Our latest recipient spotlight of the IAVM Foundation’s inaugural class of 30|UNDER|30 is Dani Cole, sales manager at the Tacoma Dome and the Greater Tacoma Convention & Trade Center in Washington.

“We’re in an industry where there are always new trends, new technology, and new expectations that the clients are bringing us,” Cole said when asked what she feels is necessary for future success in the venue management industry. “It is imperative that we are continuing to educate ourselves, that we aren’t allowing ourselves to become complacent or stale, that we are always learning what all these new trends are so that we can create new and exciting experiences every time someone walks in our door. If we can do this, I know that we will stay relevant, we will be competitive, and that we will be remembered.”

One of the benefits of being named a 30|UNDER|30 recipient is a full complimentary registration to VenueConnect in Baltimore. However, Cole will not be able to attend because her two-year-old daughter, Emmy, was recently diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a form of cancer.

Cole created a CaringBridge page to help friends and family stay up-to-date on Emmy.

“If you would like to leave words of encouragement for Emmy or the family on social media please tag #TeamEmmyCole so that when she grows up and looks back at this time in her life she can easily find your messages online,” Cole wrote the page. “Many people have asked how they can help our family, here are two sites that that have been setup by loved ones. If you would like to make a monetary donation please visit http://www.gofundme.com/teamemmycole, or if you would like to provide a meal please visit http://www.takethemameal.com/meals.php?t=HSMZ2586.”

Our thoughts and prayers are with the Cole family and for Emmy’s health.

In accordance with IAVM policies and bylaws, the slate for the 2015-2016 Board of Directors is now available online. As in previous years, members will have an opportunity to cast their votes electronically in advance of VenueConnect in Baltimore, Maryland, Aug. 1-4, 2015.

“Members can read about the candidates online during their leisure and then cast their votes,” said Vicki Hawarden, CMP, IAVM president and CEO. “In addition, we will capture numerous more votes than would typically be counted onsite during a meeting.”

The ballot box will open soon, but in the interim take advantage of the opportunity to read all about those individuals slated to lead the Association during the next year.

I tell my management team and our part-time staff that the real purpose of my job is to help them be excellent in their jobs. Everything that we do as a management team is ultimately focused on ensuring that our front-line staff and their supervisors are put in a position to be successful. After all, the event day personnel are the ones that are face to face with our customers, our season ticket holders, our sponsors’ constituents. If they fail to execute, then the entire enterprise is a failure.

That mindset has always kept me interested and focused on staff training and development. I am in a constant search to find ways that we can better prepare our staff to meet the challenges and expectations that we have for them. They come to us with a variety of backgrounds and a spectrum of skills. And from this vast diversity, we seek to get uniform, high quality results. Then there is the other bit where we are limited on the amount of time and money we can spend on preparing them (training them) to do the job and the bit where they only do the job a few times a year (in my case the average staff member works about 17 events annually). Oh, and there is quite a lot of turnover. No matter how good you are, the event day personnel come and go (and go, and go).

So that’s the big puzzle. How do you take a transient labor force with a variety of skill and experience level, train them efficiently and then mobilize them periodically and expect them to deliver world-class service and experiences to your guests who have paid hundreds and thousands of dollars to attend the event? After more than 26 years of working at this, I have made some progress but I do not think I will ever figure it all out. But how I do love the challenge.

It is now June, and we at AT&T Stadium are preparing for the next season of events. We operate all year long, but the NFL season is the natural start of our event year. So the months of July and August are when we do a lot of event day staff training and ready for the coming 12 months of football, concerts, motor sports, corporate events, and everything else.

June is a chance for us to evaluate our training programs and make adjustments. This is our shot to again try and find that magic formula that will help us create that world-class service workforce. As I took inventory of our training programs, I came to realize that we had a big piece missing. And my guess is that most venue managers probably have the same piece missing from their trainings as well.

While we are diligent about teaching our staff the ins-and-outs of ushering, security, ticket taking, guest services, and the like, we have failed to teach them how to interact with our guests. Sure, we give them some guidelines—“Be helpful, smile, answer questions, be attentive.” But we don’t go much deeper. Why not? These staff members will spend almost 100 percent of their time interacting with our guests. Why don’t we spend more training time showing them what we want them to do and what we do not want them to do? Well, I intend on doing just that.

I have just finished creating a new training module entitled, “Communicating Effectively with Guests.” My academic background (albeit long, long ago) is in speech communication. So this topic is familiar waters for me. But the challenge was finding out what elements of communication skills training were best applicable in a venue setting, especially given the time constraints for the actual training session.

I arrived at a program that will take about 30 minutes to deliver. The communication training is built around the concepts of EMPATHY, EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES, and PHRASES THAT “WIN THE DAY.” The empathy component seeks to get the staff members to approach situations from the guest’s point of view. Far too often, we need to deal with staff who have been a little heavy handed or who have intervened in a situation only to inflame it. My hope is that we can stress the need to “put yourself in the guest’s shoes” and let that inform your interaction. The effective communication strategies component imparts some human psychology that affects communication. These are not haughty academic ideas. They are simple concepts like “Don’t tell people what to do; instead give them choices,” and “Don’t make threats; express appreciation and seek cooperation.” The last part, entitled Phrases that “Win the Day,” consists of carefully scripted responses to some typical guest interactions. The idea here is to arm the staff with some specific things to say that will get maximum results. The expectation is that the staff members will also use their experiences and this communications training to build their own phrases that “Win the Day.”

I’ve been in this business long enough to know that a training session will not ensure success. Training only becomes effective if there is systematic reinforcement of the training materials and active encouragement of the application of the training content. To that end, I have created a piece called the “Two Minute Drill” that serves as a training reminder/reinforce that we can implement on event day. Since we are an NFL stadium, we use a lot of football-themed things. Like the two-minute drill in football that is designed to elegantly use a limited amount of time to get the maximum yardage possible, the training version of the two-minute drill uses a couple of minutes from the supervisor’s crew briefing to refresh and reinforce the training content. The training program will be delivered as part of the staff training starting in July. Then at an event in October or November, we will roll out the “Two Minute Drill” piece on “Communicating Effectively with Guests.” We’ll see how it all goes.

If you are interested in receiving a copy of the “Communicating Effectively with Guests” training materials, I am willing to share. You can contact me at pturner@dallascowboys.net, and I will email it to you. I only ask for two things in return: No 1—If you have any feedback, corrections, or suggestions to my materials that I send you, then you are obligated to write or call me and share it with me. No. 2—If you have something that you have created and are willing to share, then send something to me. We must never take credit for someone else’s work, but we should be open to being inspired by it.

Be well.

(Image: Amy Wagliardo/Creative Commons)

I feel like there was a time when the media talked a lot about millennials, then stopped talking so much about them, and now we’re back to talking about them again. It’s probably because that generation is increasingly becoming the decision-makers at companies, so if you’re not paying attention to them now, you will be soon because by 2025, 75 percent of the workforce will be millennials.

Concerning venues, Cvent recently conducted a survey of millennial meeting planner sourcing behaviors and found that they value cost as the most influential factor in deciding to host an event at a facility. Older generations value customer service as the most influential factor.

“As the next generation of meeting planners rises in the work place, hotels and event venues need to better understand their behaviors to close more group business,” said Kevin Fliess, vice president of product marketing at Cvent, in a statement. “It is clear from the survey findings that both the influx of millennial planners and advances in event planning processes and technologies are changing how hotels compete for lucrative group business.”

According to the survey, 25 percent of millennial planners say that negotiations are the most difficult part of sourcing a venue. In fact, they want to avoid one-on-one interactions as much as possible. Other generations, though, are much more open to face-to-face negotiations.

One of the more interesting findings (and I think it’s so important that I’m going to bold it) is that 50 percent of millennial meeting planners indicate that social media and blogs are highly influential when it comes to evaluating a venue compared to other generations. They rely on online reviews, ratings, and opinions, compared to traditional media.

Visit Cvent to get the full 2015 “Planner Sourcing Report.”

(Image: Tech Cocktail/Creative Commons)

Back in March, I wrote about Brian Mirakian’s brilliant SXsports session, “The New Cathedral: Sports Stadiums.” In it, Mirakian, director of Populous Activate, illustrates how stadiums are being transformed into more than venues to watch sports or concerts. They’re being designed to foster community engagement.

With that, I’d like to point you toward an article in Fortune that asks, “Did this architecture firm save baseball?”

“Kansas City-based architecture firm Populous is helping baseball maintain its cultural relevance. After the new Braves stadium opens in 2017, Populous will have designed 20 of the 30 active MLB stadiums, while being heavily involved in the renovation of five others,” Chris Matthews wrote. “Starting with the construction of Oriole Park at Camden Yards in 1992, the company revolutionized not just how stadiums are built—with closer seating and architecture unique to the characteristics of the ballpark’s home city—but how the game is marketed to fans. No longer would going to the ballpark be just about baseball: now fans could expect there to be games for kids to play, bars where young adults can congregate, and a slew of other entertainment options in the stadium’s immediate vicinity.”

As Mirakian presented during his session, stadiums are “the anchors of our cities and will be reshaped as the focal point of city building, embedded into the heart of cities.”

Please read the Matthews’ article in Fortune to understand more about how stadium design is helping keep baseball popular.

(Image: Atlanta Braves/Populous)