The myriad ways in which meeting and event professionals have embraced or been forced to interact with new—or “new-to-me”—tech during the pandemic have been especially notable. From evolving a staid mindset to learning new skills, always-agile meeting pros are bombarded with input and options while seeking to grow.
“Many of my peers may not like to hear this but I believe the challenge is not the technology, but the changing role and, more importantly, mindset of the event professional,” says Hugh Lee (MPI Upstate New York Chapter), president, Fusion Productions.
Meeting professionals may groan about the time commitment to keep up with the latest tech or get lost in the sea of different digital platforms while simply seeking an avenue to replicate what should have been an in-person gathering but online.
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“The business itself has evolved,” Lee warns. “The biggest challenge facing event professionals is understanding that digital has moved events into the business of content, community, connections, engagement and commerce. Event professionals should be asking what are the best and brightest ideas and technologies that drive and leverage the above, not what platform will help me mirror my event online until we get back to face-to-face events.”
That’s one of the key dilemmas and points Brandt Krueger expresses during the six-week Virtual Event and Meeting Management Certificate (VEMM) program, presented by the Event Leadership Institute (ELI) and MPI.
“For reasons I can’t fully explain, the job of choosing platforms and things like that just got dumped into the laps of planners themselves—people who would frequently not describe themselves as being ‘techie’ in any way, shape or form have been launched into this digital world,” says Krueger, the program’s instructor. “That’s been the biggest cause of most of the problems over the last 11 or 12 months. In our in-person events, we’d rely heavily on our production team and AV partners to help us with all of this stuff. However, the vast majority of planners for events that shifted to digital last year were just handed the task of managing the tech.”
Shifting Mindsets
Along with optimizing and learning from the virtual and/or hybrid event experience, Lee notes some significant shifts in mindset.
“Now instead of looking at age-old solution providers within our industry, the best ideas (and competition for your job) are most likely to come from the outside,” he says. “An example of this: digital event platforms designed from within our industry. They take the physical event and try to create a digital mirror online. That makes event professionals happy and comfortable, but does not lead to innovation, best practices and new business models.
“The other mindset change is to accept that digital is a way of life and a huge opportunity for the industry to move up the value chain into data strategy and customer journeys, commerce, content and engagement. I am not saying face to face will go away, I am suggesting that the event industry has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to seamlessly integrate live and digital events, expand our reach to new audiences and generations, stay relevant and add greater value year-round versus the three days of an event.”
Lee adds that a major challenge for meeting professionals is having the curiosity, ability and willingness to understand the value chain of meetings (from digital content to data strategy to engagement) and identify the best solutions and tactical concerns relating to the differences between in-person and digital events.
Krueger makes the reinforcing point that building up a virtual event stable doesn’t in any way diminish one’s knowledge and experience with in-person events.
“The biggest challenge facing event professionals is understanding that digital has moved events into the business of content, community, connections, engagement and commerce.”
“You don’t have to throw out your 20 years of meeting experience because we’re moving into this new world,” he says. “It’s just a different venue and you need to approach it that way.”
Some of the commonly used terminology, Krueger says, should evolve if industry professionals are expected to welcome these mindset shifts.
“There were some who were out in front of this, but others who sort of sat on their hands and hoped it would wash away,” he says. “Even now, there’s this language of going back versus those talking about moving forward. ‘When we go back to in-person events’ is a very different mindset to me than, ‘How do we re-incorporate the in-person experience to this online experience?’ When we talk about hybrid, especially, my concern is that people will revert to just putting a camera in the back of the room rather than taking what we’ve learned over this last year about how to deal with an online audience and how to engage with them.”
Freeman’s research shows how the pandemic and virtual has created a great opportunity for industry professionals to really grow.
Ken Holsinger, SVP of data solutions for Freeman, says in their research, the focus is primarily on attendees first—the thoughts and opinions of exhibitors and planners come later.
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“We have a framework that we use that takes into consideration a model of experience, learning, networking and commerce—the real core aspects of our industry that come together to make up events,” Holsinger says. “Pre-pandemic in-person events [had] a pretty nice blend, very balanced. But look at virtual: everybody’s been saying the areas that have suffered are product demonstration, exhibits and the networking aspects. I’d argue that yeah, they’ve suffered, but maybe because people aren’t looking for them. People are looking for learning and they have since last April. We can try to fix those things, but if [the audience] isn’t there for those things, it’s going to be a problem.”
Additionally, he explains how the pandemic and spread of digital proficiency has created an opportunity for the industry, and the professionals within it, to grow in both virtual and in-person gatherings, with some concerns.
“The issue I’m concerned about is we’ve been talking about personalization since I was a kid in this industry, but we haven’t done anything about it,” Holsinger says. “The first opportunity we’ve really had to embrace that is with what’s happening in virtual, where we understand what topics people are actually interested in—not what room they’ll sit in for an hour. They bounce around in virtual, but they land on a topic that makes sense to them. We’ve just been caught up in the churn of what we do, and it’s been a black hole of the omnichannel for a long time. I think we’ve been in this rinse-and-repeat model for so long and we haven’t really moved with the times.”
Hinting at that added emphasis on personalization and innovation, especially as the industry recovers, Krueger says, “A lot of people across the industry—suppliers and planners—have had to up their game on understanding human behavior a little bit more and how we react in this screen world.”
Reskilling and Ramping Up
Along with a mindset growth, new and additional skills have also proven mandatory. Like it or not, many meeting professionals have found themselves in a situation in which they’ve had to learn additional skills as soon as possible. Even with signs of recovery visible across the industry, the need to evolve knowledge will persist. Thankfully, there are many educators stepping up to help.
Jessie States, CMP, CMM, director of the MPI Academy, closely follows industry trends as well as other factors impacting the work life of meeting and event professionals.
“The pandemic accelerated something that was already happening—the addition of the digital environment,” she says, citing the World Economic Forum’s Future of Work report to underscore digital literacy as a bucket that encompasses many of the essential skills meeting professionals must learn to remain effective and employable moving forward.
“These new skills are needed to exist in what the job will look like in 10 years, when so many of the day-to-day things will no longer be a part of what a meeting professional does,” she says.
“Everybody’s been saying the areas that have suffered are product demonstration, exhibits and the networking aspects. I’d argue that yeah, they’ve suffered, but maybe because people aren’t looking for them.”
Kristi Casey Sanders, CMP, CMM (MPI Georgia Chapter), head of operations and customer success at Happily, a progressive event placement firm with professional development baked into its DNA, is also striving to help both new meeting professionals entering the field as well as established planners seeking to expand their knowledge of virtual event production.
“Like every other company in the industry our business model had to shift dramatically in March 2020 when events were taken offline by COVID-19,” Sanders says.
Part of that re-invention and growth has manifested as a shadow program that Sanders developed, which launched in December. The shadow program has numerous legs and goals, including ascertaining the skill level of event professionals seeking placement (through testing and virtual on-the-ground experience) and providing often-elusive hands-on experience in virtual and hybrid production within events on which Happily is working.
“There used to be guilds—you’d go to a silversmith, live there for two years, then you were able to take on junior jobs with the silversmith and get a salary,” she says. “Our program won’t take you two years—ideally, I’d love to be able to skill up people within three months. My goal is to accelerate the process of getting them to work.
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“The shadow program is a way that I can get to know who’s in our database and if they’re ready to get their first chance at a job. The idea is that after shadowing a role three times, then we’ll test you and if you’re ready, we’ll put you in a pool of qualified applicants…and then we can start to place you in a program.”
Following each experience, the “shadows” (Sanders’ term for her apprentices who are learning on the fly) have the opportunity to ask questions of the event specialists who were running the show. The shadow program itself doubles as an opportunity for established event pros to be mentors and help ensure an educated workforce. Alongside the shadowing aspect, Happily also provides event pros with tutorials and webinar content. (To explore job placement and/or the free shadowing program, sign up at Happily.io.)
Almost counterintuitively, the booming tech utilization during the pandemic isn’t necessarily hindering human relationships. Just as Sanders’ shadow program relies upon person-to-person interaction and education (whether in-person or virtual), States has seen relationships between many planners and tech suppliers become stronger during the pandemic and spur much-needed conversations—conversations that probably should have already been taking place.
“And that’s a really good thing, it’s like we’ve evolved into really understanding that they aren’t tech suppliers, they’re really our partners in the creation of an engaging and changing experience,” she says. “The conversations are richer and much deeper because of that.”
Krueger agrees that a lot of relationships have been strengthened throughout this time, and notes, “It’s best to let [the techies] worry about the techie stuff, to a certain extent. You trust the production company to make people look good on stage, so why wouldn’t you trust them to make us all look good in our little boxes?”
The thoughts on a wise response to recovery for the meeting and event industry, as shared by all of the experts in this story, are similar to how the CEO of AMC Theatres, the largest movie theater chain in the world, recently explained their vision of recovery: Move forward, don’t just revert back to business as usual from the pre-COVID era.
