Avoid When Organizing Annual Meetings

Organizing annual meetings relies on sophisticated planning and management to ensure their success. Events are organized by people with varying degrees of knowledge and experience. And many find themselves responsible for organizing a corporate meeting or conference event without much, if any, formal training. We’ve identified ten common mistakes that organizers make and how you can avoid them:

Also read: Annual General Meeting Requirements

Doing Too Much

Planning your annual meeting from start to finish is a huge undertaking. No matter how capable you are, or how small the event is. Your event will suffer if you try to do everything yourself.

Use your team and delegate responsibilities. This breaks down your responsibility into smaller, more manageable chunks and reduces the risk of missing small but vital elements.

Most good conference venues will also offer an event management service. Although this is an additional cost, it will pay huge dividends in terms of the overall success of your event and will significantly reduce the stress on you.

Lack of Detailed Planning

One of the biggest mistakes is failing to create a detailed plan. Without a clear roadmap. It’s easy to overlook important aspects of the event, leading to last-minute chaos.

Start by setting clear goals for your event. Develop a comprehensive timeline that outlines all tasks and deadlines leading up to the event day. Create a checklist to track your progress and make sure no details are overlooked or implement a task management software to help with this planning and coordination phase. By having a well-organized plan, you can stay organized and manage all aspects of your event effectively.

Here’s more on: Tips for Planning an Annual General Meeting

Promoting Too Late

The earlier you start promoting your meeting, the longer people will have to schedule time to attend. And the more they will look forward to your content. Leaving a few months before the meeting start date will allow you enough time to effectively promote your meeting, especially if you’re relying on offline media channels to reach your target audience. This will also help with negotiations with the venue about expected attendance numbers, as most will contract with you for minimum numbers. If your event is annual, you should be marketing throughout the year! Stay in touch with your delegates immediately after the event. This way, you’ll capitalize on the “buzz” of the event and get more engagement for the next event, rather than letting the engagement fail and having to rebuild from scratch next year.

Downsize your event

On the surface, you don’t want attendees to crowd a large space and make your event feel like an under-attended event. However, a small space with too many people is uncomfortable and will ruin engagement with your content. It’s much easier to creatively fill a larger space than it is to start adding space to your event.

Discuss options with the venue and ask them what extra space they may have, or how the room can be adjusted if your numbers are different than you expected. They’ll have seen every incarnation of the event in their space and can help you find the right balance. If your expected numbers are about to limit the room’s capacity, go for the bigger room!

Choosing the wrong date

Many events fail because they don’t fit the target audience. It’s important to choose a date that works not only for you, but also for your speakers and delegates.

Ensure that guests are not committed to other similar events at the same time to ensure minimal competition and maximum attendance. Avoid bank holidays and school/half term holidays – attendees will have other plans and commitments during this time and your event may not be high on their priority list. Also bear in mind that international travel is likely to be more expensive during these times. So bear this in mind if you are expecting delegates from abroad.

Not following up with attendees

If you intend to hold similar events in the future, it is vital that you maintain positive relationships with those who attended your last event. At the very least, you should follow up with a simple thank you email to show your interest in the attendees and not forget about them once the event is over.

However, you can create real added value for attendees by providing presentation materials and content after the event so that they have a useful resource to refer to. This can also be useful to start building engagement for your next event by distributing snippets of previous content or repurposing it into useful promotional tools across your platforms.

Choosing the wrong venue

The venue you choose will reflect on your brand image. Make sure you choose a venue that positively reflects your brand and portrays the right image to your audience, sponsors, and partners. Choosing a venue that shares your vision and event goals will also give attendees a much greater customer service experience, as the venue staff become an extension of your organizing team.

It’s also important to consider providing suitable nearby accommodations. Many guests may have traveled long distances and will want to stay for the duration of the event. These “break-up nights” can also provide a great opportunity to connect with your delegates and speakers, so it’s essential that your accommodation is either on the venue or very close to it.

There is no timeline for completing the task

Setting a realistic timeline for completing the task is absolutely essential to keeping everything and everyone on track. It is important that everyone on the team understands what needs to be done and when it needs to be done.

Consider using a free project management software like Trello or taking advantage of cloud-based file sharing like Teams, Onedrive, Google Drive, etc. This will allow you to consolidate key documents that all collaborators can access and edit in real time. It will give you much better visibility into the status of key tasks, rather than having people working in silos. And not being clear on how certain tasks are progressing.

No contingency plan

There is almost a 100% chance that something will go wrong or not go as planned. Despite your best efforts and planning for every possible outcome, it is inevitable that something will happen that no one anticipated.

Work closely with the venue and communicate your intentions to them during the planning stages. They have the experience and expertise to spot potential pitfalls and can often anticipate problems. Then work with you on solutions before they occur. This comes down to choosing a venue that understands your goals and helps you deliver the best event possible.

However, some things can happen that are completely unpredictable. So it is always wise to include a contingency plan in your event budget. If you are charging an attendee/delegate fee, consider setting aside 5% of your total expected revenue as a contingency plan.

Communication breakdown

The bigger the event, the harder it is to keep everyone on the same page. But it is important to do so! When assigning tasks to team members. Make sure they understand the mission and the expected outcome. This will avoid unnecessary duplication of work or, worse, neglecting important tasks because the team thinks it’s “someone else’s job”.

Create a clear timeline of activities and hold regular meetings. So the team can report on their progress and identify any gaps or areas that need more focus or help from the wider team.</p>

Listen only to yourself

One of the most common mistakes is to think you’re always right. You need to take the opinions of others and follow the latest trends. Sticking to your own opinion can cost you a lot of effort. This can lead to wasted time, money and possibly the failure of the entire meeting.

In this article, you’ll find more ideas on how to organize an annual staff meeting