As I write this, there are more than 375,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19. The world is struggling to get this under control, and we as individuals are struggling with the unknown. How long will this last? What do we need to do to end this? How can we stay safe? Why can’t the politicians agree on anything? And in our meetings industry, what do we do to survive this?
Whatever your role is in planning a meeting that was scheduled for March or April…and now looking at May, June and beyond, you’ve been forced to ponder the question, “What do I do?”
Thousands of meetings have been canceled. Hotels are now closing…some temporarily and some permanently. Tens of thousands of layoffs have taken place within the hospitality industry alone. Nothing about today looks like it did just a few short weeks ago. So how should we be going about this?
I’ve always believed that we, Meeting Planners, Conference Planners, Event Planners, or whatever we choose to call ourselves, exist to meet the goals and objectives of our clients through meetings. Period. These could be internal clients or external clients. We don’t specify how we build their events to meet their goals until we know their circumstances. But we strategically, creatively, and in an organized manner build events that provide exceptional experiences. We produce awe inspiring, showstopping experiences day in and day out. And as many of us are in our prime meetings season, we had our perfectly laid plans in place for how our events were going to happen, and now it’s all changed.
What is our role today?
It is what it has always been. Our role is to meet the goals and objectives of our clients through meetings. Meetings look different today. All of a sudden, they’re virtual experiences. While virtual meetings have been around, they haven’t “replaced” in-person meetings, but for today, they do. If it were as simple as that, we would merely learn the methods, embrace the opportunities and bring our clients along for the ride as we transform their events seamlessly into the virtual world. While I know I’m oversimplifying this undertaking, the reality is that this isn’t the real challenge.
The real challenge is that, as we are transforming their events, their overall goals and objectives are drastically changing. And they continue to change. Entire industries are changing. We thoughtfully helped to develop content for our events that would address the challenges of industries/companies/people, and now those challenges don’t exist. There’s an entirely new set of challenges, which in some cases, changes everything. Is the content even relevant any longer? Can people even think about meeting at a time like this?
I’m finding that the first reaction of many, but certainly not all, is to withdraw and say “This is no time to have a meeting.” I challenge this response by saying “There’s never been a better, and more needed time, to have a meeting.”
Customers/members/staff/franchisees/industry professionals need to get together, to collaborate, to brainstorm, to raise each other up, and to just be with each other like never before. They need this. And yes, it can be accomplished virtually. Who would have thought that virtual happy hours would be a thing? They exist now within groups of people who had never heard of them before because we need to be around people with common interests. We need some normalcy. People want to continue to learn. They want to continue to collaborate. They want to exchange ideas. They want to sell and buy and negotiate. And yes, it’s all different, and people aren’t selling and buying and negotiating as they have before, but they are building relationships that will foster selling and buying and negotiating once we overcome this crisis.
And we will overcome this crisis.
Let’s ask this question one last time. What is our role today?
Our role is to be the force that walks our clients through the process of determining what their audience needs today. It’s to pull apart the existing program to determine what is still relevant. It’s to figure out what else is needed now that so much has changed so we can find ways to add that in. It’s to show them how networking and collaborating and relationship building can all happen virtually. It’s to lead them into a different way of using meetings to meet their critically important goals and objectives during this critically important time of crisis.
We will be getting back to our beloved in-person meetings. Virtual meetings will not replace them forever. This is a situational solution to a temporary problem. I believe that virtual meetings will always have a larger role in our in-person meetings though from this day forward. We’re being forced to embrace the technology and will forever be grateful for what it can do for us.
Once we get through this, we’ll be searching for the perfect mix of in-person combined with virtual. And we’ll find it. But that’s an article for a later date.
For today, let’s keep focusing on meeting the goals and objectives of our clients through meetings. It’s what we do best, and in today’s world, it’s more important than ever before.