some huge tech advances in this areas over the next couple of years. Virtual reality will be a part of this mix, but the cost needs to come down before it can be widespread.
In your opinion, what do you think the biggest value for your attendees is in regards to returning to live events?
Building relationships is a key reason we have events and it's so much easier to do that in person. Having face to face dialogue or sharing a meal with someone and getting to know them on a deeper level is why humans will always need to meet in person.
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?
Obviously I hope we learn to prioritize the environment and to do it intelligently not in the highly reactive way we have so far. RFPs should outline the sustainability goals of the event host and should reflect their organizations' climate plan. Too often events are left out when companies plan to reduce their impact on the environment and this is a mistake, because a sustainable event is impactful and often reduces costs if done properly.
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.
