Author Archives: Kerry Rea President of GovEvents

About Kerry Rea President of GovEvents

Twitter: @Kerry_Rea | LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/kerryrea/ I am a business and marketing professional with an extensive background in company start-ups. I have 20+ years direct experience in the information technology, government, franchise, and construction industries. Having a passion for business, I love brainstorming, collaborating and strategizing on the best ways to achieve our clients' and partners' business objectives.

Halfway There: Looking at the Reality of Event Trends

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halfwayAt the halfway point through the year, we thought it was time to look back at the predictions we made at the beginning of 2015 regarding what events would look like. Here's a quick status report on our predictions: [Tweet "A look back at the predictions we made at the beginning of 2015. #GovEventsBlog"]

  • Virtual Events - webinar and virtual events listed on our site seem to be holding steady when compared to 2014 numbers.
  • Smaller Events - we have hundreds of luncheon, breakfast and table top events listed on GovEvents. Many of these are positioned as opportunities for networking within a smaller set of attendees. Some even tout the availability of the speaker for one-on-one discussions.

Continue reading →

Great Meeting Hotels

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Cvent recently came out with their rankings of the top hotels for meetings.  While we cannot validate all of their findings, we know what our GovEvents' members look for in choosing hotels and other venues for meetings.

  • Consolidated management - does the hotel offer A/V and catering as part of the full package? If not, they usually have a list of preferred providers. It is important to see if the hotel will coordinate with those preferred providers or if you will have to mange multiple points of contact. Ideally, members like dealing with a single point person at the hotel for all services offered.

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Gaining Time With Virtual Meetings

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Earlier this year we wrote about the decision making involved in deciding to plan and carry out a virtual event.  Beyond large events and conferences, a virtual environment can be effective for training and group brainstorming. In fact, sometimes a virtual meeting can be more effective than an in-person one. In this blog post from HP, they show that a 20 person brainstorming kick-off meeting was successfully completed in just 40 minutes as opposed to what traditionally would have been a half day event. By allowing participants to type in their ideas to a virtual whiteboard, all participants could concurrently see ideas and begin expanding on them.

This success in efficiency is not guaranteed; there is a lot of planning that goes into setting up a virtual meeting for success. Continue reading →

Introducing the GovEvents Member Resource Center

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We're proud to announce the addition of a new feature here on GovEvents - The Member Resource Center. This area of the site was designed to give our government and military audience access to lists of vendors they may need in their event planning and attendance as well as in their day-to-day business. With this launch we are inviting our vendor members to populate the resource center which we will promote to our 50,000 members.[Tweet "New feature on GovEvents--The Member Resource Center."]

Event-related categories on the center include: Continue reading →

Incorporating Continuing Education into Events

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The school year may be wrapping up, but in the professional world, education is a year-long endeavor. Many people including medical professionals, engineers, finance professionals, and lawyers require continuing education to maintain licenses. Even if there is not a license involved, many . Some, in fact, require a certain number of continuing education credits even without a tie to a license. So how do you build this benefit into your events?[Tweet "The school year may be wrapping up, but for professionals, education is year-long endeavor."]

There are many types of professional learning credits, but the two most common are: Continue reading →