Types of Meetings

The Right Mix

The meeting and event planner’s typical job is, well, not that typical. Many are planning a variety of events throughout the course of a year, and they are planning more of them. All the while, they continue to search for the right mix of content that will allow attendees to make the best use of their already busy schedules.

Planning regular monthly meetings continues to be a part of the majority of meeting planners’ job responsibilities (55 percent), and training meetings (56 percent) are just as common events that planners conduct or coordinate. Yet nearly three-quarters of survey respondents (70 percent) say they help plan annual meetings, the most common type of event, with events or celebrations following closely at 68 percent. Only 6 percent or respondents report planning corporate exhibitions or conventions.

The type and number of meetings a typical planner must coordinate can vary widely. David Oxley, the executive director of the American Council of Engineering Companies-Minnesota, conducts approximately 50 meetings a year. These include monthly membership meetings, 15 to 20 seminars in topics of interest to members, and the annual awards banquet and golf tournament, which attracts about 300 members. But David Peterson, owner of association consulting firm The Peterson Management Group, helps associations to plan annual meetings and incentive trips, and he says he plans between five and 10 of these per year.

The most common meetings in Minnesota are designed for mid-size audiences. According to State of the Industry survey data, the average size of meetings that Minnesota planners and vendors produce falls into the 101-500 attendee range; 44 percent of vendors and 30 percent of planners say that was the average size of events they were involved with during the past year. Few vendors or meeting planners report they are working on very large events with more than 1,000 attendees. Last year, 55 percent of meeting planners said that they had planned fewer large national meetings in lieu of smaller, more regional meetings; this year, less than half (48 percent) say that is the case. Survey data shows that while more corporate events may be taking place in a smaller regional setting, it isn’t equally true for associations. Last year, 55 percent of corporate planners reported that they were planning fewer national meetings and conventions in lieu of smaller regional meetings; this year’s result remained exactly the same. Yet, association planners disagreed; more than half of respondents (54 percent) said they were still planning larger events last year. This year, that number increased to more than two-thirds of association respondents (68 percent).

Of independent planners, 57 percent of respondents report that they were planning fewer national meetings and more smaller, regional meetings, a jump of 7 percentage points over last year’s results that could suggest that the companies that are reducing their meeting plans are turning to the independent planners more often.

As has been the case each year of the survey, planners continue to believe that events should contain multiple offerings in order to appeal to all possible attendees. Most preferred meetings that had it all: seminars, speakers, training, and networking opportunities. Yet, unlike last year, the next most popular aspect of meetings was workshops and education days, rather than seminars with keynote speakers and networking opportunities.

“I don’t think businesses are spending less on events generally, but things are down a little on the event side and up a little on travel and conferences and trade show,” says Daniel LaFond, the founder of Special Events Midwest in Minneapolis. “We’re in a recession, which affects how people spend their money and why, but it seems like companies are shifting their budgets to education rather than just events.”

Nevertheless, keynote events are in no danger of falling off the radar. Dave Herman, director of marketing and sales for Big Event Productions in Minneapolis, notes that there will always be a need for creative and memorable presentations to audiences, which includes the kind of creative events that occasionally get cut back in tough economic times. “You can make people come to an event, but that doesn’t mean they’ll really hear what you’ve got to say,” says Herman. “Sometimes clients want to be both creative and factual, but all of them want to find the most effective way to present so that their audiences get the message.”