By: My Booking Manager
Running a conference, a seminar
or a workshop can be great fun. The day of the event is guaranteed to be a hive of activity with
all of the arrangements coming together over those few hours. Problems will arise and be solved in
one way or another and the delegates will leave in various states of motivation. If this is your
first or your one thousand and first event you should never stop learning how to improve the next
one. One of the most effective ways to draw out all of the learning points from the entire event is
to hold a review meeting after some thorough data gathering including financial analysis and
delegate feedback.
Running a review meeting
Once you have assembled the background data, it is time to hold your review meeting with the
key players. This may be part of a general review that your organization regularly runs or it might
be a special one-off to quantify the benefit of events like this and to justify future expenditure.
Who to invite?
Those attending this review meeting should be the event “owners”, decision makers and
influencers in your company who will need to understand the impact of the event. It may not be
necessary to invite your entire event team, however it will add value to your presentation if you
have people in the meeting who can provide additional information that you may have forgotten,
overlooked or otherwise omitted or who can support your data with additional evidence.
The Agenda
Thematicx Product Nationwide Roadshow
Review Meeting
15:00-16:00 on 12/12/09 in Main Conference Room
Agenda
Overview of Roadshow objective and Roadshow program
Financial report
Delegate feedback and results of Follow-up process
Improvement Plans
Successes
Next steps – A discussion about extending the program
Any Other Business
Always publish an agenda for this type of meeting to allow people to prepare their thinking
in advance. A typical agenda is quite simple and looks like this:
Although this is a sensible and courteous precaution, don't expect everyone to read and
remember the agenda. Some will appreciate it; the others will muddle through and use their
intuition as long as you supply a copy of the agenda at the meeting.
Rather than defining a strict timetable, have a rough timetable in your head leaving about
20 to 30 minutes for open discussions throughout the meeting. If the meeting lasts for an hour,
each of the presentation topics should only take around 5 minutes which gives time for one or two
slides (if you're using them). The time will fly by and your attendees will be fresh and ready to
discuss future plans.
Be prepared for surprises. Often events that appear to run well have hidden problems that
are only revealed after close questioning of everyone involved. Conversely events that stumble
along from crisis to crisis can be highly entertaining for the delegates and may cause them to pay
closer attention because they start to look for errors that may not be there.
Article source: http://www.earticlesonline.com/Article/How-Not-To-Review-Your-Event-To-Death/39569
