When we start designing an event, one of the first questions we often ask is: Who is our audience?
We look at job titles, career stages, organization types, ages, geographic locations, membership status and whether someone is a first-time or longtime attendee.
All of that information is useful.
Event professionals are responsible for some of an organization’s most visible—and often most expensive—initiatives. We manage budgets, negotiate contracts, mitigate risk, influence customer and member experiences, work across departments, lead teams, and create environments designed to drive specific outcomes.
The event is over. The attendees have gone home. The boxes are unpacked. The final invoices are arriving. Your inbox is slightly less terrifying.
And everyone is ready to move on.
There’s a habit in the meetings and events industry that we need to rethink: We keep trying to fill every minute.
Women often put themselves at the bottom of the list, and by the time everything else is done, there’s not enough energy to even think about themselves, let alone do something about it. After two long years, our Refine & Refuel event is back to help you focus on your mental, emotional, or physical well-being while strengthening your connections with others.
Written by Katie K Riggs
This month I was invited to speak at an amazing association focused on women’s empowerment and leadership. The program was a motivational and content-rich experience for the attendees. I was charged with closing out the program and inspiring the women to take the information they gained and put it to good use.
Written by Karyn Nishimura Sneath, Npower
If you feel like we have been on a roller coaster for the last two years, you aren’t alone. Those of us in the meeting and event industry have been on the ride of our lives. Of course COVID has played a large role in this, but there are many other contributing factors such as heightened social awareness, political unrest, and labor and supply chain shortages — to name just a few.
Written by Katie K Riggs
I cannot believe we are days away from the close of another calendar year. It feels like we were just saying good riddance to 2020 yesterday! While 2021 may not have been the breath of fresh air most hoped for, it was overall a successful year for Riggs & Co and our clients. This year brought on a fair share of opportunities for us to grow and stretch our skill sets while supporting our clients in moving through a year that was full of surprises.
Written by Katie K Riggs
At Riggs & Co, we are dreamers and believe in setting lofty, yet attainable, goals each and every year. We believe this is a key ingredient to the consistent growth we have experienced since opening our doors. Whether or not you own your company, you should be setting yourself up for success by outlining a plan for the year ahead. Without goals, you have no way to monitor your company’s progress or keep yourself or your team accountable. Goals help create a clear path for your company and get you headed in the right direction.
Written by Katie K Riggs
In our current meeting and event climate, organizers and planners are in a state of constant flux. Prior to the pandemic, we planned for the obvious things that could sidebar a meeting or cause abrupt change such as severe weather, venue renovation, last minute keynote speaker cancellations, etc. Now we have had to layer in travel bans, meeting restrictions, extra safety measures, and organizational politics surrounding health concerns. This means most planners are planning or preparing for multiple meeting formats.
Written by Katie K Riggs
Hybrid is the future of how we will meet–with us having an in-person component and an online one–in some form or fashion. It will be our way of meeting everyone’s needs as well as achieving our meeting planning goals. Eventually the name “hybrid” will go away so we won’t have to focus on it like we did the word “pivot” during the pandemic. This is ultimately the best of both worlds, as long as we create the right impact for each audience.
Written by Jaime Theresa Smith
Event Design Canvas, or ECD, is a certification program that is globally recognized as one of the most strategic ways to reinvent or plan a new meeting from scratch. It was developed by a small team in the United Kingdom, and the purpose of it is to allow meeting owners the opportunity to go back to square one with their meetings.
Written by Katie K Riggs
As a meeting professional, everywhere you turn you hear that hybrid meetings are not the future, they are the now. I wouldn’t disagree, but before we start designing hybrid meetings, we need to define what hybrid means. That definition varies widely. At the bare minimum, hybrid means you have at least one group of in-person participants connecting with remote participants in one or more locations.
Written by Emilie Perkins
It is no secret that it has been an interesting and challenging 18 months for the meeting, event, and hospitality industries. We are very tired of terms like “new normal,” “pivot,” and “unprecedented.” We’ve endured months of meetings and events that went from postponed to ultimately cancelled, which caused a ripple effect of issues in our organizations.
Written by Katie K Riggs
