Destination Dayton is excited and honored to offer the first of several guest blogs from noted meetings industry expert Joan Eisenstodt. Joan is a pioneer and a trendsetter in the meeting, convention, and exhibition industry. During her career and consultancy, she has helped clients with, and taught others about, conference planning and management support, with focus on ethics, contracts, risk management, and better learning methods. Joan has been honored by MPI, PCMA, PCMA Foundation, HSMAI, and NSA, and as a 2004 inductee into the Events Industry Council Hall of Leaders, considered the industry's highest honor. We thank her for being willing to offer our readers her experience and insights.
Fall has arrived, and the holiday season and winter will soon be upon us. Unlike the seasons of the year, planning and holding meetings and events has no one season. We plan year ‘round: as soon as the current meeting is completed, we have already begun planning the next, or in the case of association and corporate planners, we are planning more than one at a time.
We learn and build on what we’ve experienced to bring people together to share memories at reunions (school, military, family), build skills (crafting, professional and work), and learn (new product introductions, educational meetings.) My goal with these guest blogs is to provide some ideas from a lifetime of planning, and to answer your questions* or, if I’m unsure, to provide resources of where to learn more. I’ll explore too careers in hospitality, a field into which I was, I think, destined, and fell and stayed.
Whether a volunteer or paid staff of a company or an organization, or the family or community member everyone says plans the best events, you have lots of responsibilities when planning a meeting or event. Among those responsibilities are determining dates and budget, selecting the destination (city), venue (hotel, convention center, museum, restaurant, or other location), writing the RFP (request for proposal), negotiating a contract, and every detail of what will happen from that point on until the lights are out after the last aspect of the meeting or event. Adding to your knowledge, whether you are credentialed in meeting planning or in other fields of the industry, or brand new to planning your first high school reunion, there is still learning every day and new considerations and resources to help. These blogs, in addition to the help from the staff at Destination Dayton or another DMO/CVB (destination marketing organization or convention and visitors bureau) will, I hope, make it a wee bit less stressful.
To begin, a bit about me:
My name is Joan Eisenstodt. I’m a native Daytonian born of a native Daytonian who was also born of one native and one immigrant from Eastern Europe. My Dayton roots and experiences are what helped me become a meeting professional.
At Jefferson Elementary in Dayton View, I volunteered for the school activities and was student council president. During my earliest years, as a “Polio Pioneer”, I received the vaccination and my friend and neighbor, Alan, got the placebo and polio. I began by creating street fairs to raise money for polio research. Oh, the events were grand: apple bobbing, marble playing competition, and like activities of the 1950s.
Then to Colonel White High School where some of my favorite activities in addition to classes were service clubs. I volunteered at the Dayton YWCA for Y-Teens, and embarrassingly I can only remember our Mikesell’s potato chip sales and not our activities to benefit the communities! The camaraderie of other young women from across Dayton still lives in me. Too, I was a delegate from our Y-Teen chapter to the state conclave held at Ohio Wesleyan University. Remarkably, I reconnected with a friend from those years who was from another Ohio city. The joys of social media! We are as alike now as
we were then, our values very much formed by our volunteering for the YWCA. And I was fortunate to have the best teachers ever. One, the artist Willis “Bing” Davis, allowed me, though I didn’t take art, to sit in his classroom during study hall to absorb culture. I mention Bing because I cherish him and he has a studio in the very active arts community in Dayton, another place to visit when you hold your events in Dayton.
During high school, I worked at a stand in the old Arcade – then, not the exquisite restored building it has become – on weekends and holidays. It was demanding work, standing on my feet all day and lifting food to the scales, using my math skills to calculate prices, bagging up and smiling at customers, regardless of their requests. I was clearly honing my skills for working as a meeting professional, to be pleasant and accommodating no matter the repeated questions (“Where are the restrooms?”), while standing under the sign noting they were right there!
After a year at college in Iowa, I returned and in addition to my job, I volunteered at the still magnificent Dayton Art Institute, an absolute gem of the Gem City. The neatest experience was creating, with Meredith Moss (who went on to become a noted writer for the Dayton Daily News), to celebrate the US bicentennial, a weekend of arts – visual, handcrafts, and performing – inside and outside every hour in every gallery. It was free to the public, and it was a hit!
I moved from Dayton in 1978 to Washington, DC, to work in the non-profit world. I’ve been back to Dayton to see family and for high school reunions of our now sadly torn- down high school. My ties are deep; I subscribe to the Dayton Daily News to keep abreast of what goes on in Dayton. My hometown, and I hope the home of your next meeting or event, is the source of who I’ve become as an honored meeting professional, and since honored for lifetime achievement as an industry educator and other honors.
That background is all relevant to my writing, as a gift, to and for Destination Dayton. Like many others with Dayton roots, I want to give back and help sustain the city in which we gained so much. It is a privilege to help others in their planning and management of meetings and events and to support Destination Dayton as a place for you to consider for your meetings and events. If NATO can hold a meeting in my hometown, then surely others can too.
*Joan will respond to questions asked via social media or sent to info@destinationdayton.org in her upcoming blogs. Note that her advice will be that of a meeting professional and not of a lawyer for any legal advice even though she became, and was, for 30 years of her career, an expert witness in meetings industry legal disputes. She will provide resources for more information about contracts, general guidelines, and items to add to your checklists for planning and managing meetings and events from the experiences she and colleagues have had.