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Seven Keys to Successful Offsite Meeting Management

by Andrea Pellettiere

A large offsite meeting is very much like a stack of dominoes. If one of those dominoes should happen to fall down, the entire row simply collapses. Similarly, if you miss one critical detail, your offsite meeting can quickly unravel into complete chaos. For this reason, offsite meetings require careful planning in the preliminary stages and effective management at the meeting venue itself.

The following organizational tips should help you to keep calm focused and collected on the meeting day.

Arrive early at the venue. Give yourself plenty of time to have adjustments made to the room set-up and display if necessary..
Agree on a plan of action before the meeting day itself. Review all crucial details with participating staff. (Who is handling the registration process? How many volunteers do you have? Whom are your volunteers assigned to?) Also make sure that your staff knows the venue address, directions and time expected to arrive.
Designate a point person from your organization to coordinate with venue management, direct volunteers and manage any displays or additional set-up required. If you have multiple contacts from your organization at the venue, make sure that responsibilities are clearly defined. (For example: Bob will coordinate with the audiovisual technicians to make sure the sales presentation is up and running. Mary will oversee the distribution of presentation materials.)
Find out who your own contact will be on the meeting day itself. The manager that you initially dealt with may not be the same person assigned to your event. Make sure that venue management is fully aware of your agenda. For instance, if you neglect to make clear that you are planning a forty five minute speech between the time your lunch buffet is set up and actually served, you may wind up with a dried out and very unappetizing meal.
Make sure that facility management is aware of any outside vendors or deliveries (flowers, audiovisual equipment etc.) expected, so that they can tell you the best way to enter the building. This information should be communicated to your vendors before the meeting day.
Have a well thought out check in process. This is especially important if you are dealing with a large volume of people. You may want to consider the following question

-How will guests be checking in? Alphabetically? By name? By company?

-How can the registration tables be placed to decrease congestion?

-Do you have enough staff on hand to check attendees in quickly and efficiently?

-Have you evaluated the facility layout? When attendees first arrive, is it immediately apparent where they need to go? If not, you may want to station a few volunteers to direct traffic.

Prepare of packet of all relevant information for yourself including:

-The name and phone number of your venue manager.

-A copy of your catering and venue rental contract.

-The names and phone numbers of your vendors and time expected to arrive

-A copy of vendor agreements and contracts, so that they can be easily referenced.

-A roster of all volunteers with phone numbers and tasks assigned.

-Your complete meeting agenda.

Having this information on hand will allow you to retain control over the meeting management process and more quickly deal with any crises that may arise.

Coordinating hundreds or even thousands of people for an offsite meeting may seem like an insurmountable obstacle. However, with just a little bit of strategy and organization, you can significantly cut down on the confusion factor and run your meeting smoothly and effectively.

Stop! Need some advice on planning your meeting, conference or event? Contact Eleganza Meetings, Event & Conferences Inc., a full service planning agency at http://eleganzaevents.tripod.com

The secret benefit of web accessibility part 2: A higher search engine ranking

An additional benefit of website accessibility is an improved performance in search engines. The more accessible it is to search engines, the more accurately they can predict what the site`s about, and the higher your site will appear in the rankings.

Not all of the accessibility guidelines will help with your search engine rankings, but there are certainly numerous areas of overlap:

1. ALT descriptions assigned to images

Screen readers, used by many visually impaired web users to surf the web, can`t understand images. As such, to ensure accessibility an alternative description needs to be assigned to every image and the screen reader will read out this alternative, or ALT, description:

<img src="filename.gif" alt="image description goes here" />

Like screen readers, search engines can`t understand images either and won`t take any meaning from them. Many search engines can now index ALT text though, so by assigning ALT text search engines will be able to understand all your images.

2. Text displayed through HTML, not images

Text embedded in images appears pixelated, blurry and often impossible to read for users utilising screen magnifiers. From an accessibility point of view this should therefore be avoided.

Search engines equally can`t read text embedded in images. Well, you can just give the image some ALT text, right? Unfortunately, there`s strong evidence to suggest search engines assign less importance to ALT text than they do to regular text. Why? Spammers. So many webmasters have been stuffing their ALT tags full of keywords and not using them to describe the image. Search engines have cottoned on to this form of spamming (as they eventually do every form of spamming) and have taken appropriate action.

3. Descriptive link text

Online poll

Having to register before buying
Hidden charges at the checkout
Lengthy checkout process
No clear delivery details
Phone number not provided on website

(Submit your answer and we`ll show you the results so far)

Visually impaired web users can scan web pages by tabbing from link to link and listening to the content of the link text. As such, the link text in an accessible website must always be descriptive of its destination.

Search engines place a lot of importance on link text too. They assume that link text will be descriptive of its destination and as such examine link text for all links pointing to any page. If all the links pointing to a page about widgets say ‘click here’, search engines can`t gain any information about that page without visiting it. If on the other hand, all the links say, ‘widgets’ then search engines can easily guess what that page is about.

One of the best examples of this in action is for the search term, ‘miserable failure’. So many people have linked to George Bush`s bio using this phrase as the link text, that now when miserable failure is searched for in Google, George Bush`s bio appears top of the search rankings!

4. Website functions with JavaScript disabled

JavaScript is unsupported by about 5% of web users (source: The Counter), either because they`ve turned it off (for example to prevent pop-up adverts) or because their browser doesn`t support it. Many forms of JavaScript aren`t accessible to web users utilising screen readers.

Search engines can`t understand JavaScript either and will be unable to index any JavaScript-driven content. Perhaps more importantly, they`ll also be unable to follow JavaScript-driven links. You may really like the look of your dropdown menu but search engines won`t if they can`t access certain pages on your site because there aren`t any regular <a href> links pointing at them.

5. Alternatives to Flash-based content provided

Flash, like JavaScript, isn`t accessible to many users, including those using screen readers. Equally, search engines can`t access Flash so be sure to provide equivalents.

6. Transcripts available for audio

Hearing impaired users obviously require written equivalents for audio content to be able to access it. Search engines too can`t access this medium, but transcripts provide them with a large amount of text for them to index.

7. Site map provided

Site maps can be a useful tool for visually impaired users as they provide a straightforward list of links to the main pages on the site, without any of the fluff in between.

Site maps are also great for search engines as search engines can instantly index your entire site when they arrive at the site map it. Next to each link you can also provide a short keyword-rich preview of the page. All links should, of course, be made through regular HTML and not through JavaScript (see 4. above).

8. Meaningful page title

When we arrive at web pages the first thing that appears, and the first thing that visually impaired users hear, is the page title. This latter group of web users don`t have the privilege of being able to quickly scan the page to see if it contains the information they`re after, so it`s essential that the page title effectively describes the page content.

If you know anything about search engine optimisation you`ll know that the page title is the most important attribute on the page. If it adequately describes the content of that page then search engines will be able to more accurately guess what that page is about.

9. Headings and sub-headings used

Visually impaired web users can scan web pages by tabbing from heading to heading, in addition to tabbing from link to link (see 3. above). As such, it`s important for accessibility to make sure that headings are correctly marked up by using <h1>, <h2> etc.

Search engines assume that the text contained in heading tags is more important than the rest of the document text, as headings describe the content immediately below them. Search engines assign the most importance to <h1>, then <h2>, and so on. Make sure you use the heading tags properly and don`t abuse them, as the more text you have contained in heading tags, for example, the less importance search engines assign to them.

10. CSS used for layout

Screen readers can more effectively work through the HTML code of CSS-based sites as there`s a greater ratio of content to code. Websites using CSS for layout can also be made accessible to in-car browsers, WebTV and PDAs. Don`t underestimate the importance of this - in 2008 alone there`ll be an estimated 58 million PDAs sold worldwide (source: eTForecast).

Search engines also prefer CSS-based sites and are likely to score them higher in the search rankings because:

The code is cleaner and therefore more accessible to search engines
Important content can be placed at the top of the HTML document
There is a greater density of content compared to coding

Conclusion

With all this overlap between web accessibility and search engine optimisation there`s no excuses for not implementing basic accessibility on to your website. It`ll give you a higher search engine ranking and therefore more site visitors.

This article was written by Trenton Moss. Trenton`s crazy about web usability and accessibility - so crazy that he went and started his own web usability and accessibility consultancy to help make the Internet a better place for everyone. He knows an awful lot about the Disability Discrimination Act and spends much of his time doing DOM scripting & accessible JavaScript.

What next?

Optimise the accessibility of your website with our accessibility consulting services
Get a highly accessible CSS website through our accessible web design expertise
Attend our interactive web accessibility training and advanced CSS training courses

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