 You are going to leave this week's video feeling motivated and so proud to be in the meetings industry. And in a time when our industry has been hit harder than ever, inspiration is what we need the most. I'm going to introduce you to five event professionals who are turning lemons into lemonade. These five people are creating some really special moments for our industry. Get ready to be inspired! Hey friends, it's Leanne and sometimes it can take a pandemic for us to realize what an incredible industry we're in working in meetings and events. Each week I seem to hear about story after story of event professionals who are being innovative and creative and turning lemons into lemonade and creating really memorable experiences for other people. Today I'm showcasing five of these incredible event professionals and my hope is that they would inspire you as you look to create something new in you. But before I begin, don't forget to hit that YouTube subscribe button and click on the little bell to be notified. Each week I create content for the meetings and events industry and I don't want you to miss a thing. So let's hear from these five event professionals. We're starting off with Jenny Ring with Cineplex Theaters and with PCMA Canada West. Jenny was responsible for delivering the monthly Hot Topics Cold Drinks event and of course it needed to go virtual when the pandemic hit. Jenny sure ran with that idea of creating an incredible virtual event for the PCMA Canada West members. Let's hear from Jenny. Hi, I'm Jenny Ring, Senior Sales Manager for Cineplex Groups and Events and Director of Events for PCMA Canada West Chapter. Today I'm going to be talking a little bit about how I have been staying motivated and using a guiding principle from of all places the world of improvisation, from comedic improvisation. Think whose line is it anyway. And that is to start where you are, use what you have and do what you can. And for us what this means at Cineplex is both internal and external. So internally making sure that our team stays engaged and we've been leveraging Microsoft Teams to host a daily coffee chat where we don't talk about work mostly, we have fun, we play fun games, we do silly challenges like wacky hair day to keep everybody engaged. Externally this means how can we leverage what we already have, the great technology we have in-house so that we can offer fantastic virtual and hybrid meetings in the future. And the same thing goes for PCMA Canada West. It's a really popular monthly networking series. It's called Cold Drinks Hot Topics where we visit a new venue in person every month and we discuss a new hot topic in the event industry. So we took what we had, which was this great series, this great, you know, community of people from across western Canada and we just applied it to a virtual setting. So we actually did a cocktail competition, we played some fun trivia and it really just created the hot topic of fun for the month because, you know, we had a feeling that the community wanted to get together and wanted to have a platform to just have these open and honest discussions and they did, it was awesome. For the four of us that were hosting the event we had a few rehearsals on Zoom because this was just a great chance for us to be messy. You know what I mean? Try out different functions. Does the polling function work great? Can we have four different hosts? How do we spotlight? How do we throw it to different people? And so I really encourage you, if you're feeling stuck, to go to that almost like startup entrepreneur mindset or that improv comedian mindset of if you had to start right now from scratch, what would you do? And just try to take the negative out of your mind. Go to gratitude when you can. For the things you have and for the place you're in and really just go from there. Next up, we have Ann Nguyen with Spark Event Management. Now you may recognize Ann's name. It was her tweet that started the global movement of GMID Goes Virtual. And while it was a simple tweet that started the movement, it was really her leadership and organization that saw the project through to delivering content to over 12,000 event professionals on Global Meetings Industry Day, April 14th. While GMID Goes Virtual may be over, she continues to create new initiatives with the newly formed Arise Event Collective. And you can go to this website here to view all the details about that. But let's hear about Ann and her experience with GMID Goes Virtual. Hi, I'm Ann Nguyen and I own Spark Event Management in Calgary, Alberta. Like so many of you, the COVID-19 pandemic has completely uprooted our company. What would normally be our busiest time of year has seen our focus shift to crisis communications, risk management, hyper-analyzing of our finances to try to keep the company afloat, all while still trying to stay relevant of service and top of mind with our clients, many of whom have had to cancel or postpone their events. One of the things that has been a great way for me to spend my time during this crisis is by trying to give back and serve our community and industry as much as possible. Just this month, I worked with 50-plus event professionals to take Global Meetings Industry Day Virtual. We gathered 12,500 event planners on a virtual call for 30 minutes in a show of amazing unity, strength and resiliency, and all of that was sparked by a tweet focusing on stories of positivity and hope have really helped me get through the last few weeks. I think the best advice anyone has given me during this time is for us to recognize and honor the complexity of the situation. You don't need to feel this or that, that it's okay to feel this and that in any given day, week, month, whatever it might be. This is a complex situation, a difficult situation we're in, and event professionals naturally want to put timelines and certainty and processes around things, which we can't do right now. If I can give you any advice to try to get through this, is to show yourself a little bit of love and show yourself a little bit of empathy. Let yourself have the space to experience all of those emotions and take care of yourself right now, and that's all we can really do. Third up is Miguel Nefs with Miguel7.com. I've known Miguel for years. We used to sit on MPI's social media guru team way back in the day at their World Education Conference several years ago. Miguel provided great leadership for GMID Goes Virtual, and he created a majority of the programming that all those event professionals saw on April 14th. Miguel is just one of those event industry professionals that you just cannot wait to work with, and we were so lucky to have him for this project. Let's hear from Miguel. My name is Miguel Nefs, and I am the Chief Social Strategist and owner of Miguel7.com. I got involved in a fantastic project called GMID Goes Virtual, and when we were kind of creating the event, we really felt like we were doing something worthwhile. You know, the event was volunteer-driven. It was a group of about 50 people behind the stage. Nobody got paid or anything. It was very much a grassroots effort, and I felt like it was very important to do this at this point because, you know, it kind of set an example in a way of what's possible, and it was by no means perfect, but I think it was a worthwhile investment of everybody's time, and it was an opportunity to kind of give the industry a big hug, you know, a big virtual hug, which I think is important and continues to be important. And to me, it was really important to do personally because I kind of wanted to test myself and test what we were able to do, and it was really amazing to collaborate with so many people, and we all got together as project managers and marketing managers and all sorts of different, you know, skills that were used, essentially from the events world, and transferred them into a virtual event, and I thought that was really, really, really powerful. I think it's really important to get involved with virtual online events, be they webinars, happy hours, any sort of educational thing, and kind of experiment with it and get a feel for it, because I think it's important that we embrace that or at least step into it and figure out the best way to combine those things and to really understand those things and bring them into what we do. And I would really encourage everybody who is involved in arranging meetings and the whole meetings, events, and sentence travel industry to really give it a go, experiment, and maybe find that, you know, there are things that you can do virtually that you can do well, and hopefully there's also things that will remind people that how great it is to meet face to face and how great it is to travel and see the world, and when we can do that again, then we do that even better. Fourth up is Sean Chang with MCI Group and PCME Canada West. Sean is a busy international event planner, and he found time to lend his skills to GMID Goes Virtual in huge ways. Sean is the one who reached out to all of the industry associations and got them on board to help support the GMID Goes Virtual event, as well as he lent his talents to the marketing team and the programming team. I'm so lucky to have Sean in my life as a mentor and as a friend, and well, let's just hear from Sean now. Hello, everyone. My name is Sean Chang. I am project manager at MCI Group, and I'm based in Vancouver, Canada. Because of my job as an organizer for international conferences and conventions, COVID-19 has been impacting my line of work really early. I'm constantly talking to the client at all levels of stakeholders, trying to do my best to assist them to make the best decision at the moment, whether it was post-poem or Pivot to Virtual. I believe it is important for us as an event planner and meeting planner to be the one our clients rely on for guidance right now. More important than ever that we as individuals now need to be engaged with our industry. We all need to ask ourselves a question, are you okay that life in an industry disappear after this? Because if the answer is no, then we need to do something. So on the positive side, I think it was very inspiring to experience how we respond to this outbreak in the past few weeks. Yes, it was chaotic and depressing with bad news every day. I mean, we're still in it. But many of us are showing resilient and kind and ability to reset and collaborate. There are so many amazing things about that project that I can talk about, and I just want to mention that it was a project that within less than three weeks of planning from the start and involve more than 15 industry professions from around the world. It proved that with a common cause, collaboration is in our DNA. And figuring out is what we do. And so I really like the ending quote this weekend from the broadcast where we work together at home. For tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for today. So let's make today's come. Last but not least is Heather Reid of Planner Protect. I've always admired Heather and her work with event planners, but what she's doing during this time is really blowing me away. I want her to tell the story of her initiative, and I hope you get excited for the final product, which you will see probably at the end of May or beginning of June. Let's hear from Heather. Hi there, it's Heather Reid of Planner Protect. I am the founder and owner of Planner Protect, as well as a small meetings and events agency called Innovative Conferences and Communications. Because of what I do, which is to work with small groups and event hosts, associations, etc. The initial first few days and first couple of weeks, I was answering a lot of questions. I was making a lot of referrals to legal counsel. About three weeks ago, I realized that I'm wired academically and I thought there might be an opportunity to really document what is happening in our industry right now as we quickly unravel and unplanned live events and move them perhaps to future dates or move them to a virtual platform or perhaps cancel them outright. And so I launched a national initiative called COVID-19 Chronicling the Lessons Learned. And I'm proud to say that I'm partnering with Heidi Wilker. And together we are going to interview up to 35 Canadian planners who have found themselves unraveling and unplaning their live events over the last four weeks or so. And we're going to take those interviews. We're going to use a series of prescribed questions and then document the lessons learned out of them and produce a report that we hope will be useful and practical for those that find themselves in a situation of canceling a conference or an event. For me, that's trying to find a use for this downtime but also a way of connecting with planners that have been through an enormous amount of work in the last few weeks. Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. And so I love that saying because I'm all about constantly moving myself, my business, my professional practice forward so that when opportunities arise that I can step into them. In this time, if you're, find yourself with time perhaps it's an opportunity to move your practice forward, move, take courses online, connect with people, move your relationships forward so that when, not if, but when our industry comes back online and comes back to doing live events we are going to be ready and we will have positioned ourselves to be top of mind and ready to take on whatever is in front of us. So that's friends. This is just but a small sampling of stories we're hearing about event professionals who are taking this time and running with it. And I suspect that you've heard stories as well and maybe you are one of those stories. I want to hear from you. Please feel free to share your story with me. I want to hear how you are turning this time into a time of opportunity. You can reach out simply by commenting below in this video or through my blog over at conferencesource.net. And conferencesource.net is where our event planner clients hang out to learn more about our complimentary services for event planners head on over there. I hope you're feeling inspired and I wish you all the best this week. Thanks everyone. Bye for now.