Dateline: Frankfurt, Germany
Event: Global Leadership Council Meeting for 200 top partners

Room Set Up: Six people to a round table with electricity run to every table and a computer hub run to every table to enable each of the attending partners to have access to the internet throughout the meeting.

Challenge: Enter the Keynote Speaker, Benjamin Zander. He surveys the room set up and says to the client, I will need theater-style seating for my presentation. There is a 15-minute break between the content presentations that afternoon and his keynote address. The client and the hotel perceive the challenge as unhooking all 33 tables, taking them out of the room and resetting 200 chairs. (They further envision the nightmare associated with resetting the room for the following day.)

This is where possibility thinking kicks in. There was an open space between the first row of tables and the stage that would accommodate approximately 90 chairs. There was a space in the back of the room that would accommodate the remaining 110. Pushing all of the 33 tables to the back of the room would require a massive effort. But disconnecting just the first row of tables—six in total—lifting them over the intervening tables and setting them down in the back of the room in the open space would take coordination, but a minimum of effort. Then the chairs could be walked forward and set.

The break ran 15 minutes as scheduled and the keynote address on “Creativity--Thinking Outside the Box” began on time.

Click here for more information on how Quicksilver can enhance your next meeting.

Kathy Morris has spent the last 10 of her 35 years in the communications business with Quicksilver. Her unique ability to rapidly ramp up on a client’s business, then present targeted information through the creative efforts of the production team she manages have been key contributors to the growth of Quicksilver’s live meeting and webcasting offerings.

You’re producing a corporate meeting. You know that a great deal of planning and pre-production must take place prior to traveling to the venue. You painstakingly check every production to be certain that your show will execute perfectly. Experienced producers know that, on-site, nothing ever goes completely as planned. 

One of Quicksilver’s key differentiators has always been our ability to think on the fly. Murphy’s Law lives and breathes in every corporate meeting environment and the best producers can find a smart solution to almost any challenge.

Quicksilver was producing a meeting at Washington DC’s Grand Hyatt, an older venue. The main ballroom is three floors below ground level, ceiling height at 14-feet and too few hang points, which is not optimum for a 2,000-person meeting.  All these factors presented us with a challenge - how presenters were seen on camera by the audience.

The clients preferred to be looking into the audience or straight on to the cameras as if they were making eye contact with the viewers. In the past, prompter monitors were moved out and away from the stage to decrease viewing angles. But, this venue was a little tight. The client turned to Quicksilver and said “fix it.”

We chose to hang a 7’ x 10’ screen over the main entry to the ballroom. The problem was that there were no hang points in the center cove for a projector and no place to set it without blocking access to the ballroom.

Our solution was interesting. We went to Home Depot and returned with two lengths of steel cabling. We weaved the two cables through a 12” x 12” truss plate and attached a small LCD projector to that plate. Stretching the cable across the center cove and anchoring it to steel supports inside the cove, we built a suspension bridge for the projector. Weaving the power and video feeds around the steel cables, we leveled the projector plate. Once settled it was rock steady. Fed by a matrix router, the LCD was able to display TelePrompTer or still store, which enabled a theme graphic on-screen during walk-in periods.

The camera shots were perfect and back-of-the-room screens became a standard procedure when working with this client. We were applauded for our ingenuity and overall confidence in Quicksilver skyrocketed. However, there were many more challenges in the shows to come. We say, bring it on.

Click here to learn more about Quicksilver's innovative meeting production.

Chris Bartot truly is a meeting superhero - his innovative production skills and ability to think on the fly have resulted in many successful client meetings around the globe.

If PowerPointless is trance-inducing in person, imagine how much less compelling it is when the presenter resides on the opposite end of a phone line and the viewer is alone in a cubicle or office with two days worth of work on the desktop and needy colleagues hovering about the entrance. Rallying geographically distributed management team members around your company’s mission and vision under the heading of “Quarterly Financial Update,” can be a challenge, but with careful agenda preparation and dynamic presentation, you can turn make these anticipated rather than dreaded events.

There are five keys to developing an effective webcast agenda.

• Present unique information – If all you are going to do is read the audience a published report – send them a link to the pdf and let them peruse it over lunch.
• Provide context – If the information that needs to be presented is quarterly financial results, distribute the numbers in advance and use the webcast event to provide context that helps members of the team understand the why behind the what.
• Reiterate common goals and give examples of how seemingly disconnected departments have contributed to achieving those goals. What recruiting and/or training successes has HR had that have contributed to the ability of R&D to develop or sales to sell the latest version of the product? What market intelligence did sales provide that enabled manufacturing to deliver a more successful product?
• Involve multiple presenters in the storytelling – Rehearsal is mandatory, but when the team hears the same message from multiple voices in their own words, it more quickly becomes the company’s story.
• Celebrate success – Share both corporate and personal achievements to connect geographically distributed team members.

The delivery format is equally important. Make technology work for you by choosing a delivery platform that enables you to keep the presentation moving without having to wait for files to load or awkward hand-off of presenter control. Allow the audience to see the presenters. Add pictures and video to demonstrate your points. Solicit opinions from the audience in the form of polling and invite questions through email or phone submission. Practice.

With compelling content and dynamic presentation, your management team will not only be informed, they will be energized.

Click here to learn more about Quicksilver's webcasting experience.

Kathy Morris has spent the last 10 of her 35 years in the communications business with Quicksilver. Her unique ability to rapidly ramp up on a client’s business, then present targeted information through the creative efforts of the production team she manages have been key contributors to the growth of Quicksilver’s live meeting and webcasting offerings.