Becky Harper
A banner year for AKA
Nametags, brochures, signage. CVBs are often willing to assist with those meeting necessities, especially when the group is a large one.
That was the case when the Mid-Atlantic region of Alpha Kappa Alpha met in Winston-Salem, N.C., in early April.
The conference, with an estimated attendance of 2,800, was “a big deal,” for the city, said Marcheta Keefer, the bureau’s director of marketing and communications.
So, the CVB had pole banners and street banners made in the sorority’s colors, bright pink and green, to broadcast the fact. One of the banners was a four-by-30-foot custom welcome banner that hung across a busy thoroughfare. The CVB had arranged with the city to have it hang there.
AKA’s meeting planner loved the banner so much that she decided it should hang in the convention’s main ballroom.
The CVB went back to the city and asked to have the banner taken down several days earlier than planned and then arranged with staff at the Benton Convention Center to have it rehung there.
AKA’s experience shows how CVBs can quickly cut through red tape and maneuver through local channels.
“It doesn’t take as many layers, which makes it a lot more efficient for us than for a person coming in from out of town,” said Keefer. “If I was having a convention, I would have a laundry list — ‘Here’s what I need done’ — for the convention services staff.”
One way the Winston-Salem CVB is getting the word out to meeting planners about the myriad ways it can assist them is through testimonial ads from various meeting planner clients.
The current ad, with a testimonial from a group that relocated to Winston-Salem after their original meeting site fell through “shows how we handle and approach these issues, and it lets them know we understand and that we have faced these situations before,” said Keefer.
