Sample: Magazine Article (Trade Press)

{Magazine-style article; addressed to event managers} Building a Better Site Visit As event managers, we know that the key to a successful, wrinkle-free show is all about being prepared. A good site visit or familiarization trip results in a better informed event manager, which leads to more accurate show planning, fewer surprises onsite, and most importantly, happier attendees. While site visits can be an integral part of your pre-show preparation, it is sometimes difficult to show cost-conscious supervisors just how valuable a site visit can be. Site visits and familiarization trips are often short in duration and long on objectives. As an event manager, your challenge is getting the most out of your time and demonstrating a return on investment to the boss. With a solid plan and some out-of-the-box thinking, you’ll show your managers just how a site visit can be a valuable part of your pre-show routine. ------ Some site visits have a very specific purpose—to find the perfect special event venue, perform a technical inspection of a conference room, or select a hotel. Some are far more general in nature, and are intended just to familiarize the event manager with the local area. A well-prepared event manager will be able to accomplish both. The first step to getting your boss to sign that travel voucher is to present defined objectives. Why ARE you going on this trip? What specific tasks do you need to accomplish while you’re there? Write it down, and make a checklist of specific goals and objectives for your trip. Distribute your draft list to management for review. Most of us work under the Sales or Marketing departments, but don’t stop there. Heads of any department attending the show should be aware of your trip, and they may have needs as well, needs that sometimes only occur to them as a result of reading your list. By distributing your checklist well in advance of your site inspection trip, you give stakeholders a chance to think about their needs for the show, be it a restaurant with a private banquet room for a client dinner, transportation to a golf outing, or a hotel conference room with a speaker phone. More often than not, you’ll find that your checklist has doubled in size well before you leave, but by soliciting input from the higher ups, you appear proactive and organized, and avoid last-minute scrambling at show time. If you’re friendly with personnel at your show’s organizing association, or other exhibiting companies, check in with them as well! They may have questions or something you could look at for them while you’re there, earning you some goodwill or return favors in the future. Now that your trip is planned and approved, do your homework. While nothing can replace the trip itself, doing some research in advance of getting on the plane can make all the difference in how your time onsite is spent. Visit hotel and restaurant guides, CVB sites, and local city guides to get reviews and information about places you’d like to visit. Use online mapping services to determine which hotels and restaurants are nearest the convention center. Map directions from the airport to your hotel, and from the hotel to your intended destinations, print them out, and keep them in a folder in your carry-on bag to save valuable time on the ground. Once you arrive at your destination, divide up your time, devoting specific days to one type of task. Day one could be divided between inspecting hotel properties and doing some reconnaissance at the convention center, and day two be devoted entirely to restaurant visits or special event venues. Make a schedule, but leave some time for flexibility. ------- Now that you’re ready to pound the pavement, start thinking outside that box. One common mistake many planners make is to schedule their site visits to be spent entirely with the hotel staff, CVB personnel or a DMC. While it’s sometimes impossible to avoid announcing your planned arrival to your local contacts, their job is to sell you on the venues and services they’re paid to promote. You can often learn a lot more about your destination if you arrive incognito. When planning your meetings and tours with your official contacts, try scheduling them for the second or third day of your visit, not when you first arrive. While your presence in the hotel may be known, your face isn’t yet. Take that undercover time to familiarize yourself with the facilities and staff, as just any run-of-the-mill guest, not as a potential big-ticket client. See how the staff treats you, and watch how they treat others. Ask the concierge really dumb questions! It may seem sneaky, but it’ll give you a good idea how useful they’ll be in a crunch. Outside of the hotel and convention centers, your job is to become a local expert for your attendees. When they’re onsite, your show attendees are going to have a myriad of needs, and with a little legwork, you can anticipate just about all of them. Sales people, in particular, need to entertain clients, so knowing the restaurant scene is crucial. Visit as many local restaurants as you can at peak lunch and dinner hours. Even if you’re not eating there, you can get an idea of how busy they are, the atmosphere and the level of service. Most will have a take-out menu you can bring home with you, making up a valuable piece of your attendee materials. A binder with these menus and your personal notes on the restaurant kept in the booth during the show is a goldmine for busy sales folks. Don’t be afraid to interrogate the locals! You may find that hidden gem of a restaurant by asking the clerk in the gift shop where she would most like to go on a special night. If you belong to an online community or bulletin board, these can be great advance sources of local expertise to direct you to the best restaurants or tell you about that “secret” special event venue. You might also learn some surprising, but important things about the city the show is being held in. Arriving unprepared and learning too late that a local festival will close down a major street for the weekend or that every restaurant in the area will be closed on SuperBowl Sunday could put a serious crimp in your show! As you explore, don’t just focus on restaurants. Have a car, have a map, and get out on the street. Nothing will give you a better lay of the land than wandering around your show area. None of us have been to a show where one of our attendees didn’t need a drug store, office supplies, a copy center or even a hospital. By taking a few hours to explore and be observant on your site visit, you’re prepared for just about anything they could need, which not only saves time and stress, but can make you look like a real hero when that emergency crops up. Above all, if you want to return from your trip and show everyone just how valuable your site visit was, there are four things you must always do while you’re there. Keep looking at your checklist, constantly. Take notes, incessantly. Take pictures, pictures, pictures! Collect as much physical information as you can—brochures, maps, menus, floorplans, business cards—to bring home. These are invaluable later when you’re preparing materials for your attendees. ----- Now that you’re back in the office, it’s time to demonstrate to management that their money and your time away were well spent. Immediately, while things are fresh in your mind, begin writing up your notes from the trip into a site visit report. It’s often a good idea to start fleshing this out before you come home, or on the airplane. Using your site visit checklist as a template, create a concise, but thorough, written report to explain how you accomplished each of the listed objectives, and what the results were. Try to include photos and reference items if applicable, to give your stakeholders a complete picture of your findings and observations. In some cases consider holding a formal meeting with the managers concerned to discuss your findings. By providing your managers with such a detailed account of your show planning objectives and how your site visit better prepared the company for the show, the value of the site visit trip becomes immediately apparent. Your stated objectives provide a metric against which you can measure the success of the visit and your site visit report provides you with a demonstrable return on investment. With a little planning, a little creativity, a lot of exploration and even a pinch of sneakiness, you can easily show the most budget-conscious manager that a good site visit can be the key to a worry-free show.