How To Get Your Meeting's 'Sexy Back'

I’ve spent several years as a Coordinator for large global companies. Due to the many meetings that occur throughout the year it’s important to keep meetings fresh so that attendees stay tuned in and are not playing Angry Birds instead of being actively engaged! Here 4 tips to put the sexy back into your meetings:

Keep meetings interactive

How many times have you attended a meeting while the person at the front drolls on and on about X. It’s important for meeting attendees to feel involved. At my company we have employees across Canada so we incorporate web casts in our town halls meetings so that everyone can have the opportunity to attend. Why not have a live Twitter wall with a hashtag to your meeting so people can post and share their comments. We typically just have this screen off to the side and this has been a hit at our meetings!

If you have a smaller meeting have your attendees throw some pictures of themselves on a USB – the more fun and unusual the picture the better! Plug the USB in and have a random attendee (not the owner of the USB) use their imagination to try to come up with an explanation of where the photo was taken and what’s going on the photo. This is a great exercise for meetings where the attendees do not know each other very well or have just started working together. It will add a personal element to the meeting and allow attendees to get to know each other a bit more.

 

Have a Contest

Why not integrate your product or service into your events and offer a prize for the winning submission? It could be something that involves attendees interacting with that product/service. I work for a food company and one of the things we have done at meetings is to have employees send us a video prior to the meeting of them utilizing the product and to explain how it solved a meal time problem ie. you picked up your kids and their friends from soccer practice and on the way home you got a flat tire. You got home much later than planned so now need to make dinner in a jiffy. Enter how ‘product x’ helped with this dilemma. Show the winning video at the meeting and offer a fab prize. Nothing beats employee engagement and getting your attendees syked prior to the meeting.

 

Offer Unique Food at Your Meetings

Salami on rye, tuna wraps, and turkey sandwiches…YAWN. Who said food at meetings need to be boring?? Now more than ever people are open to expanding their palate and trying new and unique food offerings. Try to tap into fresh local food that are in season and have a little fun with this often overlooked important component. At one of our recent team building events I enlisted the services of Elle Cuisine.  Attendees could not stop talking about how tasty the food was! Her take on livening up a mixed salad was to add breaded goat cheese balls that had a tasty herbed breading coating. It was simply delicious!

A hole in one…I stumbled on this amazing company Glory Hole Doughnuts in Toronto who take doughnuts to the extreme! Some their unique concoctions include Banana Cream Pie, Black Forest, and Pretzel.

Who says you can’t play with your food?

 

 

Total Recall

As a planner after you’ve poured all of your blood, sweat, tears into an event you want to ensure that your attendees remember the content. One of the ways to ensure this is to have a game that sums up all of the content, or key content in a fun game. At one of our events we had attendees play a game of Jeopardy. We created a Powerpoint presentation in the style of Jeopardy containing some key takeaways from the event. Attendees were asked to answer Jeopardy style. Nothing like adding a bit of friendly competition to your meeting while finding a way to ensure that the content stays fresh as a daisy in the minds of your attendees.

 

What are some techniques that you’ve used to add a dose of sexy to your events??