The Renewed Significance of Stakeholder Relationships and Event Planning

By Naomi Tucker, CMP, HMCC | Account Director, Meetings & Incentives Worldwide, Inc.

The success of your event depends greatly on many people coming together toward a shared goal. Regardless of whether you’re planning an event in the middle of a pandemic, or if you’re planning an event with an endless budget, you will find that an interdependent team is one crucial key to a favorable achievement. 

As a certified meeting professional, acknowledging and understanding the position of your stakeholders is part of building that interdependent team. This interchangeable relationship builds throughout the life cycle of your planning process. Stakeholders provide a vision and goals, and they can provide a wealth of support to the event. Planning professionals, understanding this, can leverage the stakeholder’s support to strengthen the event.

As we lunge into this post-pandemic dynamic of planning meetings and events, special attention needs to be placed not only on your relationship with stakeholders but their aspirations for the gathering that you are planning. As a meeting professional, there is an enhanced dependency placed on you by both internal and external stakeholders, to guide them in the best practices when it comes to planning virtual, in-person or hybrid meetings and events. That dependency is more relevant now than ever before.

In a world that has advanced tremendously in technology, given that event tech vendors have grown 4 fold in the last year, many stakeholders are now faced with an amazing variety of choices for their virtual and hybrid events. As meeting professionals, we need to be equipped to make enlightened recommendations to highlight and emphasize the stakeholder’s vision when it comes to virtual and hybrid experiences.

Gatherings that are conducted in-person will have a similar feat. There is the challenge to raise the protection levels of those that are gathering in person. There is also the challenge to ensure that all safety protocols are met so that everyone attending feels secure. Planning professionals will be entrusted with the ability to show stakeholders how to best protect and serve attendees safely.

Understanding the wants and needs are of your stakeholders is a skill that you acquire by asking questions that get you closer to what they are looking to obtain. You want to know what drives them, what will help them, understand the vision presented clearly, and adopt that vision and information into your own outlook for the event experience.

With such dynamically shifting times, engaging and supporting your stakeholders is more important than ever before. Also, staying on top of industry trends will help you guide your stakeholders toward making effective decisions. That is why having a team that depends on each other for various degrees of support has many benefits. This continuous support not only gives the planning team what it needs to succeed but also provides a good foundation in which it thrives beyond measure. 

As professionals in the events industry, we will have to direct stakeholders in the direction of an amazing event, no matter what format. This is why organizations like the Events Industry Council are key in helping provide the framework for you so that you can put your best foot forward when it comes to developing relationships with your stakeholders and putting on spectacular events. As you move forward with planning events for your customers, be encouraged to make sure your customers’ needs are met in consideration of the variety of solutions that our industry now has to offer.

About Naomi

Naomi Tucker, CMP is an Account Director of Meetings & Incentives Worldwide, Inc., a Past President of MPI Wisconsin Chapter, and the Founder of Planners on Purpose. Naomi has more than twenty-five years of experience planning meetings and events and loves to write and discuss her learnings in this industry at her website Planners on Purpose, where she empowers event planners to lead a stress-free life on purpose. When she’s not planning or writing about events, Naomi enjoys spending time with her family, friends and getting lost in a good book.

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