Beyond the Beltway: Great Spots for Government Meetings

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While DC is the hub for federal government, there are many areas across the U.S. that have large concentrations of government employees. This post is the first in a series that will go on to highlight other cities and venues in those cities to consider for events.

As we've detailed, government travel budgets are tight as are people's schedules. By breaking up large, national events into smaller regional events you may end up attracting more participants. To maintain the great networking that happens at national events, consider webcasting certain sessions or creating an online spot where attendees across the country can post their take aways from each event and share questions with one another.

Some locations we plan to highlight are San Diego, Colorado Springs, San Antonio, and Atlanta. We're open to any other suggestions of places you'd like to see highlighted. What success have you had with government events outside of metro DC?

Image courtesy Melissa and Doug

FedBizBeat’s Q&A with GovEvents President Kerry Rea

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Originally posted on FedBizBeat by Joyce Bosc

Kerry Rea, president of GovEvents, has many years of experience working in the government marketplace. She took the time to talk with FedBizBeat about government events and the trends for 2014, as well as, how to promote your event using social media.

1. Can you tell us a little about GovEvents? GovEvents is the online resource for all government- and military-related events worldwide. Government and military personnel can find events to attend, government contractors and primes can find events that they'd like to exhibit at/sponsor, and the government event organizer community has a place to post all of their government-related events for free! We have over 34,000 GovEvents members (adding over a 1,000 new members a month!), and the GovEvents community adds about 400 new events to the site each month.

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Meet the “Meet-up”

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At a recent gathering of FOSE speakers and Federal IT bloggers, there was a lot of discussion around the tightening of budgets and the impact that has on event attendance. A suggestion was made to stop calling your events "events" or "conferences" or "seminars" and call it a "meet-up." More than just changing the name, the idea of a meet-up is a smaller, more intimate, more tightly scheduled  gathering. Govies reported they are better able to get approval to attend these smaller events because of the lighter time and financial commitment.

For marketers and event planners this means really looking at your event schedule. Can you break up your big once a year event into smaller, more focused, and more frequent events? You can still get the economies of scale in bulk ordering and material creation (likely each event will need the same "stuff") and potentially you can save on venue and catering costs by moving to smaller locations (check out some of our suggestions for DC area lunch venues).

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Improving Training at Your Agency Just Got A Lot Easier

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Originally posted on GovExec.com by Eric Katz

Two federal agencies announced on Monday a joint effort to boost training and other human capital services for agencies across government, saying the move would save money and improve human resources support.

The Office of Personnel Management has partnered with the General Services Administration to create a contract vehicle that will ease the process for agencies to hire private companies for HR consulting. While OPM and GSA are still finalizing the details of the arrangement, a memorandum of understanding signed Monday spelled out a system that eases agencies away from the acquisition process for their human capital needs.

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It’s Time to Stretch Into Hybrid Government Meetings

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Extending a meeting over the internet ("online" or "hybrid" conference/meeting extensions) means broadcasting meeting content in a way that remote attendees - in the U.S. and potentially worldwide - can securely access the presentations, interact with the presenters, discuss the topics online,  chat & network amongst themselves, and access archives of the conference/meeting sessions afterwards.

Here are the top "myths" I hear from government meeting planners:

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