What do you do when the unexpected happens? Most of the time you will not have to deal with natural disasters effecting your events. However, if you do enough events, at some point you will run into this situation as I did yesterday. I was informed by our venue that a portion of their building flooded due to all the rain that they have had. The portion that flooded happened to be all of our meeting rooms. She informed me that we would likely need to move rooms but that we could make the final determination during the walk through yesterday. It was a challenge because we had just finished printing 500 26-page event guides with all the room assignments and would not have time to get these redone due to the lateness of receiving this information. To make it more challenging I had a new contract planner doing the event because I was unable to go due to another event. The thought was that we would send her to do the walk through and determine if we could keep our original rooms or if we would need to move and attempt to reprint just the schedule portion of the event guide. In doing the walk through our venue contact came up with a brilliant idea to alleviate the concerns we had about changing all of our rooms. She said that she would just change the names on the outside of the rooms since the attendees would not know the difference. The building thankfully had alternate rooms to move our event to and the flexibility to make the change as painless as possible for our attendees. Due to this innovative idea, our attendees will never know that there was a problem.
Take time to think about all the options and ask people for their thoughts because they may be able to come up with the idea that makes the most sense.
Winn Events is a full-service event planning & management company that offers flat-rate pricing and customized packages. Check out http://www.winnevents.com/ for more information.
