The Meeting Planner's Online Advantage: Automate These 7 Things To Increase Attendence By 27%
Learn the simplest, most effective ways to increase attendance at your meeting by 27 percent through technology.
Tired of spending hours manually planning a cocktail hour, breakouts and announcements? Get this snazzy online tool that will automatically send out emails to attendees and schedule posts on your website. It's like having one more worker in the office!
With so many new technologies available today, it’s hard to avoid becoming a digital nomad, except when it comes to planning meetings. With so many things left up to chance with poorly planned meetings that do not result in insights and productivity gains for the greater good of all involved.
In this article, we will focus on how you can use the following 7 online tools to automate your meetings:
1. Attendee Tracker
This a great tool to have as a meeting planner because it helps you (among other things):
- Keep track of who has called, emailed, or shown up at previous meetings. - Organize your attendees' personal data (e.g., before and after their name in business cards, first and last names, email address, phone number). - Create an online agenda with a customizable agenda maker that will allow you to make changes on request. - Track notifications sent out via email (e.g. latest changes, meeting reminders). - Get a weekly digest of all communications that have been exchanged. - Analyze your meetings to see how they were coordinated and executed. This data can be used to improve future meetings and make them more efficient.
2. Meeting Countdown
This tool enables you to take control over your meetings by giving you the ability to:
- Create a meeting agenda in minutes with their free meeting maker which includes over a hundred inspirational templates, templates that can be edited, and schedules that you can change as many times as you want before the meeting event date. - Send out digital invitations and reminders in just a few clicks. - Collaborate with other people including clients, staff, bosses or whoever else wants to keep on top of things. - Stay organized by tracking who has RSVP’d in real time and make changes to the meeting agenda if needed.
- Make it easier for members to share ideas, files and photos. - Make sure you can focus on the tasks at hand while still providing an online platform that sends out notifications and allows you to attend your meeting remotely if you can’t make it to the actual event location.
3. Google Calendar
This is the most widely used online scheduling tool out there. You can share your calendar with friends and family, schedule meetings as well as view other people’s calendars in order to coordinate shared events.
4. Doodle This tool enables you to plan meetings or any other event or activity where you need people to participate.
- You can use this tool in order to create a poll so that you know what your members are interested in before taking a vote at the next meeting of an organization that has to make a decision on which products or services they will invest in next year. - This is great for planning things such as company retreats, conferences, seminars and workshops. - It allows you to organize teams and groups and manage the interactions between them. - You can see what’s coming up in a calendar view, so you always know where things are on your agenda.
5. Canva This is a really great tool for graphic designers who want to create website banners, invitations, cards and various other kinds of marketing material from scratch without needing any fancy software. - You can use this tool to create infographics that will help you summarize key insights from past meetings.
- It is also a great tool to use if you need to make a list of things that need to be done at the next meeting as well as a checklist of action items that result from the previous meeting. - The team building is made easier with the collaboration tool of Google Docs where you can make comments, attach files and create workflows.
- This is a great tool for those who want to create a video that will summarize key findings from an important meeting.
- A great tool if you are a blogger or want to upload blog posts for a later date or even an e-course.
6. Leadpages This is a Google Tag Manager (GTM) website builder that allows you to generate website forms from your existing website. - This is great when you are creating landing pages, forms or surveys used to gather feedback from your attendees. - You can create landing pages that will capture leads and get them to fill out a form or make a purchase.
- You can create customized forms in order to gather information from your audience members in order to better understand their needs, requirements and interests. - You can also use this tool if you need to send out direct mail postcards.
- This is great if you want to attach an online form for your attendees to fill in so they can provide their contact details directly on your website. - This is a great tool if you need help with gathering feedback from your members as well as data for those internal team meetings that take place over the phone or via Skype. - You can get online feedback from your audience using this tool in order to get informed about their different opinions and recommendations for making your next meeting more successful. - Can be great for when you are working with a client and need to track their engagement levels.
7. GaggleAMP This enhances team collaboration capabilities of Google Apps, especially the Google Drive platform by implementing an advanced automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology into the Drive platform. - This is great for those who want to gather feedback from your audience members in order to get informed about their different opinions and recommendations for making your next meeting more successful. - It works especially great for gathering suggestions from your members when you want to collect reviews on the hotel you booked or other services. - This is great if you have a client that provides a phone service and you are working on improving the quality of the call recording technology.
- It makes it very easy for team members to share files, calendars, notes and other information through email or Dropbox.
- This is very simple to set up, but really powerful if you are using Google Drive as your primary lead capture tool for running marketing campaigns and customer events.
- Add a Call-to-Action button that is automatically spoken to your guests with a simple phone call and let them dial in on the spot.
8. Google Forms This is an online tool that allows you to create surveys and collect data from your audience whenever they are most convenient for them. - This is great when you want to hand out tickets to an upcoming event, or if you need to encourage more people to sign up for your next webinar. You can use this tool if you want to create a lead capture form for capturing emails or any other information from people who are interested in doing business with your organization.
9.
Conclusion Google Docs is a fantastic tool that is used to create, edit and collaborate on documents and spreadsheets from one or more users. - This will allow you to create a custom email reminder for the next meeting without creating a separate template for each meeting type. - You can even track information regarding progress on your projects, tasks and who is responsible for what in order to make sure everything stays on track at all times. - The team building is made easier with the collaboration tool of Google Docs where you can make comments, attach files and create workflows.
- This is great if you want to send out direct mail postcards or if you want to send an electronic newsletter that includes important company updates and news.