Q4 Spotlight Department: Meeting Planning

Think back to a Texas REALTORS® meeting you attended.

Picture the meeting space and everything in it. Remember the building where the meeting was held and where you stayed if you arrived from out of town. Recall the day’s agenda and speakers, the décor, food, coffee, and entertainment.

These and other components didn’t just happen that day — they were carefully coordinated and scheduled by the Meeting Planning Department.

“You don’t realize how many details there are,” Member Experience Manager Ashley Liles says. “It’s not just housing and food. It’s coordinating all the way down to the audio visuals in the room and the live production schedule run-of-show. It’s how many microphones you need. It’s just lots of different things.”

The Meeting Planning Department coordinates gatherings from statewide and regional conferences to staff meetings. The numbers alone hint at the amount of work involved to put on informative and memorable events:

• 2019 REALTOR® Day at the Texas Capitol: two days, 2,201 attendees

• 2022 Texas REALTORS® Shaping Texas Conference: four days, 1,422 attendees

• 2022 Texas REALTORS® 360: Real Insights Meetings: eight regional meetings, about 1,200 attendees

• 2022 Texas REALTOR® Party and Leadership Summit (formerly TREPAC/Governmental Affairs Orientation and Board Officers Leadership Conference): four days, 386 attendees

Meeting Planning plans meetings far in advance. Pre-pandemic, the standard was five years ahead. Now, it can be closer to three years.

“We are project managers with a serious deadline,” Director of Meeting Planning Christy Coward says. “That deadline is when the meeting takes place, so we don’t have a lot of flexibility.”

Even with diligent planning, the department handles the inevitable last-minute changes and venue logistics. Team members follow up with stakeholders and tie up loose ends. “For an event the size of the Shaping Texas Conference, hotels ask for the full details a month out,” she says. “For this last conference, we got the details to the hotel a week out.”

The members of the Meeting Planning Department have only worked together for a short time. They say the best way to work with the department is to start discussing future events as early as possible in as much detail as possible.

“There’s no such thing as oversharing,” Liles says. “That’s our new motto. Any information you have about your event is great. No detail is too small.”

The team tries to keep things light amid all the details and coordination. They love to laugh together, like the time they were headed to a Texas REALTORS® 360: Real Insights meeting in Beaumont.

“We were in the parking lot of the event place, getting everything ready to go in. And some lady pulled up next to us, rolled down her window, yelled, ‘Girls trip!’, and drove off,” Coward says. “We just stopped and cracked up.”

The Meeting Planning Department includes:

• Director of Meeting Planning Christy Coward likes all different types of music from almost every decade of the last 100 years. She was a radio DJ in college and once hosted a party where she asked guests to bring three songs to create a playlist: favorite song, guilty pleasure, and best love song.

• Meeting Planner Sabrina Phelps is a native Austinite.

• Member Experience Manager Ashley Liles loves traveling, HBO shows, and bodies of water – oceans, pools, and lakes, in that order.