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  • 1.  Tip of the Week #16: Advance your Meeting Program Success

    Posted 07-22-2020 12:04
    Edited by Danielle Czark 07-22-2020 12:04

    Hello, Cvent Community and Happy Wednesday! As we all have seen, the world has been faced with unprecedented times during the past months. Although we have confronted challenges that we never expected to in our lifetime, the Cvent Client Success team has also seen incredible momentum and advancements in their client's event programs and account configurations. Director of Client Success, Stephanie McNamara, shared some key activities their team has supported through this awesome blog post, Client Success Retrospective in the Early Days of COVID-19. Keep reading to see my top tips and resources for a few of the blog's highlights. 

    • Strategic Meetings Management (SMM) Program Adoption – It is more important than ever to automate your meetings program, not only to improve efficiencies, but to provide visibility into all events, manage risk, and help control costs. Stephanie mentioned in the blog how important duty of care is for organizations and their employees, as well as event and hospitality professionals and their event attendees. Adopting tools through the Meetings Management solutions guarantee success for the event planner, as well as the stakeholders and team members, and lead to a greater event experience for the attendees:
      • Access Portals: Provide a centralized hub to give stakeholders access to the tools they need
      • Budget management: Track cost and expense details to ultimately save your organization time and money
      • Strategic Venue Sourcing: Create a strategic process to compare bids and use cancelled-space credits
      • Meeting requests and approvals: Collect the important information you need to know to put on an event, whether in-person or virtual. Pass the necessary information to the stakeholders in a seamless process to get approvals in a timely manner
    • Reallocation of Resources – Technology is constantly evolving, and Cvent has many product enhancements and migrations to offer. The Client Success team has seen a jump-start in migrations now more than ever, whether that is migrating from Classic events to Flex, using Access Portals for the first time, or running New Reports. Take a look at the Solution Evolution Hub for all of your migration resources and work with your Success Resource to follow a Success Plan through this journey.
    • Intentional Communication and Technology Training – Understanding the technology you are using is key to your success. Cvent training and certification have seen record numbers in the past months through both on-demand and live webinars. Take your skills to the next level and enroll in training and certification today, whether that is the fundamentals of the products you support for your organization, or learning new opportunities such as the Virtual Events Training Course. Be sure to pass on your knowledge to your fellow users at your organization through intentional communication and admin-to-user trainings, too!

    We hope you have some great ideas to continue advancing your event program after reading Stephanie's blog and these tips! What other actions have you taken during these times that you may not have prior? Do you have any success stories to share with your fellow users – reply below if so! 

    Let us know if you have any questions. #CventTip


    #Flex-Creating/ManagingEvents
    #SourcingaVenue
    #ExecutingStrategicMeetingsManagement
    #ManagingVirtualEvents

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    Danni Czark
    Senior Associate, Online Community Marketing
    Cvent
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  • 2.  RE: Tip of the Week #16: Advance your Meeting Program Success

    Posted 07-29-2020 10:24
    We have taken this opportunity to reallocate and re-evaluate human capacity and bandwidth from our work-from-home model & hybrid models (some work done at home and some at an area office). Also, we have made time to reach out to potential clients who were listed as a "warm" call. We have made time for crosstraining between departments, and we have reorganized our teams to be more region-centric in order to help the people in our region and communities... a more personal approach.

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    Amanda Adams
    Professional Learning Coordinator
    Cognia, Inc.
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  • 3.  RE: Tip of the Week #16: Advance your Meeting Program Success

    Posted 07-31-2020 16:18
    We have had to do a huge overhaul of our IT security. We realized very early on in this COVID world that whilst our staff had the physical equipment to work from home, we did not have the technology to be able to access everything we need from anywhere and when we did have access, it wasn't necessarily secure. Our team had to learn how to access programs remotely and how to adjust certain settings to keep everything safe. Once all that was setup, I was once again able to access all my filed like contracts, agendas, meeting minutes and everything else I needed to complete my daily tasks. 

    I'm also finding that I am talking to members a lot more asking what it is that they need from me/my organization. I feel like this is something I will continue doing if the world ever goes back to normal. It's so easier to forget to ask why we are doing all these things in the first place and if nothing else, the pandemic has forces me to check myself and ensure that the programs I curate are serving the purpose expected by our membership.

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    Sharna Pascolo
    Program Director
    Texas Society of Architects
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  • 4.  RE: Tip of the Week #16: Advance your Meeting Program Success

    Community MVP
    Posted 08-03-2020 08:51
    We very quickly pivoted to all virtual events, transitioning from about 40 per year to about 40 just in the past three months! We brought in our IT team early in the process to assist with vetting out appropriate webinar platforms, and also reallocated resources for those first three months by giving the event team of one an additional person to assist with the explosive event growth and all the project management that entails.

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    Lori Wildman
    Senior Marketing Manager
    DuCharme, McMillen & Associates, Inc.
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  • 5.  RE: Tip of the Week #16: Advance your Meeting Program Success

    Community MVP
    Posted 08-04-2020 13:54
    The shift from fully in-person to fully virtual events means that we reallocated a lot of resources: all the event planners, in collaboration with our internal tech team, got trained on webex events, and we enabled the corresponding cvent integration, which also came with a learning curve. We became tech resources for the live, virtual events, on top of still doing the meeting logistics. Part of the process, because we are not sharing offices with the rest of our staff and other departments, was to set up ways for information to be shared more seamlessly. We implemented Webex Teams (similar to slack) for instant messaging, and I've been using the Access Portal to share live registration data with other departments. 
    The event planning team is also splitting attending various webinars (some cvent, some other actors in the event industry). The shift to virtual has also accelerated our transition to Flex and other new features.

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    Béline FALZON
    Event Planner
    California Teachers Association
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  • 6.  RE: Tip of the Week #16: Advance your Meeting Program Success

    User Group Member
    Posted 08-05-2020 09:13
    I loved that all the cvent certifications were being offered for free during this time. I completed 3 different ones last month (CrowdCompass, Advanced and Venue Sourcing) and came away learning so much about each area. There were so many tools that my company has not used yet and studying and taking these certifications really helped in advancing my Cvent knowledge and helping me in creating/managing my future events. I would highly recommend to anyone during this time to take at least one certification to learn something new!

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    Megan Ridgway
    Sr. Specialist, Event Operations
    S&P Global Market Intelligence(PreviouslySNL Financial LC)
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  • 7.  RE: Tip of the Week #16: Advance your Meeting Program Success

    Posted 08-06-2020 11:39
    Our A/V team, Meetings & Events Team and Medical Education Team came together to incorporate live webinars to broadcast to surgeons across the world. We were able to integrate Cvent registration to capture our audience for these webinars and use it to our advantage in order to keep the learning process going for the surgeons. Even when we get back to in-person events, we know that the option to broadcast to those who can't make it is there. 

    We normally produce thousands of events per year, so it has been difficult for us to find the right time to switch from Classic to FLEX . With the decrease of our in-person events, our team has been able to train with FLEX and slowly start integrating it for our upcoming registrations.

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    Bri Anguilano
    Meetings And Events Intern
    Arthrex, Inc.
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  • 8.  RE: Tip of the Week #16: Advance your Meeting Program Success

    Posted 08-06-2020 13:23
    Nothing yet.  But our conference is a while away.

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    Edward House
    Tech Support
    Virginia Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
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  • 9.  RE: Tip of the Week #16: Advance your Meeting Program Success

    Posted 08-06-2020 15:25
    Edited by Annika Petroski 10-22-2020 10:36