There are countless companies, associations, societies and charities who have the regular, if not frequent, thorny question of where to hold there annual event or conference. A major city centre, somewhere far from distractions, or even in a virtual space!
How do you make the decision? Which city, which hotel? There’s no point in asking too many people their opinion, unless you want to have a list of all their favourite places in the world! As ever in the events world, what is needed is a simple step by step process to take you to the right answer.
Here’s a scenario taking place across the world on a regular basis:
You’re sitting in your weekly board meeting, and there’s just one more item on the agenda before you can whisk away for the weekend - Item 8: Annual meeting - location ideas. With all your research complete, you believe you’ve already found the perfect city which must now be presented to the board. You start to speak, when you are interrupted by a board member who every year requests the same city location. This is followed by a second, then third member, all of whom have their own favourite city or hotel chain. You hope that no one can here your internal groaning, “not this again”! When the meeting ends an hour later, you have a list of an additional eight cities to research and check against your proposal by the next meeting. It’s going to be a long weekend.
So what is the best way to almost automate the way that a conference city is selected? Here are some ideas that may help:
General conference location options
The key to selecting the right city and venue is based on the criteria you use in your selection, and the weighting you put against each one. Firstly decide on any general rules of city selection, for example you may:
- Move continents, regions or cities each meeting
- Rotate through all regional hubs
- Selection based on current news/business levels
- Cities with highest level of customer business or largest number of potential attendees
- Always switch hotel brands or stay with the same brand
This will immediately help to focus you on a smaller number of locations.
Country, city and hotel criteria
Next, take a list of 10 factors that the group should consider when choosing a meeting destination. Here are some generic ones, but you may need to adjust yours slightly:
- Location is attractive
- Overall cost to attendees is low
- Events can be held in one facility
- Meeting Facilities are attractive
- Room rates are low
- Hotel and Conference centre have good service records
- Low travel costs
- City has train station/airport
- Cost to the association is relatively inexpensive
- Shops, restaurants, social areas are easily accessible
You now need to rank them and add a weighting to each one. Are the travel costs more important than the location, and if so by how much? One way to do this is to ask a sample of attendees, directors and staff to rank these items by importance. The more people that rank a factor high, the greater the weighting.
With all your results in, you tally up the totals (those marked as “most important” gain 10 points, second place has 9 points etc). This will then show you very simply the order of importance for the selection factors.
A key step is to now go to the people who will make the final decision and gain their buy-in for the list and weighting. They may want to adjust the list slightly, but try not to alter the list too much. Remember that highly paid directors will probably have a very different wish list than for an attendee.
Rating each Hotel or City
You now have a scorecard that will allow you to compare candidate cities fairly. You or your events team can use this scoring system to rate each city he or she visits, giving points on a scale of one to five for each criterion.
For a city’s final score, multiply the number of points (one to five) in each category by the importance factor for that category. Total all of the points for that city and you have your winner! (A spreadsheet makes this fairly painless).
At this stage, go back to the decision makers with the choices. When all the information is laid out systematically, it is much harder for anyone to sway the decision based on a personal agenda. The ratings give the board a rationale for settling on a particular site.
Possible Grumblers!
Of course, in the end there are bound to be some disappointed board members and chapter officers. But if you and the board work systematically with approved criteria and can explain why other options didn’t quite make the grade, you can avoid both hard feelings and dreadful choices.
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