Staging-guide software.

An old meeting manager's tool takes a new turn.

Planning your association's meetings is no easy task, especially in this age of no time, no staff, and no money. Although the themes, structure, and events of an association meeting have become second nature for planners, it is the details that can decide whether a meeting is truly successful. You know the glitches I mean: the wrong audiovisual equipment, the missing handouts, the room that is too small or too large, or the speaker who comes in with materials different from those he originally discussed. So how do you manage all of these little things?

Staging-guide software is with us because neither meeting planners nor hospitality providers can remember everything. In many hotels, staging-guide software is quietly working behind the scenes, allowing the property's staff to fill in the gaps in your meeting when something has slipped though your fingers. While staging-guide software appears in many forms, packages now on the market are inexpensive, personal-computer-based, and easy to install and use with minimum coaching. Really.

Creating a meeting

Just like meeting management software, staging-guide software requires some effort for the user to set up or create a meeting. Many of the data requirements are relatively straightforward.

You need to establish the following: the name of your meeting; a code designation for the meeting (for example, the 1993 fall meeting could be coded FA93); the sponsoring organization; the full address of the sponsor, including city, state, and ZIP code and primary telephone number; one or more sponsor contacts with a priority listing of who to contact; the dates of the meeting; the time bills will be reviewed; the dates attendees will arrive and depart; an estimate of the meeting's attendance; the total estimated room nights; the peak night and total number of rooms occupied; the standard tax rate for the property; the gratuity rate suggested or required by the hotel; an "authorized to sign" designation (the name of the person who approves invoices and can sign accounts); a group profile; and finally, an area where you can record postmeeting notes.

You are probably saying, "But I already have these items in my present meeting management system." Maybe you do. But with staging-guide software you can create a number of different "meetings" and, in effect, model your association's meeting. Meeting planners seldom get to play what-if scenarios until it is too late. The set-up functions in staging-guide software allow experimentation with different meeting styles, gratuity rates, tax rates, room blocks, and arrival and departure patterns. The ability to interlink these what-if scenarios with an electronic spreadsheet and put everything together into a word-processing document is a nice additional feature of a personal-computer-based program. Maintaining lists

If there is one thing that meeting planners do a great deal, it is maintaining lists. In fact, a function book or staging guide consists almost entirely of one list after another. Staging-guide software allows the meeting planner to use several easy data manipulation utilities to create and maintain a variety of lists.

Facility lists. Facility lists usually exist for bigger meetings or citywide conventions where one or more hotels may be used for a single meeting. These lists provide all the identifying information about every property that is being used to support that meeting. The information on a facility list includes the name of the facility, a primary contact person, addresses, telephone numbers, and other identifying information.

Location lists. Location lists show the exact location of events within a given facility. For example, several educational breakout sessions may be located in the same hotel. In other cases, location lists can provide a handy reference for creating educational tracks within a single meeting, such as a chief executive officer's track or a communication track. Location lists help structure the meeting so that it best uses the facility's layout.

Organization lists. Organizations lists cover organizations that may not be the event's host but that do have a relationship with the facility or with the meeting--for instance, a vendor at a trade show who also has a hospitality suite. Organization lists are an easy way to control the myriad groups that meet in and around a major trade show or convention.

Event listings. All meetings are arranged into one or more events. An event can be a dinner, an educational program, a golf outing, or almost anything that gathers people together. Events listings truly become the who, what, when, where, how, and why that a meeting manager uses to control a meeting. Besides the standard array of contacts and phone numbers, event listings can help generate banquet orders, estimate attendance, establish capacities for events, specify equipment and set-ups, and produce attendance listings.

People lists. People lists identify the attendees at events by organizational, by location, and by facility.

You can see that the structure of staging-guide and event management software increases in level of detail as you move from facility listings to people listings. People lists not only contain name and address information but also organization, guest status, arrival and departure plans, expense information, and biographical data. These lists easily interface with a speakers listing so that names can be organized by event and by links to other names.

Keep in mind that in the context of a staging guide, the "people" are speakers, presenters, or facilitators. If a system is used more broadly, the "people" can also be attendees.

Other listings. The listings produced by these software systems are truly endless. Some packages allow the user to establish signage and posting lists. Many even have required items lists.

Generating system reports

Not only do these systems have listing capabilities, they also have significant reporting capabilities. Many reports are standardized and are similar to the listings from which they are drawn. More and more, these staging-guide systems use report generators that allow the user to establish his or her own reports. A good staging-guide software package should be able to produce reports in user-defined formats and should follow a structure similar to the one outlined in the listing descriptions.

Learning more

As mentioned earlier, many meeting management packages already have staging-guide functions embedded within them. More than likely, the smaller, meeting-management-only packages will not have these functions included. Stage-It, by Advanced Business Solutions, is an example of a stand-alone staging-guide system that incorporates most of the features described in this column.

Maynard H. Benjamin, CAE, is executive vice president of the Envelope Manufacturers Association, Alexandria, Virginia.