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: Rebecca Royal, CMP
Company Name: Potomac Management Resources
Job Title: Director of Meetings & Events
Years of Experience: 11
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?
I started in my position in January 2020 and had no choice but to adapt to events in this new world. My clients quickly adapted to the virtual environment and jumped right into virtual events. With over 2 years of virtual events under my belt, and 1 year of post-pandemic hybrid events, I feel that I am very well positioned to take advantage of this new environment. This pandemic has brought our industry closer together than ever, and has truly re-set how we evaluate the success of an event.
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 have started eliminating paper/items distributed at events, keeping event materials virtual. Additionally, we have moved most Q&A to slido.com to allow for both in-person and virtual attendees to ask questions the same way. The questions are then displayed for the moderator/speaker on the confidence monitor (or on a separate device for virtual speakers).
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?
Hybrid meetings are definitely here to stay, and allows for attendees to participate from anywhere, expanded the event's reach. As much as everyone is excited and relieved to be back in-person, people have gotten used to the convenience of virtual events. It's important to remember that both the in-person and virtual audiences need to have the same amount of attention and interaction to have a successful hybrid event. It requires the event host to keep the virtual attendees engaged and informed, as well as additional event staff dedicated to the virtual side of the event. Planners should partner with the hotel and communicate bandwidth requirements early and often!
In your opinion, what do you think the biggest value for your attendees is in regards to returning to live events?
Attendees are so happy to just be back together. Watching groups come back and interact with each other after the past 2 years has been a highlight of my career.
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?
My hope is that we can all work together to create great events for our clients and attendees. We all have seen the importance of being thorough with event details up front, over-communicating, and the necessity for mutually-beneficial contract terms!
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.
