Dusting Off Live Events...It's Been Over A Year

I remember growing up adults telling me they always remembered what they were doing the day a big event happened – (i.e. 9/11). I never had an experience like that…. until COVID. I will never forget March 13, 2020. Ironically, I was onsite at an event as the world around me was shutting down. I never would have imagined it would be over a year until I would get back to doing events. I just got off my first in person event since the shutdown and wanted to share the experience planning for this event.

I work for an association management company. I have 4 clients and one of those is the Casket & Funeral Supply Association of America (imagine the looks my family gave when I told them that😊). This was going to be our first conference since taking over the group, so we were new to how things worked. We had no idea how bumpy the road ahead would look. The group typically has a fall conference around November. Beginning of the pandemic we were naive and thought by November this will all be over…. WRONG! Come August we entered negotiation phases with our contracts to postpone to April 2021. After successfully postponing our event we felt better. Hurdle one complete, 100 more to go.

The new year came, and things were looking promising with the roll out of vaccines about to start up. But remember we still have 100 more hurdles to get through. So, let the fun begin. In the year+ I was off from events. My clients did not switch to virtual at all. Coming back to this first in-person event I was rusty and forgot how much of a pain in the butt they can be lol. Add in that I have never done this event before you could say that was good and bad.

• Challenge #1: staffing cuts from our host hotel. We worked with the sales manager for the longest time and only got our event manager a couple weeks before our event.

• Challenge #2: while great for the city of Indianapolis a big tournament, like NCAA, right before your event is not fun. It was all hands-on deck for the bubble world, understandably, but that meant only a few hands-on deck for us. The communication we did get was requiring us to rework a lot of logistics. We did not have a good feeling about a final plan until probably 2 days before our event. Talk about a little panic attack.

• Challenge #3: even though we were taking all the safety measures, the reality was that not all members felt safe or could come due to their location. There is always a group of critics of what you do out there in the world. This year perception of what you are doing, especially in regard to safety, is even higher. We planned from Day 1 for this event to be 100% live- we could not afford hybrid. When some board members and other attendees started voicing concern, we knew we had to throw something together last minute to accommodate that. We will touch base on this separate digital extension event in the next blog.

• I do know how to count and it feels like there were way more issues than just the 3 main ones above but don’t want to bore you😊

With planning the return of live events, we learned it is about what you can control (being someone who likes to control everything this was hard). There is a lot you are not going to be able to do. Do not stress yourself on those elements as much- YOU CAN’T PLEASE EVERYONE! This was going to be the first RGI client to put on a live event, so all eyes were on us. We knew safety was going to be a big component of this year’s event and make things look a little different. We adapted the WEC Duty of Care and communicated this regularly to attendees so they would feel safe coming to Indianapolis. I will say having the NCAA right before our event was one good thing. We could leverage to say they chose Indy for a reason and so should you to our attendees. We also required all attendees to fill out an Attendee Code of Conduct consent form ahead of the conference saying they would abide by the rules set forth in the duty of care at that time or else be asked to leave the meeting. If not signed they would not be let into the event. It was important to emphasize the safety of attendees AND staff and make sure both groups followed the protocols.

We became pioneers from this event, as event planners and our members as funeral suppliers, bringing back live events safely after much time apart. I hope this kickstarts the trend for many others as well. Be sure to read part 2 of this blog from Emilie Perkins about the execution on-site and lessons learned.

By Emily Wrinkle