Features of a childhood memory

A remembrance of those moments when we were young, hyperactive and enthusiastic about the simple things. Somehow I felt like I was 7 again last week, when we were walking to The Labourdonnais Hotel to monitor our latest conference.What it meant was simple: less planning, more action.Yes people, those surreal things in Events Management, when you get to see the final results of weeks of hard work, do happen.

A souvenir of the day - myself at The Labourdonnais Hotel

Here’s how it went:

As I was comfortably sitting in the office dealing with phone calls and emails, it was time for the last challenge of our current event, the running schedule of the day. This strategic plan of the monitoring of the event is basically 10 % on paper and 90 % sweat. It was an important meeting with the senior management of IBL so we had to be perfect, as always.

I got there quite early; 2 hours before. From there I was allocated to the conference room and we verified the set-up, one important part of this was to get acquainted with the hotel staff (later on it proved to be extremely helpful). Eventually, we saw the trainers and attended to their last minute requests – in this case, to get email address sheets so that they could send the slides to attendants later on (so then we had one attendance form + the email verification sheet at the registration desk): Lesson here – always bring more pens.

Then everything happened all at once:
attendants had arrived 
and the hotel staff were serving them breakfast, 
the trainers were rehearsing on the main room, 
we were collecting attendance 
and verifying e-mails 
while we had to continually inform the attendants of the running schedule of the day.

One skill that I noted in particular was to recognise the attendants. It was important in terms of time because we needed to know their name in order to direct them to their email address on the list (which was NOT in alphabetical order by mistake)

Our pilgrimage continued as everyone entered the conference room. In the mean time, we walked back to our office on John Kennedy Street (which is exactly 600m and 80 steps away). But first we would stop at the IBL House to see our client’s personal assistant for some feedback, we had left the sheets with the hotel staff in case someone would walk in late.

Another 600m/80steps later, we were back at The Labourdonnais, Following the running schedule for 10:45; tea and coffee break. And we left once again, when meeting had started. (Yes, it means cardio session all over again). We went back one more time, after lunch to put the evaluation sheets (training department obliges) at their disposal. And one last time finally after the conference was over to collect the forms.

So from this exciting experience, I understood that in Public Relations, professionals need to be ready for anything. Consequently, a practitioner will need to be able to adapt to all circumstances and have the capacity to process information quickly even if sometimes it means serving the coffee yourself, or staying at the office until 7 p.m waiting for the event to end so as to be reachable at all times.

Still the thrill of your plan finally coming to life and the overcoming of last minute challenges make the hard work worth it. 

What was your first Public Relations Cardio Session?

x

Gaëlle