Whether you are a professional meeting planner, or the bride-to-be planning her wedding, it is important to make sure you are meeting and constantly communicating updates to everyone involved in the planning process. This is key in order to making sure no detail is forgotten. It is crucial to maintain excellent communication between the individuals in charge of booking the venue space, contracting with the catering company, or any other major task that the event can’t do without. Having regular briefings and reviews ensures everyone is aware of any upcoming event dates and deadlines.
Reasons to have meetings
It’s simple, meetings will help keep everyone on the same page. Plus, if you happen to have an idea but aren’t too sure of how it will work out, your team can help you make decisions. You can take advantage of this time to help each other enhance your creative ideas, or come up with new ones. Also, meeting will help keep everyone involved, and on track of deadlines. You may think that something due a month out is very far out and won’t happen until a very long time. But keep in mind that time flies, and if you are not actively involved with a task, the due date will arrive before you know it, resulting in stress and last minute decisions. In other words, having meetings can keep everyone informed, interested, and on top of things.
Frequency of meeting
So how often should you meet? Should you make everyone meet at the same time? If you are planning your own event with help of your peers it is beneficial, but not always possible, for everyone to make it to every meeting if each has their own job, and a different work schedule. However, a professional meeting planner should be meeting on a weekly basis with her team. It is important to make time to question, and carefully review all details, especially during the weeks leading up to the event. On the day before—make sure you run through every confirmation and final detail once more, this is when things will become more real and you will be able to capture any little missing details you couldn’t see during the planning process. By this time everything should already be finalized, but you can check in and see if there were a couple of last minute attendees added, or if there was a last minute room change that needs to be inspected to ensure the new room will comfortably accomodate the event and its full details.
Tips for a meeting
Always have an agenda to follow during a meeting, make sure you have a list of the major points you need to touch on so that the meeting fulfills its purpose. It is easy to get carried off topic, so make sure you are checking off the points you wanted to touch on. Keep the focus in mind, and make sure that time is not wasted. Have a list of the goals that you would like to have accomplished by a given deadline, and make sure you are clear and specific with your requests during the meeting with your team.
