Learning from Other’s (Best Practices)

Like many of you, I have always enjoyed when a new program or initiative is a great success.  Of course I don’t always disclose the fact I borrowed the idea from someone else. I don’t feel guilty about it as I didn’t exactly commit copyright infringement.  I have always felt challenged seeing the success others have enjoyed and trying to figure out if and how that successful best practice might apply to my organization. For instance, if I am organizing an event for a group that is focused on diet and exercise I probably will not organize a make your own sundae fundraiser. However, if I organize a trade show and conference, I may borrow an idea from another successful national event like a sports tournament.

I recently learned USA Volleyball sponsors and organizes various successful national events each year.  I wanted to look at how they do it and see what I can borrow when organizing a large national trade show and conference. One thing I learned is they focus on what they are good at and select professional outside vendors to assist with the unrelated yet very important elements that are necessary to make their program a success. 

I learned USA Volleyball hires a tournament housing services company to assist them with their housing needs.  That makes sense and enables USA Volleyball to focus on inviting teams, setting up brackets, hiring officials and all the other things that go in to making it a successful event. The tournament housing services company can take care of meeting all their housing needs from selecting appropriate housing sites, negotiating rates, negotiating contracts, attrition and all the other non-volleyball issues that may come up.

So I went looking for a company that can do that for my association and I found Omnia.  Omnia Housing Services can do the same thing for my association trade show that USA Volleyball gets from their housing services provider. I can feel pretty confident about that because Omnia is managed by the same professionals and modeled after the same company that provides this service to USA Volleyball.  If you’d like to learn more visit http://www.ohsweb.org/index.html or post a comment or question here and I’ll get the information you need.