Volunteers are the life-blood of most associations and are crucial to the overall success of the organization. What is their time worth? How do you assign value to association volunteers? Quantifying the Value of Association Volunteers Recently I attended the Canadian Society of Association Executives (CSAE) annual conference. One [...]

Sponsorships The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has a published a guide GST/HST Information for Non-Profit Organizations; however, its section on sponsorships does not offer clear-cut information about sales tax on sponsorships. As an association management company, we add GST/HST to all sponsorships sold by our association clients, except under [...]

As an event manager, we are contracted by an individual on behalf of an organization who we refer to as our client, but most of the time we really don’t just work with that one individual on the event. There are usually volunteer committees, board members and other staff [...]

Your organization or association needs the protection insurance offers, for all of its events, even if you believe “there is no way that we could be at fault.” There are several varieties of insurance – read on to find out which (and possibly all) are right for your event. [...]

Have you ever been in the situation where the funding you requested to host an event comes in at the final hour? Now what? How do you execute the planning of an event without sufficient advance notice? You know that your association would benefit significantly by creating an opportunity [...]

Event planners rely on great vendors to make the events we manage a success. We are typically highly organized, type A personalities and we expect our vendors to be as organized as we are. I am sure you have some horror stories about dealing with vendors that maybe weren’t [...]

A name badge seems simple at first glance; it’s just a piece of paper with a name on it. But on that piece of paper is many hours’ worth of consideration, effort, trial and error done by a meeting planner. A name badge helps direct attendees, make registration simpler [...]

Event planners and event managers are often tasked with creating the food and beverage budget for conferences or meetings and it’s usually a very significant part of the total event budget. While at first this number may seem like a lot of money, it can literally get eaten up [...]

An event may last only a few days, but the planning process can begin years in advance. Many annual conferences begin their planning two or more years before the event date. For national conferences which move from city to city each year, the event planner and the event chair [...]

In our post-conference surveys we often ask delegates to tell us what their main objectives were for attending. One of the most common responses is conference networking. Of course delegates attend for educational purposes, but interacting with others who work in the same field, live the same day-to-day challenges, [...]