Open Forum

Hi everyone! Happy Monday and I hope you are ready for the Huddle of the Week!

Navigating social pressures on your events such as sustainability, DEI, and accessibility can be challenging. These are all becoming more prevalent in the meeting and events industry today. There are many ways that event tech can help support you achieving your goals that you have aligned in your event strategy. A few examples are sourcing venues, badge printing, and meeting request forms. A great place to start with sustainability, DEI, and accessibility is setting small goals that you can accomplish this year or in a short time frame.

Questions for you:

• Have you set any goals in your meeting and events strategy on sustainability, DEI, or accessibility?
• How is your event tech helping you reach these goals?

Want to learn more about how attendee expectations have changes - and ideas you can use to wow your attendees, the five pillars of effective and measurable engagement, and ways event tech can support you in navigating social pressures on your events? Register for our upcoming live online webinar – Be Kind, Rewind: Reboot Your In-Person Events Playbook- today!

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts in the comment section below!

#HuddleoftheWeek 
#VoiceIt
#Creating/ManagingEvents

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Megan Clark
Assistant Team Lead, Online Community Marketing
Cvent
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• Have you set any goals in your meeting and events strategy on sustainability, DEI, or accessibility? Super excited to read what planners goals are! 
• How is your event tech helping you reach these goals? looking forward to reading these responses. 

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Colleen Beck
Director of Sales & Marketing
The Westin Tampa Bay
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• Have you set any goals in your meeting and events strategy on sustainability, DEI, or accessibility? My company has many strategies and plans in play regarding sustainability, including carbon calculators.  The company is vary diverse and we do highlight various demographics throughout the year.  We also have diversity groups within the organization where employees can be a part of similar workers, or even just learn about various groups.
• How is your event tech helping you reach these goals? Event tech is a great way to reduce carbon footprints.  CrowdCompass creates a way to significantly reduce (or even eliminate) printing.  It also allows for people to participate in a round-about way.  For example, people who may not want to ask a question during Q&A because it would involve speaking in a non-native tongue, or because they have a speech impediment, etc. can submit questions via the app which will allow them to type out their questions using however much time they need to put their thought down.

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Julie-Michelle Davis, CMP
Meetings Manager
Amex GBT - USA
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• Have you set any goals in your meeting and events strategy on sustainability, DEI, or accessibility?
  Not outside of what we already do as an organization
• How is your event tech helping you reach these goals?
  N/A

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Lori Wildman
Marketing Director
DuCharme, McMillen & Associates, Inc.United States
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• Have you set any goals in your meeting and events strategy on sustainability, DEI, or accessibility? We try and do things where we can. Not so much on accessibility other than picking venues where lifts and ramps might be available in some way if someone needs it. As for DEI we try our best when possible to ensure we have a diverse lineup of speakers For sustainability we've tried to cut out as much printed items as we can, and moved more towards buffet style to reduce individual person packaging 
• How is your event tech helping you reach these goals? Mobile app has helped us to reduce needing printed agendas and flyers for communicating as we can use the app for everything. Additionally on-demand badge printing has prevented us from wasting paper pre-printing badges of attendees who do not end up showing up and correct any name issues before print to avoid reprints.

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Rachel
NJ
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• Have you set any goals in your meeting and events strategy on sustainability, DEI, or accessibility? We try to touch on DEI and sustainability at all events we host. 
• How is your event tech helping you reach these goals? Mobile apps are a huge plus!

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Rebecca Quinn
Corporate Events Manager
Uber Freight US LLCUnited States
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• Have you set any goals in your meeting and events strategy on sustainability, DEI, or accessibility? Currently haven't set any new goals outside of what we already do from a hotel standpoint. 
• How is your event tech helping you reach these goals? Event tech helps us to make things more digital instead of printing out a bunch of items it can all be emailed, or accessed via QR code. 

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Teresa James
Director of Sales and Marketing
DoubleTree Gainesville
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• Have you set any goals in your meeting and events strategy on sustainability, DEI, or accessibility? For sustainability, we are trying to go totally paperless at events. 
• How is your event tech helping you reach these goals? Attendee Hub really helps with our sustainability efforts. Using an Attendee Hub app helps a lot with this, because we no longer have to hand out paper agendas/programs! I love that we can even feature the presenters on there so we don't need to share bios in printed programs.

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Cate Liverman
Constituent Relations Director
UVA Medical Alumni Association and Medical School FoundationUnited States
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