When Your Client Wants to Cancel, Part 3
Sometimes meetings have to be canceled, but it should be a last resort. This is the third of a three-part series on ways that event planners can turn a canceled meeting around.
We have looked at rescheduling your hurricane-ruined meeting as well as holding a virtual meeting to help your client go through with her plans. However, those two options may not work, so you may be left with restructuring the whole enchilada.
And the meeting can be looked at just that way–as an enchilada. You may have a combination contributors, attendees, and presentations wrapped up in a timing problem that can’t be solved by teleconferencing or new meeting dates. With that in mind, what would happen if you substituted some of the ingredients?
You need to know what ingredients are important to the client for this approach to be successful. For instance, if it was educational you will need to get the materials presented to the right people at the right time. You need to ask these questions: Can someone else present the material at a different time, or could the original presenter pre-record the session? If people are supposed to collaborate on a project, could you reduce the number of people involved and hold a face-to-face meeting in the office?
If you had planned to hold a short but intensive conference, perhaps it would be just as well–or better–if you spread the meeting over a few days and held it locally. This would serve the dual purpose of including the people you need to include without yanking participants out of the workplace for a whole day, maybe more if there was travel involved.
In the end, you may have to cancel the meeting anyway despite your hard work and encouragement. There simply may be no way to overcome the hazards wreaked on your event. However, if there is a way to hold it and you can figure it out, your client will admire your creativity and appreciate your efforts all the more. This is bound to pan out on your bottom line.
