Running a conference, a seminar or a workshop can be great fun. The day of the event is guaranteed to be a hive of activity with all of the arrangements coming together over those few hours. Problems will arise and be solved in one way or another and the delegates will leave in various states of motivation. If this is your first or your one thousand and first event you should never stop learning how to improve the next one. One of the most effective ways to draw out all of the learning points from the entire event is to hold a review meeting after some thorough data gathering including financial analysis and delegate feedback.

Running a review meeting

Once you have assembled the background data, it is time to hold your review meeting with the key players. This may be part of a general review that your organization regularly runs or it might be a special one-off to quantify the benefit of events like this and to justify future expenditure.

Who to invite?

Those attending this review meeting should be the event “owners”, decision makers and influencers in your company who will need to understand the impact of the event. It may not be necessary to invite your entire event team, however it will add value to your presentation if you have people in the meeting who can provide additional information that you may have forgotten, overlooked or otherwise omitted or who can support your data with additional evidence.

The Agenda

Thematicx Product Nationwide Roadshow

Review Meeting

15:00-16:00 on 12/12/09 in Main Conference Room

Overview of Roadshow objective and Roadshow program

Financial report

Delegate feedback and results of Follow-up process

Improvement Plans

Successes

Next steps – A discussion about extending the program

Any Other Business

Always publish an agenda for this type of meeting to allow people to prepare their thinking in advance. A typical agenda is quite simple and looks like this:

Although this is a sensible and courteous precaution, don't expect everyone to read and remember the agenda. Some will appreciate it; the others will muddle through and use their intuition as long as you supply a copy of the agenda at the meeting.

Rather than defining a strict timetable, have a rough timetable in your head leaving about 20 to 30 minutes for open discussions throughout the meeting. If the meeting lasts for an hour, each of the presentation topics should only take around 5 minutes which gives time for one or two slides (if you're using them). The time will fly by and your attendees will be fresh and ready to discuss future plans.

Be prepared for surprises. Often events that appear to run well have hidden problems that are only revealed after close questioning of everyone involved. Conversely events that stumble along from crisis to crisis can be highly entertaining for the delegates and may cause them to pay closer attention because they start to look for errors that may not be there.