Responsibilities & Activities include:

• Collaborating with the project team to identify strategies and solutions that will best meet the client’s needs within the project restraints
• Managing day-to-day client relationships
• Growing new business within client accounts
• Developing project plans, creative briefs and proposals
• Scheduling and managing production resources; in-house, contractors, and vendors
• Managing all day-to-day aspects of project estimations, planning, execution, invoicing, reporting and delivery for all types of marketing communications including, but not limited to; events, video, print, PowerPoint presentation, web and interactive production
• Ensuring that all projects are delivered on-time, on-budget and on-target

Skills &Attributes

• Excellent client services skills
• Strong analytical problem-solving and decision-making skills
• A team leader who values and fosters collaborative cohesive teams
• Excellent oral and written communication skills
• A working knowledge across mediums such as; print, video, web, mobile, presentation production, even management
• Ability to prioritize work and maintain composure under pressure

Basic Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent
• Minimum 4 years experience as a Project Manager within an agency environment
• Experience directly interfacing with clients
• Experience coordinating & managing creative teams
• Work experience using MS Word, Exceland especially PowerPoint
• Ability to travel, especially day trips to New Jersey on a frequent basis

*Please click “Apply” and send us your resume and PDF portfolio, or link to portfolio.
Thank you for your interest.

How to Make Corporate Meetings Pay Off – In Employee Engagement and In Business Results.

For many years, the goal for corporate meetings was simply to reduce costs. The goal today is to leverage the unique opportunity that only face-to-face meetings can offer to actively engage employees in growing the business.

One of the biggest trends in corporate meetings is the increased demand from top management to show results. With this in mind, businesses everywhere are taking a fresh look at corporate meetings.

“This is expensive!” “What are we doing?” “ Why are we doing it?”

And most importantly, “what are we getting out of this?”

Corporate meetings today can and must serve a clear strategic function within an organization and that function is to engage employees in the business plan for growth. This expectation puts specific pressure on the people responsible for organizing the event and developing its content. Success requires highly relevant content aligned with business objectives and delivered in such a way that the meeting actually changes employee behavior. And those results need to be quantified.

That’s a tall order, but if achieved, the meeting investment will result in an aligned work force prepared and motivated to carry out the business plan. This is the goal of employee engagement and a competitive advantage many businesses are trying to achieve today.

Using meetings to achieve a competitive advantage: A historical perspective.

Businesses have always sought new competitive advantages and meetings have historically played a role in helping achieve those goals. As the goals have changed, so has the nature of meetings.

The big annual meetings or conferences we are familiar with today started in the 1950s. Back then, corporations were looking to improve professional skills. They saw that having a sales staff that was better trained and more informed than their competitors was a distinct competitive advantage. Meetings were conducted as large, cost-effective training sessions. Content was paramount. (And jet travel to a new city was a prestigious, motivating perk for attendees.)

The next generation of meetings, which started in the late 70s, focused on rewarding and motivating employees. Many companies were experiencing labor shortages or losing experienced people. The new competitive advantage was to recruit and retain talent, hence meetings changed to serve those goals.

The meetings became a time for recognition, motivation, and team building. Most employees were used to travel, so budgets went toward exotic locations, beautiful golf courses, and high entertainment value. Employees were treated to a combination of professional development, personal growth, and pleasure.

From training to survival.

The phase most organizations are in now has to do with cutting costs. It started before 9/11, but accelerated after. In a challenging economic climate, businesses have needed to reduce expenses—not just for competitive advantage, but as a necessary survival technique.

Meeting content has taken a back seat to logistics, a word which has come to mean cost efficiencies: Where can we save or cut? Find the best sleeping room deal? The most central location to keep our airfare down? The meeting planner’s focus is on stretching dollars to keep pace with shrinking budgets. But this focus is now reaching a turning point. It is shifting from reducing costs to improving the outcome.

After nearly seven years of cutting fat, there is not much more businesses can do to reduce the investment side of the ROI equation. However, there’s a great deal more that can happen on the Return side by using the meeting experience to influence employee behavior. This is the new strategy for forward-thinking businesses and the new challenge for meeting organizers.

Employee engagement: The new goal for corporate meetings.

One of the newest competitive advantages businesses are seeking is employee engagement, and corporate meetings can be an important tool in achieving that goal. Employee engagement refers both to attitudes and behavior.

• In terms of attitude, engaged employees feel positive about their company, what the company is trying to do, and how the company goes about doing it.
• In terms of behavior, engaged employees are aware of the business objectives, understand what is expected of them, and are motivated to get the work done for the benefit of themselves, their coworkers, and the organization.

Even small improvements in employee engagement are well worth the effort. The Gallup Organization, which has conducted a large amount of empirical research on employee engagement, finds that 29 percent of the U.S. workforce is engaged, 55 percent is not engaged, and 16 percent is actively disengaged. While 29% may seem low to executives, Gallup research shows that if more than 29% of employees are engaged in the organization, its purpose, and in the work it does, then that company is likely to be among the most productive in its class.1

But, it’s not just up to the employees to “get happy.” If a company wants its employees to be engaged, it has to start the ball rolling and the corporate meeting is an ideal setting. Here, the collective energy of a large, diverse employee population can be molded and directed. Content is the key. This involves crafting key messages, setting agendas, planning the various sessions, and developing interactive content to drive engagement.

MossWarner methodology for developing, delivering and measuring engaging meetings.

The methodology presented in this white paper is appropriate for planning large corporate events or small team meetings. It is based on the experience we’ve gathered over the last fifteen years in planning and producing corporate meetings for a variety of clients both large and small. It can be used by meeting planners and organizers responsible for developing and delivering effective content.

Our methodology doesn’t contain silver bullets or rocket science. It simply stems from the practical and proven communications disciplines of branding and messaging and will result in a corporate event that:

• Is aligned with business objectives.
• Is relevant to and embraced by participants.
• Addresses the strategic goals of each stakeholder.
• Delivers a unified company message.
• Provides attendees with the knowledge, motivation, and tools necessary to behave in ways that move the corporate agenda forward.
• Results in greater employee engagement for improved business performance.

Plan holistically.

Too often, corporate meetings are seen as a once-a-year opportunity to download every single piece of information that managers want attendees to have. Multiple presentations combine into one great big fire hose from the podium, immersing people in their chairs. They can’t begin to absorb it all. They leave soaked, fleeing to dry land where they can forget about what just happened.

Getting a better return from the corporate meeting begins with clarifying its specific role and purpose within the context of an annual communication calendar. The meeting may be the largest, most expensive and high-profile event on the calendar, but it should be seen as just one milestone in a series of ongoing communications.

By having the perspective of the entire year, management can plan more wisely for what they need to have happen with attendees during that particular week and use the meeting for important leaps forward versus an annual deluge.

Why are you meeting? Before anything can happen, the meeting organizers and upper management clearly articulate and agree on why the company is spending so much money and resources to get everyone together. “Defining the objective” is Communications 101, but it is surprising how often this basic step is overlooked.

The role of a meeting will change from year to year, depending on what is happening in the company and what people need to know, care, or do something about. One year the annual meeting may serve to introduce a new management team, and the next be used to build cross-functional teams.

How can we make the most of the time together? There are certain things that can only be done in a meeting. Aside from meetings, companies have a variety of methods for communicating with employees: bulletins, webinars, intranets, announcements, and emails. Never waste the unique opportunities that face-to- face meetings provide by having attendees do what they could do back at the office.

Consider the many potentially critical opportunities that only corporate meetings offer:

• Face time with senior management.
• Making sure everyone hears the same message at the same time.
• Practicing cross-functional teamwork.
• Networking with employees in other functions.
• Rapid knowledge transfer and skills training.
• Leveraging economies of scale for introducing new products or new business processes.
• Soliciting real-time employee feedback. • Hosting motivational experiences. • Reinforcement from the top on matters most important.

Seen holistically as part of an annual plan, the corporate meeting offers a unique opportunity for unifying the collective energies of a widely dispersed group of people. Take advantage!

Determine key take-aways.

Many companies experience panic mode a month away from the sales meeting with everyone still uncertain as to what content to deliver. Too often, meeting planning starts with an internal email asking potential presenters, “What do we need to tell our employees?” Pity the poor attendees. There is a more important message, and that is, “what do we need the attendees to do differently after the meeting is over?”

Being audience-centric ensures more effective communications. There may be 50 things managers want to say, but the human brain will absorb and retain only a few. A good rule of thumb is to focus on three big messages that you want attendees to retain.

Engaged employees need knowledge, understanding, and ability. A good starting point to develop the key take-aways is to define what you want the attendees to know, understand, and then do once the meeting is over.

KNOWLEDGE involves facts. Knowledge may begin with the opening general session, but it will grow throughout the week as presenters repeat and reinforce the same vision. If done properly, the messages are consistent and employees learn where the business is going and why.

Many of the knowledge goals for an event can be accomplished in advance through pre-meeting communications. For example, a primer could be sent out before the meeting as a pre-requisite, allowing more time for clarifying Q&A at the meeting itself. To make sure all presenters are unified, it makes sense for managers to have teleconferences in advance of the meeting, so that they can come to the event knowledgeable and capable of reinforcing key messages with their direct reports.

UNDERSTANDING creates motivation. Knowledge has to do with intellect, and understanding has to do with emotions and motivation. Engaged employees need to understand what part they are being asked to play in specific jobs or roles. They need to understand what’s in it for them. And they need to understand in a way that is motivating.

While general sessions can foster group understanding, breakout sessions are a critical component to address more specialized and interactive topics.

ABILITY requires skills, tools, and organizational support. Come Monday morning, all the attendees a company has spent so much time and resources to gather will be back in their offices either doing nothing different or helping to execute the plan. Effective action, performed by engaged employees, requires that they are capable of doing what they need to do. For this, they need skills, training, tools, and organizational support. This is often the role of breakout, team-building and training sessions.

Two out of three equals failure. Sometimes a meeting agenda does not allow sufficient time for knowledge and understanding and just gets down to the business of training. But unless the audience is prepared with knowledge and understanding, training time can be wasted. For example, just showing everyone how to use new software, or how to complete new forms, can

be de-motivating unless it is clear how this new process fits into their job (knowledge), and how it will help the individual support the company and personally succeed (understanding).

All three of these dimensions are needed and should be the basis for key take- aways if new behavior is expected on Monday morning.

Know your audience.

True story: A CMO last year, waiting for his turn at the podium, turned to a meeting organizer and whispered, “I spend millions of dollars to understand what our customers want. Right now, I’d love to know what those people out there in the audience are thinking.”

Marketing and Sales departments all understand how critical customer intelligence is, but somehow this discipline of communications is forgotten when it comes time to plan the annual meeting. Messages crafted in the ivory tower won’t stick if they don’t connect with the individuals in the audience.

SEGMENT your audience. It’s important to see beyond “the audience” and understand the different segments in attendance. After all, each attendee will be expected to play a different role in making new business plans happen, and not all attendees come to the meeting with the same mindset and skill set. What knowledge and skills do they already have? What tools or training do they need? How long have they been with the company? Have they covered this material before?

There are a number of ways to create this segmentation. The information does not have to be granular, but it should be meaningful to what the organizers want all the attendees to walk away with. Some segmentation information is already known by managers or trainers, but more precise data should

be gathered well in advance through pre-event communications or online registration, where attendees create their own profiles and professional interests. This information will help organizers determine who needs to know what and plan the appropriate numbers, sizes, and types of sessions.

IDENTIFY gaps & roadblocks. Is there a disconnect between the mindset of management and the mindset of employees? Generally there is. But even if there is not, organizers can benefit by knowing what’s on people’s minds, what key messages need emphasizing, and what the roadblocks might be to employee engagement. Online surveys and focus groups can be useful for gathering information and insights.

GET FEEDBACK on the messages and the rough agenda. The early planning phase is the time to find out how the key messages and the rough agenda are likely to be received. Feedback from the attendee focus groups can help you design a meeting that they actually want to be at! Get their opinions now before the momentum of planning takes over and before it is too late to benefit from knowing what they are thinking.

Craft a message platform that harmonizes corporate objectives with employee mindset.

Key messages based solely on the business objectives from management’s point of view will likely fail to engage the audience. The trick is to unify the two sides of the equation; those being:

1. What’s on the minds of the attendees.
2. What matters most to senior management.

This step ensures that the key messages convey what’s most important to the business in a way that will connect with the various attendees. It’s often necessary to translate “macro messages” regarding, for example, strategic direction into “micro messages” like how this will specifically change how I do my job. It is hard work but necessary if employees are to act as expected.

When unified messages are well defined and well orchestrated there should be no competing content. When the vice president gets up and talks after the president, they should sound like they work at the same company. There is a common message platform that everyone speaks from and the attendees can connect with.

Message development takes time, but it can also save a huge amount of time by creating an overarching game plan. Don’t feel you have to set everything in stone and months in advance. Messages may continue to be developed and clarified as part of the process of putting together the meeting, writing the speeches, and producing the supporting visuals. The important thing to remember is to keep everyone responsible for developing and delivering content on the same page.

Use the entire event to reinforce the unifying message. Many companies overlook important opportunities to deliver and to reinforce content throughout the entire event. Take advantage of wake up calls, turn down service, creative in-house television broadcasts of key messages, placards in the dining area, daily newspapers, unique give-aways, and attendee packets.

Set and control the agenda.

Brace yourself. Building an agenda that engages employees is going to be a big challenge. The good news is that all the planning you’ve done to this point becomes your guide. You have your meeting objectives, your key take-aways, an understanding of the audience, and your message platform. These are the parameters that should define the agenda and help you control it.

The agenda should be structured in such a way that the attendees get the plan, like the plan, see their part in the plan, and leave equipped to act. This should suggest the sequence for delivering content and key messages. This plan may look different for different segments of the audience. If done effectively, everyone’s meeting experience should be tailored to what they need to know, understand, and do.

This methodology generally results in considerably more breakout sessions and different tracks for different people. Figuring out the schedule can be a considerable logistics challenge. But, if done properly, you can design an event that people wouldn’t dream of missing because of the personal advancement it affords.

Avoiding agenda creep. A major benefit of this process is that it gives planners power over “agenda creep”, which otherwise results in the dreaded “shut up and listen to my slide presentation because we have a lot to cover today”. This planning process ensures that attendees are not going to be subjected

to someone at the podium taking an hour delivering content not absolutely necessary to advancing the meeting objectives. Meeting organizers now have the solid rationale to veto suggestions that stray from the key take-aways or message platform.

Mix it up. Make it stick!

Take another look at your agenda and consider what experiences individual attendees are likely to have as they go through the week. Their experiences should be as interactive and varied as possible. Look not only at what they will take away from each session, but the best way to involve them in the process.

You want to keep people moving, learning, and doing. You don’t want them sitting in a general session for a day and a half. How many different formats are you using? What kind of adult learning methods are you bringing to bear? Remember, even for large general sessions, there are a variety of delivery options that can really bring the ideas to life.

Follow some basic rules, starting with “the brain can only absorb as much as the butt can tolerate”. In fact, research studies have suggested that the average adult can “listen with understanding” for about 90 minutes, and “listen with retention” for about 20 minutes2. So use the “90/20/8 rule” which suggests restricting any session to less than 90 minutes, changing the pace at least every 20 minutes, and including some type of audience involvement in the material at least every eight minutes.

Another basic guideline to consider comes from many educators who find that students will retain:

• 10% of what they read.
• 20% of what they hear.
• 30% of what they see.
• 50% of what they see and hear.
• 70% of what they say.
• 90% of what they say and do.

Interactive sessions take time! The biggest resistance to using activities (that most attendees agree are preferable to slide presentations) is the time they require. And yes, it helps to have experienced facilitators and well-planned sessions to ensure the time is well utilized. A good role-play session can take hours to go through the explanation, role play, critique, repeat (twice if using triads), and then summarize.

By controlling the agenda you can carve out more time for interactions by the use of pre-conference communications. It creates more time by not requiring everyone to go through every session; it controls time by preventing irrelevant or duplicate materials piling up on the agenda; and it uses face-to-face meeting time to its best advantage.

Make it their meeting.

For all the planning this methodology recommends, it is also important to keep content fresh and growing over the days of the event by involving the audience in its creation. This can be done simply or elaborately.

The simplest way is to solicit comments from employees throughout the day and use those comments to reinforce key messages later on in the meeting. On this point it’s important to embrace controversy! Don’t ignore the “elephants” in the room. When people see they are included in management’s view, tough issues are being addressed, and the conference itself is helping to stimulate ideas, it raises everyone’s energy and their commitment to a united vision. Don’t miss this opportunity by “canning” the entire content of a conference, or by finalizing it so far in advance that it is stale by the time the meeting happens.

A more elaborate way to involve the attendees’ perspective in the meeting content is to have video producers on site developing an ad-hoc movie of the conference that can be used in the final session, showing attendees hearing (maybe resisting), absorbing, and becoming energized by what they are getting out of the meeting.

The best summary, whatever form it takes, occurs when ownership of the corporate strategy transfers from the presenters to the employees. Everyone should walk away engaged, each knowing what they need to know, understanding what they need to do, and ready for Monday morning.

Measure the return on your meeting investment.

While mentioned last, determining what and how you are going to measure is one of the first things you’ll want to do. Corporate events need to pay off and meeting organizers are expected to show results. This is not an easy process and there are many different points of view on how to do it.

Senior management wants to know the hard ROI, or Return on Investment. As an accounting formula, determining ROI needs hard numbers. Meeting Planners International, in partnership with the ROI Institute, have developed a comprehensive methodology for quantifying the return on investment for a meeting. However, many contend that it is extremely difficult to isolate the meeting’s contribution to a sales increase or productivity gain as there are many other factors involved in success or failure. For example, a product launch meeting could be incredibly successful, but the product itself is fatally flawed. Does that mean that the meeting failed?

In addition to the complexities of isolating the meeting contribution to revenue gains or cost savings it should also be noted that not all meetings require the time, effort and detail required to develop a meaningful ROI analysis. Depending upon the scope and importance of the meeting there are different levels of measurement that can be employed. Each level has a corresponding set of tactics that can be used to uncover the results.

• Level One: Reaction
  This measures attendees’ (and management’s) perceptions and satisfaction with the meeting presenters, format, and logistics. Planners typically do this sort of measurement using evaluation forms during or shortly after the event. Attendee satisfaction does not always translate into achieving meeting objectives, but satisfaction has great impact on learning (level 2). A positive reaction does not always guarantee learning; but a negative reaction always reduces the possibility. It’s important to develop a historical perspective so planners can track improvements from meeting to meeting. This allows them to repeat what works while discarding what doesn’t.
• Level Two: Learning
  This measures changes in attendees’ knowledge, skills and/or attitudes. Depending on the meeting’s purpose, the focus could be on any one, or all, of these dimensions. Importantly, this level (and each level that follows) requires pre- and post-testing to track whether the meeting content was received and internalized. Most don’t do this. In a recent survey by MeetingNews, more than 60% of respondents say that they rarely or never pre-test and post-test
• Level Three: Transfer
  This level measures behavior changes evidenced when attendees return to work. This looks beyond if the message was internalized and ascertains whether or not the employees take action on what they learned. This requires pre- and post-testing, as well as on-the-job observations, management interviews, and an evaluation of performance reviews.
• Level 4: Results
  This measures the effectiveness of the meeting in terms of whether or not the business objectives were in fact met. As mentioned before, getting to these hard numbers requires much more analysis than the other levels mentioned above and it’s often difficult to isolate the meeting contribution to the achievement of the business objective. A simple way to determine the meeting’s contribution to results is to look at the investment in the meeting as a percentage of the total investment in an initiative. Then use that percentage to roughly calculate the meeting’s contribution to the revenue gain realized. However, this should not be construed with a true ROI calculation.

For any of these measurements to be meaningful, it’s imperative to establish some sort of baseline before the event so you have something to compare after the event. This is the only way to know whether or not the meeting moved the needle forward and the reason why measurement should bookend any event.

Of all the aspects of a meeting, the most important for delivering a positive return is what and how you communicate. That’s why the methodology outlined above emphasizes content over logistics. In the end, it’s not the location, the meals or the entertainment; it’s what occurs in the meeting room that determines the return you can realize.