Event Professionals: Keeping Your Eyes on the Prize

Event professionals have to keep up with a million details when planning for meetings. What’s the one thing you can do to keep focus and deliver top-notch events? Set the right goals.

It’s great to dream big dreams for your event, but keep your goals grounded in achievable reality, advises a recent post on the Event Manager Blog  (opens in a new tab). You can do that by setting SMART goals—goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Goals help you stay motivated even when things get difficult. “Knowing that what you want is attainable is enough to get anyone out of bed in the morning, and goals have the added bonus of making you feel like you have achieved something, even when your workload is piling on top of you,” says the post.

Many event managers may work on large teams, where communications can get muddled. “Setting standardized goals helps everyone to work towards a common focus and avoids any miscommunication and team members acting against this.”

Goals also help set priorities. Even when a dozen tasks crop up at once, solid goals will prevent you from getting sidetracked.

Check out the post for more  (opens in a new tab).

Essential Features

New blog post: 5 things your website must have #assnchat  (opens in a new tab): https://t.co/UDMFaEyd6x  (opens in a new tab) pic.twitter.com/O9OyJvdf6I  (opens in a new tab)

— Vanguard Technology (@vanguardtech) February 21, 2017  (opens in a new tab)

Is your association’s website fully modernized? Vanguard Technology says there are five must-have features  (opens in a new tab) that all association websites need in 2017.

Among them is responsive web design. Your members expect any site they land on to be fully functional on mobile.

Members are also looking for a customized experience. According to Vanguard, adding personalization to your website can help increase conversion and return visitors and can help your members bond with your association.

Learn more at  (opens in a new tab)Vanguard’s  (opens in a new tab) blog  (opens in a new tab).

Other links of note

Slack hacks. Fast Company  (opens in a new tab) tells you how to get the most out of Slack to boost your productivity.

Decline of Snapchat. TechCrunch does a deep dive on the impact of Instagram Stories  (opens in a new tab) stealing Snapchat users.

Evolving your social media strategy. According to Hootsuite, the organic reach of Facebook pages fell 52 percent last year. Here are a few ways to handle that decline  (opens in a new tab).

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