Pinpoint the goals of your Quarterly Meetings. Which functional groups will be participating and presenting content? Consider employees, business successes and milestones that need to be recognized and celebrated. Decide what business targets, initiatives, and behaviors you want to drive excitement and alignment around for your audience. These key elements will set the tone for your meeting and help you find the center of the bullseye for what content to include and not to include.

Production Tip: Clarify your Budget. Knowing your limitations will inform every other decision you make. Setting clear and specific budget parameters is a high priority in the planning stages of great quarterly meetings productions.

Identify Key Stakeholders. Be certain of who the decision-makers, planning team, creative collaborators, and presenters involved in your Live Event will be at the earliest possible stage. However, don’t underestimate the most significant stakeholder of all: the Audience. Understand who Audience will be: attendees, offsite locations, remote viewers, and post-live audiences. Whether they are employees and colleagues, business to business, or business to consumer viewers and attendees, being clear about who you are communicating with is critical to crafting your messages.

These tasks go hand in hand and each will have an effect on the others. You might find that you have to ping-pong between Venue availability, your required dates for business purposes, and the availability of your Presenters and Guests until you settle on exactly the right combination.

• Lock In the Date(s).
• Choose and book your Venue.
• Confirm Partnerships with an Event Producer and Audio-Visual Production team.
• Create a High-Level Run of Show.
• Start a ‘work in progress’ Production Schedule.
• Create a regular meeting schedule with Key Stake Holders.

Once you have your venue booked and your dates confirmed, you have your most important parameters and everything else can flow. Decisions will be straight forward because you can now back time your schedule to align with when tasks must be complete.

• Begin with a Site Survey and determine Audio-Visual needs including;
  • Audio. How many mics are required? Is the in-house PA System appropriate for your Event? Hint: Probably not.
  • Lighting. What are your Stage-Wash requirements? Is ambient lighting design needed? Is there a Product Showcase that requires lights?
  • Staging Requirements. Do you need to build a stage? What is your Seating arrangement, Theater Style? Round Tables?
  • Camera and Switching Requirements. Consider Live Stream Goals, IMAG requirements, Slide Presentation, and Video Playback needs.
  • Projectors, Screens, Video Walls and Displays. Room Size, Audience Size, Available Light, and Budget will inform your decision about whether to use TV Screens, Projectors or a Video Wall. One important question, can the Audience at the back of the room clearly see what is being presented?

With that information in hand, you need to review important setup details with your team and production partners.

• Evaluate Power Needs. This is a critical step. Most hotels and venues have confronted this before, but if you need to bring in power you need to plan ahead. TIp: Read our article about Event Teams to help determine if you need an electrician.
• Mark Load-In Paths, Loading Docks, and Parking for Trucks.
• Finalize Equipment needs with your Venue and Event Audio-Visual Partners.
• Finalize Crew and Staffing requirements.
• Create a detailed Production Schedule including Load-In, Crew Call, Set Up Times, Technical Rehearsal, Signal Tests, and show-ready rehearsal availability.

Troubleshooting! All good plans allow for change, setbacks, and augmentation. Things change, schedules change, weather changes, agendas change, decisions change, business needs change. You need to be ready. By now, you have created a regular meeting schedule(s) with Key Stake Holders, ideally, the frequency is weekly, or daily as the event date draws nearer. You will be tracking and monitoring several key elements of your event production with the team.

• Update and revise your Production Schedule as required.
• Continue to develop your Run of Show with any new information.
• Room Layout Design Diagrams if appropriate.
• Book additional services including:
  • Catering
  • Furniture
  • Signage
  • Polling Services (Review our article on Event Trends, Survey’s, Q&A and gathering data on your attendees and audience is critical
  • Registration Staff
  • Hotel Internet (you won’t believe how often this is a problem, you turn up on setup day and “Paul” the IT Guy is on vacation” make sure it is connected in your space, turn on and configured. and make sure the Hotel has a plan to troubleshoot if there is a problem).

As this process unfolds, unresolved issues will reveal themselves. Sometimes it is better to communicate an issue to the group and circle back rather than trying to solve every issue immediately. You will be surprised at the number of issues that will self-correct with time and patience!

Showday… start early to give yourself some breathing room. The first order of business for the day is a Production Meeting with the entire team. Review the Run of Show line by line and update the team about any changes that occurred during rehearsals or overnight.

Headshot Cheat Sheet. Create a One-Sheet with headshots to easily identify Presenters, Guests, and Executives. Your A2 will thank you! As soon as a Keynote Speaker enters the room, guide them straight to the team to be mic’ed up. With many people arriving simultaneously, time can run short. This headshot cheat sheet will also generally help the Production Team follow the action onstage too!

Approved Music Playlist. Your A1’s idea of an R&B Playlist might look very different from the client. Avoiding Explicit Lyrics isn’t the only concern, the music will set the tone for the Audience as they walk into the room. So be deliberate about your choices here.

Final Decks and Media. You need a Drop Dead Cut Off Time for Final Revisions. It needs to be clearly communicated to all and sundry. You need a final arbiter and decision-maker present with the authority to say no! And you need a clear process and chain of custody for thumb drives, media and downloads.

Production Tip: It is not worth introducing risk to your Event to be accomodating on this point. Nobody wants the wrong version of a slide deck or video to play. But more importantly, Media needs to be checked by the production team, bad video files sometimes won’t play, slide decks sometimes have a missing font, audio levels might be off, the list goes on… The only way to ensure this doesn’t happen is giving the team time to check and double check any media element that will need to be played back during the event.

Production Tip: It is important to have a plan for Media and File Delivery, and any Editing or Post-Production that is required. Decide where Final Presentation decks and Videos should be stored ahead of time. Video Media transfers may be time-consuming and the file sizes quite large, assign the task ahead of time, and plan enough space to store everything. We recommend transferring all Files to Solid State Drives (SSD) for Delivery to the client. Lower cost Hard Disk Drives HDD have moving parts and you risk losing your data. The biggest advantage of this SSD approach is transfer speed!

Final Decks and Media, Part Two. Make sure your V2 has taken a break prior to the arrival of Presenters and is prepared for this last minute flurry of activity. The Event or Live Stream may not start until later, but as Presenters arrive they will inevitably bring changes to their Slides, Slide Notes, or Videos. Multiple individuals may have such revisions, which will mean that your playback operator will be inundated with requests and updates, some of which can be quite time-consuming.

After the show is over, the production isn’t. Strike and Load Out require planning too. Make sure you have the room reserved for long enough to de-construct everything. Make sure you have a schedule for the truck(s) to arrive and park. Most importantly, make sure that the room is completely reset to pre-show state, remove everything down to the tape on the window, and any and all trash.

Depending on your post-show media plans it is a good idea to send links to presentations, share a meeting recap or sizzle reel with participants and the audience without delay. But we will be posting a Post-Production Blog post very soon to deep dive into that subject in detail.

Production Tip: Follow Through! Make sure everyone gets paid promptly. Finally, don’t forget to Thank the People involved with making your event a success! A great deal of hard work and time is invested behind the scenes, a little gesture like a phone call or an email recognizing contributions is appreciated.