Meeting Objectives – Roadmap for Success

• Posted on Carolyn
• in Meeting Design
• on October 10, 2014
• 1 Comment.

Imagine if you will, the following call from your boss or client:  “We need you to plan a 2-day meeting for our largest customers in April.”  Armed with that information, you immediately start sourcing venues, planning menus and researching activities – right? Hardly. This is barely enough information to begin. To do your job more effectively you need to ask some questions to better understand the purpose or objective of this meeting.

Objectives act as your meeting roadmap (or GPS for those who cannot remember using printed maps or Trip Tiks), helping guide you in the right direction.  To get started, ask why are we having this meeting and what do you expect to accomplish as a result? If the answer to why is “because we always have a customer meeting in April,” dig deeper.  Are you launching a new product?  Do you want to educate them on new features of existing products?  Are you thanking them for their business through a recognition and entertainment event? Are you trying to do all of the above (ugh, that’s one tiring meeting that you might want to split up)? Each of these options has decidedly different outcomes and will affect all of your planning – from venue to F&B to budget, activities to A/V and beyond.

So you’ve asked  questions and established why you’re holding the meeting (your destination) – now you need to put the map together and add stops along the way – who is being invited, where should we hold it, what activities might be needed,  how do we get everyone there, even how to publicize it.  The objectives you create should help steer many choices, and feed into marketing collateral – easily answering the “what’s in it for me”?

When writing objectives for your meeting, start with action verbs just like you should when describing tasks on a resume. Action verbs are demonstrable – they show what or how something will be done and make the statement more tangible.  It also helps to make your objectives SMART (just like your phone):

S – Specific, one point per objective

M – Measurable, can you quantify it?

A – Attainable (or Achievable), is it doable within the allotted time or have you set yourself up to fail?

R – Relevant, does it make sense within the scope of the project?

T – Time-based, have you given yourself a timeframe to keep you on track?

Putting together objectives isn’t always easy, often takes input from many stakeholders and requires a few rewrites.  Look at each proposed idea and ask “so what”? If you’re trying to do too much in one statement, break it apart into two or three. Add timeframes to keep you on track. See if you can make the objective quantifiable by adding some numbers. Use action verbs to start the statement. Think about how your meeting objectives will flow through to marketing copy and then to your evaluations. The effort spent on asking questions and drilling down upfront will result in a smoother direction and allow you to arrive at your destination successfully.