Seven Steps to Hiring a Meeting Planner

When you’re thinking about the meeting that must take place in order to drive your business or organization’s objectives, there are a few steps to hiring a meeting planner that will smooth your team’s path to success:

1. Define your goal. Are you holding a meeting for team-building in general? Are you bringing a set of people into one place in order to produce an end product, such as a budget for the next year? Is it to announce massive change? Your end goal will help you find a planner who has experience in that type of meeting.
2. Define your need from the planner. Do you need your meeting planner to handle everything from initial communication with attendees right up through getting them back to their home base? Or do you have travel resources in-house, and need more venue-based assistance?
3. Define your spend. Your goal and needs should inform your budget. And your budget will determine venue, travel arrangements, accommodations, pretty much everything about the meeting except the agenda. It will be one of the first questions from any meeting planner, so she can maximize your return on your dollar.
4. Put together a wish list. Add to the list those aspects of a meeting planner that would make them perfect for you, such as one with a local branch for face-to-face discussions, or one with an international client base because you will be bringing in employees from across the world.
5. Search for candidates. Talk to colleagues who’ve used a meeting planner to get their recommendations, or search online for the planner or planning company that fits your specific criteria. Talk to local organizations like your Chamber of Commerce. Search professional organizations, such as Meeting Planner International.
6. Interview the top three. If possible, sit down with your planner, or if they’re not local, do a phone interview. Just like hiring someone for any job, you’re looking for the right fit for your company, you need to get references you can contact, and you need that sense that your meeting matters to them.
7. Ask for their input. When you’ve narrowed it down to the one you think would be best, ask them for their ideas on the event you outlined in the interview. If it fits with your picture of how the event would go, then you’ve found your planner. They should present you with a standard contract, with the budget for the event included, and contingencies.

If you’ve walked through all these steps and found the right planner for your meeting, you will be able to leave all the details in their hands and diminish your own stress considerably. elm Planning would love to be the meeting planning company that fulfills your needs. Contact us today!