Here’s what I think is a brilliant idea gleaned from the international track held at the Pharmaceutical Meeting Planners Forum earlier this week in Philadelphia:

For planners with meetings outside the U.S., the changing exchange rate can make budgeting a royal pain. There are lots of sites where you can get exchange rates for the day the contract is signed (which the session leaders highly recommended you do, so you have a baseline, at least). Their recommendation was one called xe.com. But who wants to keep tracking the exchange rate to update the budget as you move along your timeline?

The nice thing is that you don’t have to—it can be done automatically. All you have to do is link your Word document to the xe.com (they said to talk to your tech department to find out how to do it; I found this tip sheet, which sounds like it should work though I haven’t tried it yet), and it will automatically update your budget.

By the way, if anyone is interested in hearing impressions of someone other than me about the Pharma Forum, Meetings Radio did a podcast that I think captures the highlights pretty well (and a few low lights, too).

I was just reading < a href="http://annoliveri.typepad.com/annoliveri/2007/03/kiss.html" target="_blank">this post by Ann Oliveri on Association Zen about tourist buses in Washington, D.C. She talks about a system she thought was great, the red Circulator bus, which took people from Union Station, past the Convention Center and convention hotels, to Georgetown, for just a dollar. Then, she says,

The same people who blocked a subway station in Georgetown thirty years ago to keep out “unwanted elements” had in recent years formed a BID–a Business Improvement District–a marketing entity to increase the number of visitors. In addition to clean streets, they started a shuttle system of blue buses to connect Georgetown to the closest Metro stations in Virginia and Foggy Bottom. No doubt to silence their affluent constituents, the tortured routes also wound through narrow streets, and out Wisconsin Avenue, as well as connecting M Street to the subway stations. Expensive, unreliable, and disconnected from the Metro system, it never really took off.

So what happens? Well-intentioned people merge my brilliant red bus with the badly conceived blue bus, expecting purple, I guess. The result, however, is that nasty mud color you get when Easter egg dying goes bad. Few of us ever set out to to dye eggs Goth hues, and no one intended to destroy my bus.

What they did was abandon their brand promise. The idea was to give visitors easy access to the places THEY wanted to go, not where someone else thought they should go.

What does a tourist bus route in D.C. have to do with meetings, other than the obvious for D.C. meeting attendees? Everything, I’d say. Think about it: How many times does a site get selected due to reasons that benefit someone other than the attendee? How many times are schedules arranged to make someone other than the attendee’s life easier? How often do speakers get selected because they’ll talk about what your organization thinks attendees should hear, which may not necessarily be what they actually want and/or need to hear? How often do you inadvertently, with good intentions, end up making it more difficult, rather than easier, for attendees to get what they want from your meeting?

A meeting should be, but all too often isn’t entirely, about where attendees want/need to go, not where your organization’s leader, staff, industry gurus, sponsors, or exhibitors think they should go. It’s not a bad idea to regularly recheck your route to the information highway, just to make sure you’re not detouring your attendees.

According to this New York Times article, doing more than one thing at a time may cause some problems, delays, and possible errors. And, contrary to popular opinion, younger folks are no better at multitasking than us oldies are.

I have to admit to being an unabashed multitasker at most times (I have to get far, far away from my computer when on conference calls; otherwise, I will definitely not be able to give those on the phone my full attention). When it comes to writing, though, I need to mute my answering machine, ignore e-mail, and put everything I have on that one task. But for everything else, I usually end up doing at least two things at once.

The research in the NYT article says multitasking can result in a delay of up to a second on one of the tasks, which could be a big deal if you’re driving and talking on your cellphone, but not so much if you’re answering e-mail while on the phone. Still, when dealing with humans either on the phone or electronically, they deserve full attention. I’m going to do my best to give it to them from now on. Except maybe the PR people who call to ask me if I got their press release, then go on to read it out loud to me over the phone…

My favorite thing so far at the trade show at the 3rd Annual Pharmaceutical Meeting Planner Forum, which started today at the convention center in Philadelphia, other than the wine and munchies at tonight’s reception, is the cyber cafe that Digerati is putting on. It’s very elegant, with couches to lounge on if you have to wait for a turn at the kiosks, and there’s a really cool big curved e-banner and digital screens as a backdrop (I’ll try to remember to bring my camera and take a picture of it tomorrow—it’s one of the nicest cyber cafes I’ve seen to date).

The account manager I spoke with said the cafe is just a little piece of what they do AV-wise—they can totally set up your staff office with all the necessary bells and whistles; provide high-speed Internet independent of the hotel; capture PowerPoint, audio and visual presentations live and make them available for instant distribution; and lots more stuff). Anyway, I obviously was very impressed!

So far, the 3rd Annual Pharmaceutical Meeting Planner Forum, which started today at the convention center in Philadelphia, has been pretty interesting, if I do say so myself (we co-organize the show with The Center for Business Intelligence).

For example, the session I attended this morning on planning and executing R&D and investigator meetings was an excellent case in point on good educational formatting, I thought. The session leader gave us a case study that, she said, was based on actual things that happened at four investigator meetings. Each table in the room spent the next hour or so gasping, sighing, and railing at all the stupid things the organizers did (what, they didn’t know there was going to be construction going on at the hotel? The lead guy adds six breakouts, with full AV, F&B, laptops and flipcharts, at the last minute?), and then devising ways to keep those stupid things from happening. While a lot of what we came up with was of interest only to pharmaceutical meeting planners, some general takeaways for any meeting planner are:

-Set up a pre-meeting with all the meeting stakeholders and rough out meeting goals, objectives, rough agendas.

-Define the roles and responsibilities of all parties involved, from in-house planners to third parties to those in charge of calling the meeting to be held in the first place.

-Site selection has to be based on what’s important to achieving the objective, not where the internal stakeholder has relatives he wants to visit, has a daughter who is the social chair of her sorority and “corporate party planning is something she would like to explore,” etc., etc. (and that party planner thing got everyone at my table’s ire up big time—”someone has to explain to Leonard [the fictitious internal stakeholder] that what we do is not party planning,” said one irate tablemate of mine).
-Ensure that the facilitator can control the discussion. If not, have a staff person who can step in if the meeting starts getting off-topic or stuck on someone’s personal pet peeve.
-Hold a weekly or biweekly call with all the stakeholders. “I dread these calls,” said one participant. “But things come up, like AV requirements, that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. You need to know what they need to set your budget.”
-Have a standard contract addendum that deals with construction at the hotel over your meeting dates, competitors holding meetings concurrent with yours, and other critical issues.

After a break, we had roundtable discussion on various different topics that ranged from technology to tools and tips to meeting registration challenges, to partnering with legal, compliance, strategic sourcing, and procurement. I took it as a good sign that the room was just as full after the break as it was before. Our table got a little off topic, but we ended up having some best practices to share with the room at large once time came to report out, so we must have done something right!

Meeting and event planners, your profession has arrived, according to this article on CNN Money, based on research by Money Magazine and Salary.com. According to the article, median pay is $52,600, and the profession has a 22 percent 10-year job growth rate. I love this line from the job description: “A certain degree of creativity and latitude is required.” Talk about an understatement!

Anyway, congratulations in making the top 20 hot careers. Funny how business-to-business journalism didn’t make the list, though…

Thanks to MiForum listserv for the pointer.

Meeting planners tend to be pretty good about dealing with allergies to shellfish, nuts, wheat, dust, mold, and pretty much anything else an attendee might find to sneeze (or swell up) at. With hotels now added scents to their public areas to enhance the experience, some planners worry that this will set up a whole new round of allergic reactions they may have to deal with.

But can you imagine having an attendees like this poor woman, who is allergic to the electro-magnetic fields that surround everything from laptops to cellphones to microwave ovens (or, as she calls it, “modern life”)?

Then again, I can’t imagine she’d be able to go to a conference at all, or even survive the trip. How horrible is this? I won’t complain when my spring sneezies start, not after reading her story.

When it comes to staff meetings, I’m a big fan of movement. For example, I love a good “walking meeting,” where I can stroll with my colleagues and get some exercise for the bod while working out the brain. Who wants to sit in a conference room staring at the walls, when there’s so much in the world around us that can spark new ideas? Plus, spring’s finally here and, well, I get restless. So naturally I got all stoked when I heard about the Conference Bike (one of Alexander’s many interesting ideas on his Pimp Your Office post).

OK, so it may not be all that practical, but what a hoot it would be to give it a try! (Thanks to Bailey WorkPlay for the pointer!)

Jeffrey Cufaude offers this idea: Create a technology “petting zoo” at your next meeting. So many people are intimidated by all the new technology that’s available, and I agree that this is one fairly nonthreatening way to let attendees get some hands-on time without having to worry about getting bitten. From Jeffrey’s post:

Imagine a venue where members can float from station to station trying out new computer software applications, creating their own blogs, filming a short video clip and than learning how to edit it on a computer, and much more. Tech-savvy members could volunteer to serve as mentors and coaches for their peers. A video/audio theatre could offer clips of members already using different technologies talking about the benefits they associate with doing so.

The entire room could have a carnival like atmosphere with dozens or hundreds of people overcoming their lack of familiarity (or their fear) with some of the new toys and tricks that could help them be more effective in their daily work. I’m seeing visitors leaving with “Technology is my friend” stickers attached to their name badges.

Some of our industry associations do this, but generally they just demo their own new tech offerings. I’d love to see a portion of the expo hall turned into a tech petting zoo for all the new stuff that members might want to take for a test drive. Is anyone doing this already?

If you or one of your speakers has the world’s best presentationPowerPoint slide deck, check out the World’s Best Presentation Contest. Why not give it a shot? You have a couple of chances to win: A “people’s choice” award, where everyday folks like you and I vote on what we think is the best PowerPoint, and one awarded by judges (Bert Decker, Garr Reynolds (whose Presentation Zen is a must-read for anyone who takes to the dais regularly), Jerry Weissman, and Guy Kawasaki, whose How to Change the World blog is another favorite read of mine).