Let’s face it, meetings are a headache. You put hours of effort into preparing for a meeting and then no-one turns up! It’s even worse if you charge a fee for food, venue or content.
We always forget marketing a meeting is perhaps the most important aspect of preparation. If you have 100 hours to prepare a meeting, you might be better off spending all the time marketing it. Any other preparation you do, will not bring any more people along. Granted it might be a rubbish meeting and no-one might ever trust you again but at least you got them to turn up!
Obviously, you need to prepare and market, so my purpose here is to underline how important it is to give time to promoting the meeting.
Before I do that, let’s be clear about what we’re talking about.
Types of Meeting
There are three types of meeting and it is well to be aware of which type your meeting is.
Private Meetings
These meetings are always by invitation and they usually have a purpose, often in the form of an agenda. Usually, these are the easiest to organise and need minimal marketing. Most likely, the date and time is agreed at an earlier meeting or through some sort of arrangement between the members. An online meeting scheduling assistant can be helpful, eg Doodle Poll is free and an easy way to agree dates for a meeting. It takes out a lot of the effort formerly done by overworked secretaries.
Once scheduled these meetings sit in diaries until the time of the meeting and most people turn up! If they don’t, they usually send apologies. This is just as true for the largest committees as it is for a one to one over a coffee. These meetings imply personal promises to attend and so people usually make an effort to tell the organiser should they be unable to attend.
I used to organise 24 hour committee meetings at a conference centre. We set the dates for 2 – 3 meetings per year, each year in advance. People travelled from all over the country. My job was to prepare the agenda and make sure everyone prepared their reports in time. We did this confident people would attend.
Regular Public Meetings
These meetings have something in common with both Public (below) and Private meetings. Examples might be church services or meetings of societies, including political parties. Usually, there is some pattern to the meetings, eg every Sunday at 10.30am or 7.30pm on the third Thursday of the month.
The attenders are usually on a mailing list, they have the usual date pencilled in their diaries and they do not usually offer apologies. The organisers can be confident enough people will turn up and so can focus on organising the meeting. There’s no need to spend a lot of time scheduling or marketing these meetings.
However, over the long haul, attendance can drop off. Sometimes this can be countered by refreshing the approach to the meeting. However, a good idea can grow stale; a generation or two later, when not so many people are interested, a meeting will have to close. Is it worth marketing at this point in the life-cycle of a regular meeting? Usually, the idea itself is stale and no longer addresses the need it first addressed.
However, many regular meetings have a winning formula and keep going for many years. Some religious meetings continue for hundreds of years. The formula may be modified over the generations but the meeting is manifestly the same body of people, united by their story of how their ancestors brought them all together.
Public Meetings
Usually, these are one-off meetings designed to bring new people into contact with the organisers. There will be very few reliable attenders and people attend to be informed, entertained and educated in some way.
Anyone who has experience organising this type of meeting will testify to the difficulty of persuading people to turn up.
If you don’t charge (or charge at the door), you are likely to get a large number of expressions of interest and fewer people actually turning up. This need not be a major disaster these days, when you can collect expressions of interest online. This will build your email list of interested people, who you can contact in the future. People don’t turn up for various reasons and so the chances are those who don’t are not all time wasters.
If you charge for the meeting, the chances are a higher proportion of the people who pay in advance will actually turn up. This helps with catering, something it is usually unwise to leave to chance.
I’ll leave this topic here for this week. Next Friday I’ll say more about how to market public meetings.
Please comment and share your experience of organising meetings and the problems you have met.