In your company, are you responsible for booking venues, facilities, restaurants and organizing transportation for meetings and events?
Meeting Planning as a Team Effort
With all that’s involved in corporate meeting planning, you would have to be a master of all trades in order to accomplish every task alone and unaided. Even if you did have the credentials to wear all the necessary hats at once, you simply don’t have the time or the ability to be everywhere at once, no matter how much you stretch yourself thin. It’s no surprise, then, that the most successful corporate meetings start with planning and organizing a top-tier creative and technical team. With careful budgeting skills, it’s still possible to put on a great event without skimping on any important event services.

All of the special flourishes that lift an event out of the ordinary require specific talent from a number of people. Great photographs don’t take themselves. Beautiful décor doesn’t materialize overnight. Great floral arrangements don’t make themselves. As much as we would like audiovisual equipment to operate itself or for gift bags to appear fully assembled out of nowhere, such wishful thinking is never going to happen. So instead of axing quality services that could increase the productivity of your event simply because they fall outside the area of your expertise, develop a team that is equipped to handle these vital tasks. Delegate your work, allowing yourself to absorb the advice of other professionals. You’ll be surprised at how enjoyable the planning process becomes when you have a team behind you that supports your vision.

With that in mind, Meetings & Events Houston has taken the time to really examine the event service industry and to examine the benefits of its impact on your mission to plan and execute the most memorable meetings while staying conscious of your client’s spending dollars. While we could be like other meeting planner guides and include a laundry list of ancillary services, we prefer to include event service providers that contribute to the event’s ROI. Vendors like Prop Rock and Joystick Classic Games and Pinballs, both of which are profiled in the pages of this book are providing great services that add personality to meetings and events, but also serve functional purposes as well.

The categories we have included in our listings are proven to contribute to great meetings and a positive ROI, including the areas briefly covered in this article. Event services help give your corporate meeting that extra special touch that sets it a part from the rest of the industry.

Photography
Corporate photography is the best way to document your event in action as it happens. By keeping a set of digital photographs stored on your hard drive, you guarantee that your diligent effort on an event is preserved in case it is needed in the future. Who knows when an important advertising opportunity might fall into your lap, or if your client is expecting you to put something up on the Internet to generate future interest in their company? More importantly, you’ll never know when you’ll have to create a portfolio and show visual evidence to support your impressive resume. Digital photography may seem like an expensive frill, but it’s actually the only way to ensure that your work has any value past the event date.

Photography can also be used for entertainment purposes by capturing fun group shots of your invited guests. For many professionals, corporate events are the only time they see their colleagues outside of an office setting, so by having a photographer working the floor, everyone can leave with a nice memento featuring their favorite business associates. Look into the possibility of having a photo booth set up featuring fun backgrounds and creative digital effects, and see what local companies offer in terms of personalized souvenirs.

Houston Professional Photography uses the latest Nikon equipment to deliver magazine-quality photographs for just about any type of event imaginable. Houston Professional Photography also offers in-house web design, ensuring that your company and event are read about by as wide an audience as possible.

Meeting Facility Décor
When choosing facilities for your meetings and events, part of the decision-making process usually involves assessing the interior space and décor. Oftentimes, meeting planners are fortunate enough to find locations with design schemes that are perfectly suited to the needs of their events. Unfortunately, sometimes there are overriding factors that prevent planners from choosing an ideal space, including cost management or the geographic area of the location. If this is the case, make sure to talk with the facility’s manager about the possibility of adding your own personal accents in the way of tweaking the interior décor.

Green Lily Events is a general events service company that can also help with your interior design plans. Assisting you from the beginning stages of planning, Green Lily Events can also help in developing design plans as well as formulating a theme for your event. Themes are a great way to add a sense of playfulness to the occasion, especially if the event you are planning leans more towards informal socializing. Green Lily Events can help you gather your ideas and morph them into a fully realized meeting concept. Green Lily Events is also devoted to creating beautiful affairs that benefit the environment and does so by offering recycling, food repurposing and floral donation options.

Declining budgets may be a source of concern, but they shouldn’t be the end all discussion when it comes to creative meeting ideas. How about arranging for several smaller events as opposed to one large one, to better defer the immediate end costs? Or why not hold an event exclusively for your top clients, so that your objective and design efforts are better specified to the people you most want to affect? Whatever your budget limitations, event service companies can help you organize a meeting that meets your aesthetic vision.

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Submit an Article
If you have expertise in a particular area relevant to planning meetings and or events, you may submit a 400 to 750 word "how-to" article for possible inclusion in any of our magazines and/or our websites.

If accepted, your submission will be edited for length and clarity. There is no monetary payment if your item is used; instead, you can publicize yourself through a five-line biography with your contact information that will appear at the end of the article.

Send submissions to
editorial@MeetingPlannerResources.org. We will contact you if your submission is chosen.