Every November, Thrivent Financial invites financial representatives to its National Sales Meeting at the Minneapolis Convention Center. The meeting is critical, allowing the company to deliver messaging and motivation for the year ahead, education for reps to grow their businesses, and opportunities for peer-to-peer sharing and relationship-building with executives. It’s all designed to help attendees boost production—and it works.

Thrivent Financial’s Steph Pfeilsticker, CMP, CMM, launched the company’s first-ever hybrid meeting.

All reps are invited, with travel and registration expenses reduced or eliminated for those at certain qualification levels. But only 40 percent of the field attends. So what about the other 60 percent who are not getting the education, motivation, and corporate messaging the annual meeting delivers? Steph Pfeilsticker, CMP, CMM, senior event planner, thought about that, and hit upon a big idea.

Inspired by a presentation she’d seen on hybrid meetings, she pitched adding a virtual component to Thrivent’s National Sales Meeting as a way to reach the reps who didn’t come to the meeting in person. “The business case was to give our financial representatives the tools to grow their business,” she says.

The result? Of the 1,300 potential remote attendees, she attracted an amazing 450 registrants. Of those, more than 300 stayed with the programming from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. for two days. “We were thrilled to see West Coast reps online at 5:30 a.m. because they didn’t want to miss anything,” Pfeilsticker notes. With that kind of response, the success of the venture was immediately clear. Of course, that success was more than a year in the making, and not without challenges.

“At first I was reluctant to add the virtual edition to our National Sales Meeting,” says Bill Idzorek, director, field development and consulting, and chairman of the National Sales Meeting. “In my mind it was added cost with an uncertain return; however, as planning proceeded I became more comfortable with the idea, and the final results well exceeded my expectations. The virtual edition to the 2011 NSM allowed us to expand the number of participants by over 40 percent in a highly effective and cost-efficient manner.”

A Hybrid Meeting Business Plan
Pfeilsticker knew she was going out on a limb, so she supported her idea with a lot of homework. “I wrote a 46-page business plan to answer every possible question and did three months of research before I stepped into Dan’s office,” says Pfeilsticker. (Dan Young, CMP, leads Thrivent’s event planning department.)

The business plan covered three main areas: logistics, marketing, and costs. Pfeilsticker breaks it down:

1. Marketing—“The marketing section presented evidence that could unequivocally ‘sell’ the project. I included production data on reps who attended versus those who didn’t attend to clearly demonstrate the business need for a virtual element. I also presented several analyses including geographical attendance, SWOT [strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats], market positioning, and market differentiation. Marketing strategy was another significant focus. Defining our target market, marketing segments, and marketing mixes were essential to allowing the ultimate decision-maker to understand who could best use this new medium of education. I also outlined our marketing objectives and the timelines for marketing efforts.”

2. Financials—“Three years of financial data was included in the plan in the form of income statements, statement of cash flows, and balance sheets. A break-even analysis showed minimum needs for participation to pay for the event. While complex, this is essential information to show your stakeholders that you understand the financial impact of adding a virtual event.”

3. Operations—“The operations section detailed the ‘who’ and ‘how’ of the virtual meeting. Team members such as the technology partner, virtual emcee, technology consultants, and the audiovisual production team were identified in an organizational chart. I also showed how all of these partners would work with one another.” The plan also covered the expected outcomes. One common concern with hybrid meetings is that live attendance will decrease. Why attend, the thinking goes, if you can get the content by sitting in your own office? In fact, says Pfeilsticker, virtual components often drive attendance at live events. So she made that one of her goals: By showing nonattendees what the face-to-face meeting is like—letting them hear the buzz, experience the content, and see some of the action—she hoped to inspire the remote attendees to want to attend in person in future years.

Next Page: Read about Thrivent's 44-page "Agenda and Idea Notebook" for virtual attendees