Assignment
An international manufacturer, wanted to improve the value of their annual managers meeting. Feedback from their audience base indicated that year after year the meeting seemed the same, and that the content of many of the sessions was too general and was not tailored to indivdiual audience segments. As a result, the audience wasn’t receiving the specific information they were looking for to achieve improved results.

Result
Working with the client and our sister organization, MossWarner Communications, we radically redesigned the way the meeting was structured and a “back-to-school” approach was developed. The week long annual meeting now consists of only one large, brief general session, and the balance of the meeting is devoted to small group sessions with content tailored to the individual audience segments. While this approach greatly improved the relevance of the content, it also greatly increased the complexity of planning the meeting and scheduling the sessions. An automated scheduling tool was developed that:

1. Scheduled each attendee individually for the “ required courses” that were tailored to specific job functions;
2. Allowed each attendee to sign-up for “elective courses” to meet their individualized learning requirements;
3. Ensured that sessions were not overbooked and production resources were properly assigned to rooms and;
4. Printed almost 1,000 personalized “class schedules”.

The result was a meeting that met the specific needs of the different audience segments, provided relevant and actionable content for the participants, and much greater return on investment for the organization.