Thanksgiving is a time to reflect and think back on all the things in our lives that we are thankful for. Sometimes in the busyness of life, we forget these things. It is easy to take our loved ones for granted or the time we have to spend with them. We often forget our blessings and focus on the tough times we may be going through.  On Thanksgiving I always take time to reflect back on the past year and remember all the many blessings from God, the lessons learned, and the wonderful people I have shared life with.  Doing this tends to reign in the craziness that I constantly live my life in.  As an event planner my life is always steeped in details and I am always on the go. By stepping away from the details, emails, phone calls, etc for just a few minutes I am able to focus on the big picture and gain perspective on my life and all I have to be thankful for.

What is your favorite Thanksgiving tradition?

Happy Thanksgiving from Jennifer Winn and Winn Events!

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.

If you have been in the event world for any length of time, you have run across them: difficult people.  It is inevitable both in life and in events that you will need to work with people who seemingly have been put on this earth to torment you. Obviously that is not the case so how do you deal with them if they are at your event?  Let me know your thoughts.

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.

Check out our latest poll at:

http://polls.linkedin.com/p/66594/vcdww

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.

I recently had a conversation with someone that I found to be quite profound and a great reminder of why I do what I do: plan events.  I had the chance to share with her my heart and the passion and purpose with which I approach planning events.  For many years though I thought of event planning as just a job and that I would go to college, get a degree, and start my career.  It wasn’t until I had been planning events for seven years that I discovered my true calling or passion was actually the very thing I had been doing all those years.  I did not discover this while I was running an event or up to my eyeballs in details planning the next conference.  I discovered this by going to a concert as an attendee and taking it in. My purpose in going to the concert was ultimately because I was going to be planning a conference for that band in a few short months and I wanted to know what to expect. When I showed up I realized that God had other plans for me that night.  As I sat in the audience and I looked around at everyone whose life was being impacted, I felt like God said, “This is why you do what you do. This is why I gave you the gifts and abilities that you have so that you can lay the foundation by planning the details of the event so that the speakers and artists can focus on what I want to do through them to impact the audience.”  I approach planning events as an act of service to the speakers, artists, and attendees.

For those of you who are Christians that probably makes a lot of sense to you.  The same is true for all types of events.  As event planners, we lay the foundation with all the details we plan so that the speakers/artists can get up on that stage and share their message that hopefully changes the audience, helps them grow and learn new things, and impacts people.

One thing I shared with this young lady was that it is important that when you are running an event, that you take a couple of minutes to step into a session and see the impact it is having on the attendees.  Everyone will be fine without you for a couple of minutes. Turn off your radio. Silence your cell phone. Take 5-10 minutes and enjoy your hard work and maybe you will get something out of what the person on stage is saying.

Take a moment and let me know why you plan events? What is your heart and passion? What advice do you have?

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.

Winn Events and The Winn Group were recently featured in Front Yard Worship.  Click on the link below and turn to page 20/21 to read the article.

November 09 Front Yard Worship

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.

If you have ever done an event that required the use of volunteers, then you know how valuable they are.  Without volunteers we would not be able to pull off the setup, event logistics, and load out at events.  Today I witnessed a huge team of volunteers setup for the LeadNow/Fusion Conferences at Irving Bible Church.  They flew through the setup process with amazing speed and a servant’s attitude.  What they expected to take 7 hours took 5 hours due to the dedication of the volunteers.

I think that often we take our volunteers for granted.  We need to take time to thank our volunteers for their time and their help.  If you did not have them there, you and your staff would be doing everything on your own.  At your next event, take a moment to meet each volunteer and thank them.

What have you done to show your volunteers that you value them?

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.

Events are ultimately for the attendee.  It is important to keep this in mind whenever you are running an event. It is so easy as Event Managers to get caught up in the details of what needs to happen at the event (i.e. did the catering get dropped at the right time, is the AV correct, is there signage to direct attendees, are the speakers or bands onsite, is the registration system working properly, etc.). The list goes on and on of the many details that we as Event Managers are required to manage during an event. With all this happening, it is easy to forget why we do what we do.

It is imperative that Event Managers take a few moments to step into a session or breakout and hear the speakers. See what the attendees are experiencing.  Watch their faces and see how they are impacted. When you catch an attendee in an elevator, don’t tell them who you are. Instead ask them about their experience at the event. Take a moment to listen and learn what you are doing right and what you can improve on. Perhaps there will be things you can implement into the event right then that will change the experience for that attendee.

We all do events for different reasons. When I got into event planning, it was to see the lives of attendees changed and impacted.  I find that I have to remind myself from time to time. That means that I force myself to find a few moments to experience the event that I worked so hard to put on for the attendees.  Sometime the event may impact you in unexpected ways.

Why did you get into event planning?  What do you do to remind yourself of the reason for why you plan events?

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.

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.

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.

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.