When Your Client Wants to Cancel, Part 2
Sometimes meetings have to be canceled, but it should be a last resort. This is the second of a three-part series on ways that event planners can turn a canceled meeting around.
In the first of this series, we created a meeting in a fictitious south Florida that had a hurricane come and make a muddle out of the city streets. Travel is next to impossible, but it may be in the best interest of the client to hold the meeting anyway. One of the ways to handle the meeting is simply to reschedule it.
If it can’t be rescheduled, what then? Perhaps there is time-sensitivity to this meeting, and it must be held now or not at all. Whether the client is in the weather-whipped city or not, it may be possible to rely on technology to get the meeting’s goals accomplished.
There are many ways you can use the telephone for your meeting. If it is a small collection of highly specialized people, perhaps a series of conference calls can save the day. A good relationship with a company that does VoIP conference calls would be useful about now. An internet search of “voip” will yield you many pages of results, so pick the one that has the greatest reliability.
One of the great things about cyber-space is that you can hold meetings there. If images of the old movie “Tron” are popping into your mind right now, get the mental remote and shut them off–then get on the internet again and search for “internet video conference calls.” Again you will get many pages of results, but look for the ones that offer file transfers, have the highest bandwidth, and the best service reviews.
Many companies have been using the internet to replace travel-based conferences for years. This is especially true of companies with overseas attendees–trying to get everyone from around the world into one place can be an expensive headache, and is a process ripe for disaster. You can use the same technologies they use to save a meeting, so read up on the technology and costs, and be prepared to present them to your client–again, compare it to the cost of canceling.
So what do you do if technology and rescheduling can’t work? Part 3 will help you work out the possibility of changing how the meeting could be conducted.
