As a planner, a valuable skill you hold is risk mitigation. You know how to anticipate issues, overcome adverse situations and all with a smile on your face without so much as breaking a sweat!
What is unique and thrilling about an event for you may seem like a 6-week nightmare for others that don’t hold your organizational prowess or composure under pressure. Event coordination and planning is such a stressful job that in some studies it is actually rank as more stressful than being a corporate executive (CNN Money). You are constantly being asked to do more with the same or less each year with all the ever-changing needs of your leadership and colleagues to keep things fresh and interesting, not to mention your amazing attendees who you want to keep engaged and happy throughout their experience.
WHAT DO YOU DO? How do you overcome yet another hurdle without affecting the 20 different events you are actively planning RIGHT NOW? You don’t want to leave your current solution, but you also don’t want to have 6 different systems that require and import and export for every event each week. I know we all love excel, but as some point, the Clippy (interest joke about Microsoft here) madness needs to stop!
You pause for a breath, and along comes this cool new kid on the block people are calling INTEGRATIONS. No more exporting and importing information. With a click of a button, you can now send your information between and not miss a beat until you start getting integration OVERLOADED and now you are spending just as much time managing your integrations as you did import and exporting (insert the feeling of manual data entry here). Despite the fact that now your integrations need updating, one of them isn’t working and information is going to the wrong places screwing everything up!
This is where we get to the moral of the story, in a world of integrations, exhausting expectations management of integration and to what extent your team needs them is just as important as ordering the right amount of muffins for your attendees (insert joke about pissed off hungry attendees here). It is incredibly important to vet and understand what your integration part can do and more importantly what they should be integrating. It is also important to not forget trying new technologies is not going to go away and will continue to more important as time goes on so working to limit the number of integrations with as solid technology platform can accelerate your event success exponentially. It will also help your attendee's affiliate better with a fluid branding experience and contribute to both the retention of their attention and provide the vehicle attendees need to improve their willingness to engage with you program content and message.
Now that you have read this far, let me give a plug to Connect Space. We are a technology platform that focuses on the planner and the teams they work with. We are planners ourselves that have experienced the pain of not ordering enough muffins for a PM Break first hand. Our technology plays nice with a different system and can be used based on the things you need and want to try in a safe reliable format without forcing you to do things that won’t contribute to your event success or delight your amazing attendees, just as long as nobody is "hangry, yes hungry + angry".
