[AiYa – MeetingArkAdmin]

What are your experiences with Venues? Sometimes great meetings can take place in very unlikely venues. Sometimes a great venue cannot make a meeting work.

[Ron Eagle]

Until post Covid venues will probably be at home but even then you need to ensure all attendees can access the software you are using for online meetings (Skype, Teams, Google Meet, Zoom etc) AND that all are working BEFORE you start.

If in house then its a case of:  if attendees don’t know the time, place , subject and duration of the meeting they wont/cant come. Also see comments on ‘invitations’ topic in this group. Also need to give info’ on accessibility (eg disabled ramps, assisted entry, allocated parking if needed) and general parking on site or nearby; nearby bus/train routes ; on site facilities such as cafeteria availability. Good idea to check if the allocated room actually meets the needs…is it big enough, has the required equipment etc. (of course all these apply only post covid).

[AiYa – MeetingArkAdmin]

Hi Ron!

 

Thanks for the above.

My experience with physical venues is that the 80/20 rule seems to apply. 20% of venues will give you 80% of your problems. I have seen venues that one might expect gold-standard service turn out to have next to no parking; have zero skills in helping set-up audio-visual equipment in terms of having the cables needed; of having forgetting / misplaced instructions on having delegates tea / coffee facilities etc.

Have you had any “character-building” experiences yourself in this department that you could share?

 

 

[kieranfoley]

The key rule seems to be “expect the unexpected”.

I was once doing logistics for a mindfullness seminar, held at a fairly large hotel in Bristol, England. As you can imagine, it needed a lot of peace and quiet, which it got…until half-way through, when we found that there was a long standing 1940s English singalong in the bar that was directly above our room.

 

[Ron Eagle]

I agree that venue can be one of the highest potential challenges and let us not forget that one of those ‘venues’ can be video meetings.

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