Photo Credit: Nigel Lamb

It turns out there are a lot of parallels between direct mail copywriting and the seduction techniques you learn while dating -- one major one being what you don't say can make you appear more intriguing and desirable. 

As Francine Prose writes in Reading Like a Writer, "[…] dialogue usually contains as much or even more subtext than it does text. More is going on under the surface than on it. One mark of [badly] written dialogue is that it is only doing one thing, at most, at once."

Although it goes without saying, you don't want your copy to be unethical. You certainly don't want to omit facts for the sake of misleading someone. In the dating world this would be like omitting such necessary facts as, "I'm actually married." In direct marketing, it might be lessening dangerous outcomes, such as, "This product is made of carcinogenic materials -- no biggie."

Direct Mail Techniques & Event Marketing Campaigns

Seduction is even more applicable if your direct mail piece is promoting an event. Event marketing with the right invitation or direct mail piece should convey just enough information to entice -- but not so much that it runs the risk of appearing formulaic. It should keep the prospect on familiar ground with just enough enticement to be compelling. 

You've got limited room to communicate in a direct mail piece, so it's just as important to consider what you don't say as what you do say. What are you implying? Where are you leading your prospects?

Are you irresistible? Or, as Sally Hogshead asks, are you fascinating?

How can you master the unspoken in your direct marketing for events? Here are some crucial areas to examine. Master these, and you'll harness the larger task -- communicating the unspoken.

Who Are You Inviting? Who Is Your Ideal Prospect?

Defining your ideal prospect is a fundamental, so don't make the common mistake of glossing over it and not taking the time to clearly define the best person for your event.

A friend of mine is on a mission to get married. She has compiled a list of ideal qualities in her mate, taking inspiration from Amy Webb's book, Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match. My friend has adopted Webb's system of scoring qualities for a minimum score to avoid wasting time with people who don't make the cut.

Similarly, you should be as granular as possible about the preferences and aspirations of your targeted customer. Narrowing your focus and writing to "one person" assists you in writing the best copy. To be seductive on a date, it works well to speak using the words they would choose; the same is true when you're approaching your direct mail prospect. Every Don Juan knows nothing is sweeter than the sound of your own name whispered in your ear...

Does Your Prospect Understand Your Reference?

In dating you might casually joke using a favorite line from a movie or music you enjoy, curious if the other person "gets it." If they do, you instantly have a common interest and shared experience. That begins the bonding process.

Similarly, in direct mail think of your ideal prospect. If you reference an event, a time period, or specific set of circumstances, where is this most likely to lead your prospect's mind? One small reference can invoke a larger, shared experience. The value of using this reference is to build credibility and familiarity, or, in another word, to bond.

Be clear about the references you choose and what, specifically, you'd like the reference to conjure up in the mind of your prospect. Will the reference underscore your seriousness? Will the reference spark memories of fun times? Be very, very selective. The right reference will skyrocket your response rate, while the wrong one will leave your prospect cold.

Are You Likeable?

As the old saying goes, "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar" -- which is to say, are you likeable?

When your direct mail or invitation copy contains an upbeat, friendly, and trustworthy tone, you, as the direct marketer, benefit in several ways. One of the primary benefits is that prospects relax. When they relax and find you trustworthy they naturally "fill in the blanks" -- which is to say, they'll start generating their own reasons for continuing a relationship with you, whether it is to continue reading your sales letter or opening your email newsletters.

Be likeable enough to make the pitch immediately, but, barring that -- after all, some people don't just jump into action right away! -- at least be likeable enough to start the conversion process. Research is the start of the process. Inspire your prospects to dig further for the facts about the event you're promoting.

So, brush up on your seduction skills. Mastering the unspoken in your event marketing campaigns is one of the most powerful ways to connect with your audiences and drive action. Connection is just a few hot breaths away from conversion.

Katie McCaskey is a freelance journalist who writes for VistaprintDeals.com, the official provider of Vistaprint coupon codes for customized direct marketing products for small businesses across the globe. Katie is also an author and co-owner of a grocery and café in Staunton, Virginia.

The Banquet Area for the 2004 Awards Gala (Source: eventproducer.com)

The very first event we’ll be featuring for eVenues show and tell is the Palm Springs International Film Festival, a star-studded gala event which Richard De Santis, President and CEO of Event Management Productions, helped plan as the Executive Producer:

What were the goals of the event?

In January, as has been the case for the past 13 years, we produced the Palm Springs International Film Festival awards Gala. It is one of the major fundraising events for the Palm Springs Film Society which is its parent 501 C3 Corporation.

The event is a black-tie movie awards show which is a major precursor to the Academy Awards. Every year for the last decade more than half of our award recipients have gone on to be nominated for an Academy Award and about two thirds combined for Academy and Golden Globe awards. The goal is more an issue of branding than of attendance or execution. The Palm Springs Film Festival Awards Gala has become an international brand rivaling both the Academy Awards and the Golden globes in its reach and stature.

The challenge is twofold. First we have to guess right on whom we are offering awards to. We know what quality and merit in filmmaking is but on many occasions quality and award worthy films and actors never received the recognition that they might or should. The challenge is to avoid selecting films that may be exceptional artistic successes but don’t necessarily reflect that in the box office. Our biggest challenge is cutting off ticket sales because even though tickets to this show can be extraordinarily expensive we are usually sold out in less than 3 to 4 weeks.

What did you feel was the biggest challenge for this event? How did you overcome that challenge?

This show began essentially as a homegrown celebration of film to promote Palm springs. It has largely remained that way for over a decade but in 2000 with new and invigorated leadership the scope and direction of the show became less a local party and more a very glitzy social event aimed at seriously promoting filmmaking as well as Palm Springs.

There was a refocused effort to kindle or in fact rekindle Hollywood’s love affair with Palm Springs. With the film society and the city working in partnership it became relatively easy to reignite the excitement that Hollywood had for Palm Springs. It was a little more difficult to redefine the quality of the show as a very serious cinema awards event but again, a new board in a rededicated effort was able to accomplish this feat in a fairly short period of time.

What do you feel was the most successful aspect of this event?

There are two parts of the show that are success stories. The first is that the event has grown into a strong international brand with sponsorships such as Cartier and Mercedes-Benz and many more. Palm Springs International Film Festival awards Gala is recognized virtually everywhere as a very serious path to other awards.

Model Astrid Bryan poses in front of a Cartier backdrop (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

This has also led to a Renaissance of Palm Springs itself with a new downtown emerging that keeps the flavor of old Palm Springs of its early Hollywood heyday and enhances some of the other phenomenal growth success stories such as the Palm Springs Art Museum, the desert air Museum, the Palm Springs Opera Guild and many other interesting cultural activities held within the city.

What were some lessons learned? How would you do the event differently the second time around?

I think the biggest lesson learned is not to look back. This has been a very successful branding effort and unless there is a major need as there was about 15 years ago to retool the entire event there is very little that we would do differently. The extraordinary growth of this event to an international brand suggests that the path we are on at least for the current period of time does not require a do-over.

About Richard DeSantis: Richard DeSantis is a well known producer of quality shows such as the Palm Springs International Awards Gala, Steve Chase Humanitarian Awards, Virginia Waring International Piano Competition, and many others. He is an instructor in the use of lighting for special effect and event management, and has won national awards for his productions. He spent years in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington DC developing his craft.

About eVenues Show and Tell

Over the past couple years at the eVenues blog we’ve conducted several interviews about putting on green events, political events, even social media war rooms. Each of these meetings had different challenges and goals. Considering how popular these interview posts have turned out to be, we’ve decided to make them a regularly occurring feature: The eVenues event planner show and tell.

To participate, you just have to tell us about an event that your recently helped plan by answering these 4 questions:

1. Describe an event you recently helped plan. What were the goals of the event?
2. What did you feel was the biggest chalenge for this event. How did you overcome that challenge?
3. What do you feel was the most successful aspect of the event?
4. What were some lessons learned? How would you do the event differently the second time around?

Feel free to send your submissions/questions to kenji[-at-]evenues.com and your event could be the next one featured!

Picture this: You work at an online non-profit. You reach out to your users asking them to put on events in order to celebrate your organization’s birthday with the intention of driving new users and activity on your website.

The result of your outreach? You raise more than $509,825 within the course of six days.

This was the kind of offline event success that Kiva, a website that helps its users make microloans to underprivileged entrepreneurs, enjoyed last year. Since April is the Month of Microfinance, and since writing about successful events is what we do, we reached out to Brandon Smith, the Community Marketing Coordinator at Kiva, to learn just how this was accomplished. We also speculate a bit on how Kiva’s success could be used as a model for other successful offline events for a largely online community.

Online Meeting Spaces Come First

Even before Kiva started actively coordinating with volunteer event planners across the country, its lenders were already organizing events. The Kiva New York lending team, for example, started out as a small, casually organized group where lenders within the city could meet for happy hour and socialize with other lenders. Since its founding in 2008, however, the team has grown to more than 2,600 members and has lent more than $1,144,000 worth of loans to entrepreneurs in need. The growth of the team and the number of loans was due in part to the many events held by the group–everything from wine tastings to 5k runs.

The New York lending team organized a 5k run independent of Kiva HQ.

All of this, however, would have had a difficult time getting off the ground if there wasn’t a place for Kiva lenders in New York to get in touch with each other. By providing this basic functionality, Kiva was able to facilitate the online meeting between some very enthusiastic lenders who, noticing that they had a lot of values and interests in common, decided they wanted to meet offline. From these casual beginnings, eventually the New York team created a website of their own complete with a blog and and events calendar.

If you have community of online users, do what you can to provide a space for community members to get in touch with each other. While Kiva does this by creating team pages whereby team captains can message members and make announcements through a message board, you don’t necessarily have to go this far for your organization. You could start out, for example, with links to a Meetup group or a Google group for each major city, where users can communicate and organize happy hours and other meetups on a regular basis. If your online users are passionate about what you do and who you are as an organization, they will naturally want to meet other people who are passionate about your organization as well. You just have to provide them with the means to do it.

Helping Facilitate Offline Events

Besides providing a space for people to communicate online, what can you do to encourage more events, events which help you reach some of the goals you’ve set for your organization?

First of all, while many people may want to organize an event, not everyone may know where to start. This is where an event resource page can come in handy. “There’s a site at kiva.org/events that we created as a launchpad for all of these offline events that could potentially happen around the world.” says Smith, “A lot of people really took to it and we started developing a community of people who were interested in offline events.”

Kiva in a Box: A Free Resource for Event Organizers

The centerpiece of this offline event launchpad has to be Kiva in a Box, a free resource created by Smith and the Kiva team last year. Inside this box is everything Kiva, from Kiva balloons to Kiva event hosting T-shirts to Kiva Cocktail recipes. Also, and perhaps most importantly, there’s a set of 10 free trial cards which event attendees who aren’t Kiva members can use as a way to experience the Kiva lending process without initially putting any of their own money in.

Not only does the “Kiva in a Box” provide a free resource for Kiva event planners, but it also provides Kiva HQ with a list of people who are interested in organizing events. Thus, when Kiva wants do nationwide event campaigns like the birthday loan-a-thon it did last October, Kiva HQ has a ready-made list of would be event organizers whom they can contact about the campaign.

Harnessing the Power of Your Community

While offline events may not be appropriate for every online community, it’s definitely worth looking into. The commitment you make can be minimal at first. See if you can’t organize your fans into a online group where they would be able to communicate often. From there you can gauge just how active your community can be. It may even be good to organize some initial meetups yourself to see if they’d be worthwhile. These meetups can be:

Social Events

A happy hour or wine tasting where members of your community can get to know each other. Be sure to encourage members to bring friends and also provide a “station” like a laptop or iPad with brochures and other material laid out so that visitors can learn more about your organization. Also, do what you can to have tie-ins to your organization at the event.

A Kiva New York Wine Tasting Event (Source: Kiva NYC Blog)

For the Kiva New York wine tastings, the team captain, Valbona Bushi, said that they chose wines from the countries where Kiva entrepreneurs happen to live. Not only that, but they often also sell some of the actual products created by Kiva loan recipients at the events. While the main purpose of the events are social, the tie-ins to Kiva are always there.

Cross-Promotional Events

A Book Signing Event in LA (Source: The International Book of Bob Facebook Page)

Kiva is currently encouraging their volunteer event planners to put on book club events organized around the promotion of the International Bank of Bob book, a personal account of Bob Harris, who went around the world actually meeting the recipients of his Kiva loans. In order to promote awareness of the book, Kiva sent out free copies to active members on the “Kiva in a Box” list, and suggested organizing book club events as well as to put the word out for when Bob Harris was in town doing a book tour.

Goal Oriented Events

Perhaps you want to organize some event like Kiva’s birthday loan-a-thon to reach a goal of raising a certain amount of money over a specific period of time. In order to make this work Kiva created a Loan-a-thon leaderboard showing the teams who lent the largest amount as well as the total amount lent during the six day time period. The page updated by the minute and served as a rallying point for all the teams.

The lengths that some event organizers went to help Kiva reach its Loan-a-thon goal was impressive. In just one of many examples, Miku Sakamoto, the organizer for the Austin Loan-a-thon event, assembled an event team, lined up sponsors for food, drinks, and raffle prizes as well as made event flyers. Finally she promoted the event through every conceivable channel including Eventbrite, Facebook, online community calendars, locals news stations, and finally through the Kiva Austin team message itself. The result was a well attended event that helped raise $2,575 in loans in just one night.

“Like-Minded People”

“I think there’s such value in having these small events where people can see other Kiva lenders face-to-face.” Says Sakamoto, “[The Austin event] was really awesome because I could see people talking and they light up when they talk about who they lent to and how much of a difference it made. It’s very exciting to meet like-minded people.”

And that’s what offline events are all about. While an inspiring online presence with videos and case studies and blog posts can go a long way. offline meetings can inspire volunteers to work extremely hard to pull off incredible events with no compensation other than the joy of working with like minded people for a great cause.

Over the past four years we've compiled the largest database of meeting rooms and event spaces on the web. We started in Seattle, then quickly expanded to markets in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, New York and Washington DC.

We quickly realized that although we had a lot of venues, many first time visitors to our site found all the choices a little overwhelming. This is why we added a filter sidebar to each of our listings pages so that users could narrow down their search by the three criteria that mattered the most: capacity, price, and neighborhood. This definitely helped our users find exactly what they needed without spending an inordinate amount of time sorting through the various options.

As we continued to talk with and get feedback from our users, however, we realized that what they really wanted was a real human being to help them find the very best venue for a particular event. This is why we created the "Full Serve" option whereby our users, often first time event planners, would provide us with specific information about their event and we would get back to them with the best possible options.

While all these innovations have helped improve the user experience, we continued to look for other ways to help event planners find the perfect space.

After watching user behavior through our analytics data, it became clear to us that not everyone who visted our site was looking to book a venue right away. Rather, they were "window shopping" for an event that they may do some time down the line.

For these window shoppers, we have started to create venue guides for each city. These guides recommend the best venues for every conceivable type of event, from small meetings to large gala events. Furthermore, we single out the best spaces in the most important locations. In our Seattle venue guide, for example, we provide a list of our favorite venues near SEA-TAC airport, as well as venues near the Washington State Convention Center. In our San Francisco guide, we list the best venues in the Financial District as well as venues in Downtown San Francisco. In our LA venue guide, we list venues near LAX as well as venues in Hollywood.

So far we’ve only listed three of our most popular cities: Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. We will, of course, put together more venue guides in the near future.

We hope you enjoy the venue guides, and that you will find them useful! If you have any suggestions about them, please let us know in the comments or email us at team@evenues.com.

In any event, food is often the main attraction. The dishes that you serve can either make or break your event. You usually have two options regarding food preparation. For a simple sit-down dinner, you can choose to personally cook the food that you're going to serve. But for special events, like a wedding perhaps, these occasions often require the help of experienced caterers. Instead of worrying about whether or not the desserts are ready, you can focus your attention on the decorations, your guests, and yourself.

A Spread at TEDxLasPalmas

Choosing a caterer can be confusing because there are many companies that offer catering services, and all of them claim to be either good or the best in the field. So, which one are you going to select? Below are some issues that will hopefully help you in making better choices.

1. Budget

You need to work around your budget. It's no use going for an excellent catering company if you can't afford it. Although you have to allot a large portion of your budget on food, you should avoid going over the planned amount because you do not want to incur a large debt just because you want scrumptious food for your event. There are other caterers out there that you'll be able to afford.

Once you have chosen a particular caterer, ask for a quotation, which will depend on several factors, such as - the number of guests to be served; if there will be waiters or servers; and the sort of dishes that you prefer. If the price is too much, you can ask the caterer for suggestions about where you can cut back. But you have to remember that if a caterer drastically drops the price, then the quality of your food will probably suffer.

2. Certifications, Reputation and Word of Mouth

Choose a catering company that is recommended by people you know. A company that has a good name or that other people highly recommend is a good option. If you have attended an event and you were bowled over by the food, you can also get the name of the catering service. Moreover, don't forget to check if the caterer has certifications from the local health department. Companies that specialize in food service need to possess certain licenses that ensure that they are following state laws or regulations regarding food preparation. Through local government offices, you can also find out if the caterer that you've chosen has encountered problems about consumer complaints, failure to meet inspection requirements, and other issues.

3. The Specialty

What type of cuisine do you want served? For instance, if you are planning a Japanese-themed party, then choose a caterer who specializes in Japanese food. Don't forget to schedule a food tasting as well. Then, ask about what sort of events the caterer regularly handles. Can the company manage a posh event for 300 hundred people or is the caterer more at ease with small intimate occasions?

4. Contracts or Agreements

Be sure to sign a contract once everything is in order. Even though your caterer is your close friend, always have a written agreement itemizing what's expected of the service provider and the consumer. Contracts are legally binding and such documents will protect you in case the caterer fails to show up or neglects to satisfy the duties that are stated in the papers.

About the author: Claire Kendall is a freelancer, and her articles have been used by www.justcatering.net and other websites that specialize in food and beverages. Kendall regularly blogs about cuisine, entertainment, and special occasions.

Smart Work Center Mockup (Source: Cisco.com)

It’s easy to dismiss the recent chatter about the growing "mobile workforce" as hype. While the images of developers hacking away in the corner of a hip local coffee shop , or of 20-something startup founders teleconferencing from their one-bedroom apartments have become ubiquitous, this is the the exception rather than the norm. The reality for most people working at a traditional company job is still the commute, the cubicle, and the conference room.

That’s the reality now, but will it change? To answer this question we reached out to experts in the field of workspace innovation and got in touch with Gordon Feller, Director of Urban Innovation at Cisco. Feller provided us with some convincing arguments for why the mobile workforce is poised to become a much more significant percentage of the working population, and that this change will come about sooner than we think.

What's Holding The Mobile Workforce Back?

The fact of the matter is that today we already have the tools to enable a mobile workforce. The availability of mobile devices, cloud computing and cheap teleconferencing solutions make it not just possible, but easy.

The problem, says Feller, is that "Big companies have a cultural bias toward 'Let's get our people into a shared space which is secure.'" It's this bias that keeps employees chained to their desks, spending 1 to 2 hours each day on the road and in traffic jams while their vehicles spew an untold amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The reasons for this bias are easy to understand. First, there are concerns about the security of proprietary data. If employees could access sensitive data remotely, the chances of this data falling into the wrong hands would naturally increase. Second, requiring employees to arrive and leave work at predetermined hours guarantees a certain baseline of productivity. Finally, there's a certain amount of synergy that is lost when members of a team don't meet daily in the same space.

The Missing Ingredient: Smart Workspaces

A Smart Work Center Commons Area

These are valid points, and as far as a large company's needs are concerned, a local coffee shop with free wifi doesn't cut it. This is where the "Smart Workspace" comes in.

A "Smart Workspace," as Feller defines it, is "a space that could provide something that was uniquely suited to the hyperproductive worker who was dropping in sometimes at odd hours and wanted services available whether it was broadband connectivity, conference services, cafe services, child care services, or high definition video conferencing services that were affordable and accessible."

If enough of these smart workspaces were established in suburban areas, then not only would the daily commute become less of an ordeal, but the ability to share ideas freely with other bright professionals from different companies could lead to breakthroughs in productivity.

"There are companies like Google and Cisco," says Feller, "who have decided that 'we want to encourage our people to be in mixed spaces where we rub elbows with folks who don't have the same color badge…We want to enable [this]because we think that people are happier and more innovative and more intelligent rubbing elbows with people who are different and not in the same company.'"

One question that always comes up when it comes to smart workspaces is data security. Could employees in mixed spaces be a security risk? While this is a valid concern, there are ways to mitigate these risks.

According to Feller, in the case of Google, the employees are in workspaces separated by non-Google people. So while certain floors are secure and may require some form of ID, there are other areas that are shared spaces. The whole space, however, is designed for a more collaborative work environment. This is where people can bring work that’s not proprietary and not requiring a higher level of security.

The Push Toward the Smart Workspace

Of course, companies like Google with deep pockets have always sought out new and creative ways to keep their employees happy and productive. But, just because Google is doing something different, doesn’t mean that other companies will.

What makes the push towards having more Smart Workspaces different is demand. The talented millennials who refuse to be chained to a desk will naturally migrate to companies who begin to provide Smart Workspaces. And, it’s not just millennials either who are driving the change.

The commute, the cubicle and the conference room which, says Feller, "were once staples of our work lives…[are] going the way of the rotary phone. And companies around the world, not just Cisco and other technology companies [but] really every kind of company in the world are embracing the kind of technology that lets their employees do their jobs…from anywhere at any time and that means not just higher productivity but a different experience of work itself and a different work-life balance. And everybody wants that even if you're not 20-something."

Smart Work Centers: Early Successes

While Smart Workspaces have a ways to go in the states, they have already proven to be successful in Korea and the Netherlands.

Korea

"Korea had the benefit of some push from the top," Feller says, "The Prime Minister's office launched a national smart work strategy…and said to Hyundai and to LG and to Samsung and said to others that traffic flows in and around our cities are getting to be severely congested. Our people are being overworked by the commute, and it's not a productive use of our human capital." The solution then was to use the abundance of available real estate in suburban areas and to create smart work centers away from city centers. So far, the experiment has proven to be a success, and has provided a better quality of life for the employees who have taken advantage of it.

According to a report sent to us by Tony Kim, who has been spearheading smart work initiatives in Korea, so far 310,000 (10%) of Korean government officials did work (at least once a week per month) at 10 government smart work centers, and the target is 940,000 (30%) consistently doing smart work by 2015. This change alone should save 170M USD in business travel cost per year.

The Netherlands

Smart Work Centers in the Netherlands (via www.w-work.nl)

In the Netherlands, the growth was more "bottom up", thanks to the work of Bas Boorsma in Amsterdam, Feller's other key colleague. Bas and Tony Kim have been global spearheads for Cisco's rapid push forward on "Work/Life Innovation." The mayor of the city of Almeer, a residential suburb of Amsterdam, set up one of the first smart work centers. After the success of that experiment, the Double U network, a collaboration between Cisco and the city of Amsterdam, set about their goal of "Providing every professional in the Netherlands with a highly professional and socially conducive work place within 15 minutes bicycle distance." So far so good, as there are now more than 120 smart work centers and counting.

The Importance of Aggregation Services

If and when the Smart Workspaces movement does take off worldwide, one issue that will arise is fragmentation. A company that once only had to oversee a few buildings of employees would have to keep track of their employees scattered over a myriad of suburban Smart Workspaces. It’s aggregation services like Worksnug in the UK and eVenues in the US that are poised to help employers deal with the increasing complexity of finding and securing reliable work and meeting spaces.

"If I'm the employer and I have a distributed and scattered and fragmented workforce I'd like to be able to push my people to use that common platform for reservation and for rating and for site comparisons because I as the employer would like to know what's the uptake…[and] the benefit," says Feller.

Feller also mentions that these aggregation tools could provide analytics and reporting on "how many millions of tons per year of reduced greenhouse gas emissions or how many billions of miles per year of reduced road travel" can result when a company implements a smart work program.

The Smart Work Movement: Just a Matter of Time?

Smart Workspaces provide a "third place” - unique from either home or the office. They can offer a host of unique services under one roof like a luxury hotel, but also a social culture that makes them more appealing than being a lone employee telecommuting from home.

Changes that have already taken root in both Korea and the Netherlands offer hope and momentum. Highly sought after talent are continuing to demand Smart Workspaces and the companies that don’t cater to these demands are going to lose out. Innovative companies like Google and Cisco are already leading the way, and it’s just a matter of time before others follow. Finally, the tools that that make Smart Workspaces possible continue to be developed and refined.

Want to learn more about smart work?

If you want to learn more about the smart work movement, and the recent developments in Smart workspaces, check out the blog at cityminded.org. On the site you'll also find information about the "Meeting of the Minds" conference where smart work related topics will be discussed. This year the conference will be in Toronto from September 9th through the 11th. It's an annual invitation only leadership summit where debates related to the future of smart work and the smart city is taking place. The whole event will also be webcast live.

About Gordon Feller: Gordon Feller is Director at Cisco Systems, based at their global HQ in San Jose, California. As the Convenor of "Meeting of the Minds" he's bringing together in September a group of leaders to Toronto for discussions about such topics as smart work. The unique group of sponsoring organizations includes: tech leaders (Toyota, Cisco, IBM, Philips, Schneider, Itron, Jones Lang LaSalle); engineering / design leaders (HOK, Golder); a non-profit innovator, 1 university and 3 foundations (Evergreen, Ryerson Univ., Annie E Casey Fdn., Ford Fdn., Lincoln Institute for Land Policy), government leaders (Inst. On Governance); and publishers (Governing Magazine; IT in Canada Magazine; Renew Canada Magazine).

One of the most important steps in planning a business event is choosing a venue. The wrong space can result in the event being a miserable experience for those that attend and, in essence, an overall disaster.

Rather than helping to build a reputation a company can be proud of, such an event can make it difficult for participants to believe and trust in the business.

With these things in mind, it is wise to develop a checklist that will serve as a guide when choosing an event venue. Feel free to use the list below to create a guide that will work for your company.

1. Avoid places with strict restrictions and/or limitations.

One of the purposes of having a business event is to gain promotional opportunities. Facilities that limit the ability to display event information, banners, and directional signs should be avoided.

The site should offer on-site office services that make conducting business convenient for the company and event participants. Facilities with limited amenities should be avoided. Some people prefer to only attend events held at hotels or other facilities that offer a variety of amenities.

2. Avoid venues that are in poor condition or that provide poor service.

Your participants expect to enjoy a quality event in a nice place. Plenty of parking should be available, and the actual meeting space should be large enough to allow for comfortable accommodations. Tile and carpet should be clean, and décor should be in good condition.

Adequate lighting should be provided, and clean and well-stocked restrooms should be conveniently located. Staff should be on-hand to provide assistance if needed during the event.

All parts of the facility should be dirt-free and comfortable.

If the event is held in a hotel, the rooms should be spotless and comfortable. Ideally, the facility will be willing to offer special discounts for event participants.

You probably want to consider signs that say “Pardon Our Dust” as a prompt not to book that particular space for your event. After all, just because you may be willing to “pardon the dust” does not mean your guests will be.

3. Avoid facilities that cannot guarantee Internet access and use of audio/video equipment.

Modern presentations rely heavily on the use of electronic technology. Always ensure that a facility has high-speed Internet access and enough power outlets throughout the space. An entire event can turn into a catastrophe if there is no access to microphones, projectors, monitors, and other electronic equipment.

With these things in mind, in some cases, venues “off the beaten path” can be a sign that they are not good options for business events. The reason is, places in or near cities are more likely to have reliable Internet access that can facilitate events.

Another bonus of this is that having the event in a city means participants will also be near other attractions and activities. In some instances, this can be enough to entice someone to come to a business event.

4. Avoid venues that cannot offer food/beverage options.

Providing event participants with food and drinks is customary. Not doing so would be like inviting guests into your home and not offering them something to eat or drink. At the very least, the facility should offer beverage options that can be served or sold to participants.

Self-serve food options are an economical way to treat event participants. (Photo from TEDx Las Palmas)

Making participants comfortable while they are attending the event is always the goal.

Taking the time to create a guide or checklist of things to look for in a venue can save a business a lot of headaches. If you’ve dealt with good or bad venues in the past, why not share your experiences? And if you found this post helpful, share it with your social network.

About the Author: Debbie Allen, of The Things Women Want, is a professional writer and detail-oriented online marketer. She specializes in writing about topics of interest to women and marketing strategies for websites such as Reputation.com. Debbie attributes her business management and organizational skills to her background in Psychiatric Nursing Education and Organizational Development - but she gives credit for her positive attitude and drive to her belief in the Law of Attraction.

Offering your attendees a mobile app to help them navigate your event is an obvious benefit for the attendees – they want schedules, maps, exhibitor listings, and social media all on their phones and tablets – but can it be a revenue generator instead of an added expense?

It can if you set the app up right and your sponsorship sales team knows how to articulate the benefits to sponsors. Mobile technology offers some of the richest opportunities for engaging potential clients that a sponsor can ask for.

Here are 3 ways to use your mobile event app to generate revenue while making your sponsors very happy.

1. Mobile banner ads are interactive, unlike paper ads.

One of the simplest and most lucrative ways to leverage your mobile event app is to offer your sponsors a banner ad on your app’s homescreen. Putting a banner ad in is usually a five-minute process – all you need to do is get a fitting digital image ad from your sponsor and upload it. There are no additional printing costs, hard deadlines, or shipping concerns.

Once the ad is in the mobile app, interested attendees can click into it to get more information about the sponsor or even engage with them directly. As an example, if I ran a medical conference for cardiologists, I could approach my main sponsor about putting an ad for their new EKG machine in the event app. When a doctor clicked into the ad, they could be prompted to fill out a short web form to get a free consultation. This level of direct engagement is impossible with more traditional forms of advertising.

2. Exhibitor scavenger hunts can encourage attendees to visit sponsors.

With the advent of smartphones, scavenger hunts are no longer just the domain of children. If you’re organizing an event that has an exhibitor component, consider setting up a scavenger hunt. Allow sponsors to buy into the scavenger hunt. When they do, provide them with a QR code (a barcode that can be scanned with a mobile device) that they can put on their booth. Then offer small prizes for attendees who visit all of the booths on the scavenger hunt. This means guaranteed visits for your sponsors, and because the cost is shared among several of them, you can charge a reasonable price and still make a good amount of money.

3. Featured listings and sponsored messages attract eyes.

Your event app will quickly become the go-to source for information about sponsors and sessions. You can offer your sponsors a chance to take advantage of all of this eye traffic by selling them premium listings in your exhibitor guide. Let them include extra information or multimedia components, or simply list the participating sponsors in strategic positions.

Mobile apps also offer the possibility to send sponsored messages to attendees. This tactic should be used with discretion, because nothing is more annoying than a bunch of sales pitches causing your cell phone to blow up at all hours of the day. However, when used sparingly, this can be a powerful tool. What sponsor wouldn’t want the opportunity to talk directly to their potential clients?

About the Author: Alan Blank is the director of marketing at Guidebook, Inc., a provider of mobile apps for events, and an occasional blogger on event technology. He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Photo Credit: SAP Design Guild

This is a guest post by Dennis Shiao. See the list of contributing authors.

Recently, I watched a 60 Minutes episode featuring David Kelley. Mr. Kelley is the founder and chairman of the global design consultancy IDEO and professor (and founder) of Stanford’s d.school. Kelley is a leading thinker on “design thinking,” a methodology for designing products and procedures via empathy, diversity, collaboration and iteration. The program highlights many of Kelley’s (and his firm’s) great product achievements, including the design of the first mouse for Steve Jobs at Apple.

Design Thinking for Events

In a Harvard Business Review piece on design thinking, IDEO’s CEO (Tim Brown) writes:

“As more of our basic needs are met, we increasingly expect sophisticated experiences that are emotionally satisfying and meaningful … design thinking is the tool for imagining these experiences as well as giving them a desirable form.”

I suppose this blog posting was foretold by Mr. Brown: let’s use design thinking to create “sophisticated experiences that are emotionally satisfying and meaningful”!

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one thinking about design thinking for events:

Wondering: Are there any #eventprofs out there who use Design Thinking to strategically design events?

— PYMLive (@PYMLive) January 17, 2013

Overview: Design Thinking
The design thinking process can be broken down into three components: inspiration, ideation and implementation. To quote a design thinking article co-authored by Mr. Brown:

• Inspiration: “Think of inspiration as the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions.”
• Ideation: “Ideation as the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas.”
• Implementation: “Implementation as the path that leads from the project stage into people’s lives.”

Here are some useful resources that provide overviews on the design thinking methodology:

• Stanford d.school’s crash course on design thinking
• An Introduction to Design Thinking from SAP
• From the Emergent By Design blog: What Is Design Thinking, Really?

Incorporating Design Thinking into Meetings and Events

I’ve taken a look at the tenets and methodologies of design thinking and considered how they could be applied to meetings and events. Let’s consider some.

Attend Your Own Event (Empathy)

Meeting and event planners should take off their “planning hats” and attend one of their events solely with their “attendee hats” on. After all, you can only have true empathy for your attendee if you put yourself squarely in their shoes. And that means that you can have no part in planning the event. Go through the entire cycle of registration, travel, sessions, workshops, social events, etc. Practice further empathy by understanding how fellow attendees are experiencing the event.

Deepen (and Broaden) Your Team Roster

Design thinking introduces the notion of “multidisciplinary teams,” in which people of assorted backgrounds (and schools of thought) ideate, iterate and collaborate. Consider it a blender, where what comes out is a fascinatingly tasty beverage. You need a group that creates divergent thinking, which, according to Mr. Brown of IDEO, “is the route, not the obstacle, to innovation.”

Mr. Brown suggests “architects who have studied psychology, artists with MBAs, or engineers with marketing experience.” While this may be a stretch for the typical event planner, I’d recommend adding folks from Finance, HR and Engineering. They don’t have to be core members of the event planning team; however, their perspectives can be more valuable that you’d think.

Where No Idea is a Bad Idea
The scientist Linus Pauling once said, “To have a good idea you must first have lots of ideas.” (quote source: an SSI article co-authored by Mr. Brown). Design thinking teaches you that no idea is a bad idea. If you make an early judgment on the quality of an idea, you may have just squashed a “germ” that would develop into a breakthrough.

The ideation process is critical in creating the next breakthrough event.

Instead, design thinking teaches you to build upon each other’s ideas, sort of like the “yes, and..” methodology in improvisational theater. As a meeting planner, then, your role is to encourage ideation and “shepherd” the process so that no idea is left abandoned (too quickly). And to the earlier point, here’s where multidisciplinary teams can be a goldmine.

Meeting and Event Prototypes
Recall that part of the ideation phase is “testing ideas.” It’s an iterative process in which you deploy a prototype, collect “real user feedback,” determine what you learned, then ideate on product refinements (repeating the cycle all over again).

Let’s say you’re planning next year’s 5,000 person sales kick-off meeting and you have innovative new ideas for it. Create a prototype using 50 sales people and actually implement those ideas in a “real prototype” (event). Determine what worked, make adjustments, then plan another prototype. When the “real thing” comes around, you’ll have a much better “product.”

Potential Barriers to Adoption

Seasoned event and meeting planners (who’ve gotten this far in my post) may be calling me crazy. And I can understand that. What I’ve proposed (in concept) must be balanced against the realities of a meeting planner’s job. And the following barriers could come into play.

Budget, Timeline and ROI

Simply put, design thinking methodologies could add significantly to meeting and event costs, while extending the timeline to deliver them. The ideation phase of design thinking is intentionally non-sequential. Meeting planners are highly organized creatures who thrive on delivering against a sequential timeline. Additionally, meeting and event management may not be comfortable spending more without knowing the precise ROI on it.

Risk Mitigation

The meeting planner is like an NFL coach: every season (i.e. every event), your job can be on the line. In his article, Mr. Brown wrote, “One of the biggest impediments to adopting design thinking is simply fear of failure.” The natural tendency of the meeting and event planner is to be risk averse, which is very much the opposite approach of design thinking.

Conclusion

Design thinking is surely not applicable to all meetings and events. And as I’ve outlined, meeting and event planners will likely shudder at the very concept. What I hope to accomplish with this post, however, is to introduce its concept to meetings and events. It’s my belief that true breakthrough events and experiences can result from it.

About the Author: Dennis Shiao is Director of Product Marketing at INXPO and author of the book “Generate Sales Leads With Virtual Events.” At INXPO, Dennis is responsible for go-to-market strategy and execution, and for shaping product and platform evolution via the “voice of the customer.” Dennis has managed virtual event campaigns for Cisco, HP, Oracle and Microsoft, among others. Dennis blogs about virtual events at INXPO, and on his personal blog, “It’s All Virtual.” Dennis can be found on Twitter at @dshiao.