Insider Role - Marie Laplante - The Event Producer Role

Presentation:  
Name: Marie Laplante 
Role: Owner, Marie Laplante E&A Services
LinkedIn: Marie Laplante | LinkedIn 
Joined MPI in: September 2018

Average size of online events you’ve helped clients with: 
between 10 and 100+ attendees

Virtual Platforms that have been used during events: 
Zoom, Adobe Connect, Airmeet, Geneva

Clients’ audience based? 
Two clients have event participants that are 100% Canadian.
Another two are a mix of Canadian and US/International.
Between all of my clients, their clients/attendees are mix of people from: government agencies, school boards, entrepreneurs, young and seasoned professionals and students.

Where are your client based?
My clients are 100% Canadian (Ottawa/National Capital and Toronto).

Specific Role Questions:

Who is your target client?

My ideal client is someone who:

• Offers me regular hours
• Is an open-communicator
• Provides on-going feedback
• Is able to state their expectations clearly
• Respects the boundaries that we agree upon regarding tasks, deadlines and availability
• Has a good sense of humour

I have a variety of clients; mainly women entrepreneurs and one not-for-profit organization. They have a range of interests and occupations including:

• career/leadership coach
• bestselling author
• well-being/life coaches
• event professional
• trainers
• consultants
• reflexology therapist
• ·organization in audit and accountability
• social innovation strategist

What are the types of events you help your clients with?

I help my clients with a variety of bilingual events like workshops (half days and full days), TED Talk style events, networking events and multi-day courses. Topics that have been covered during these events:

• Civility and respect
• Well-being and resilience
• Discrimination and Allyship
• Effective Report Writing
• Leading Successful Audits
• Root Cause Analysis in Auditing
• Job Search and Interview Prep
• Answer Your Calling
• Finding Your Passions
• Building Systems for Success
• How to Write a Grant Proposal
• The P-R Community Innovation Grant Program

What is unique about your role?

With close to 20 years of experience in events and admin, I have a wealth of skills allowing me to serve my clients in many different ways. I wear many different hats: event producer, planner, host, researcher, promoter and DJ! And, I do all that and more in both official languages (English and French).

What was the biggest obstacle your client had to overcome?

I think the two biggest obstacles for my clients have been:

• Taking their in-person events and converting them into virtual events that offer the same (or close to) deliverables and benefits as an in-person event. Keeping participants interested through a screen is quite the science! It’s important to make your events as interactive as possible so you keep your attendees engaged and participating.
• Selecting the right platform for their needs (both immediate and future) and type of events.
• In August 2020, we were set to have a book launch and signing for her latest release, of course, because of COVID, we had to change that to a virtual event. It didn’t have the “feeling” that she wanted but we ended up with a good turn out and we were able to do some effective promotion for the book.

What was your clients’ biggest success?

2021 was filled with many successes. These are just a few:

• Created and delivered an online wellbeing program for a school board, the program needed to be adapted to four different groups of people (three age groups of kids and one for adults). As the event producer, I helped her deliver these workshops.
• Launching a new company, starting to pull together a team of amazing people, and having fun virtual team meetings which was designed to build team spirit.
• Aiming to be more "strategic" in 2021; assisted the client in becoming strategic about her daily operating procedures which involved important software implementation and team support components. Together we streamlined certain components of her personal & professional life which helped her achieve her goal.
• Staffing up a client’s team which allowed her to offload a lot of work and to serve more private clients.
• Building a virtual business school that will be launched this year.
• Tapping into the needs of a client’s community and mobilizing the necessary resources to help them. This was achieved through a variety of successful projects.

Did you help clients in doing anything new or innovative?

• Introducing a client to the idea of using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for her events instead of using different platforms (registration and promotion) to centralize and simplify her tasks. It’s made things much easier.
• Proposing some interactive games for team building purposes by using some online tools (i.e. WheelDecide).
• Helping train staff on using Zoom for their events.

What challenges did you have coordinating an online event?

Just like with anything online, when your internet goes down, that’s the biggest frustration! 

Another challenge is when there are major glitches with the platform you’re using. That’s why it’s important to have a backup plan so that you can switch to another platform very quickly and easily.

A third challenge is helping attendees with troubleshooting their tech issues. And sometimes there just isn’t anything to do and that can be frustrating because you want attendees to have a great experience.

Any changes in expectations for 2020 to 2021 versus 2022

I don’t feel that expectations have changed all that much between 2020 and now. Given that we were staying virtual, events still revolved around interactivity and how to avoid the so-called “zoom fatigue”, and keeping people interested and engaged as much as possible.

Last Words

I love what I do. I have the best clients in the world. Doing virtual events has taught me a lot. I truly enjoy bringing people together for a common purpose and creating connections (both virtually and in-person).

Article edited by: Darlene Kelly-Stewart, Stonehouse Sales& Marketing Services