Sterling Raphael is an entrepreneur, speaker and the founder & CEO of @NFiStudios, focusing on delivering innovative technology to associations and events around the world.

Being a meeting planner is a tough gig. You’re responsible for facilitating a meaningful experience for hundreds or thousands of people. For most industry meetings there’s the location, registration, education topics and speakers, keynotes, trade show marketing, awards, sponsors and more. And recently resources are not as easily afforded to planners due to tighter budgets, lower attendances and sponsor declines.

So how can one ensure the ultimate meeting by leveraging the voice of those who you’re planning for?

Crowd sourcing! Today there are approaches and tools that allow any planner to enhance their meeting experience by getting audience input, while also getting their buy in.

Here are some ideas and strategies on using crowd sourcing to select speakers and topics, as well as engage and involve your audience with live polling and keeping the conversation going after the meeting.

Speaker selection: NTEN uses crowd sourcing to pick their speakers. SXSW also allows user input for 30% of the speaker selection decision.

Topic selection: ASAE has an experimental site for finding out what topics they should focus on for their Association Now magazine.

Polling and surveys: There’s a lot of great ways to aggregate user feedback, before, during and after your meeting. Using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or embedding tools on your own site such as Involver, allow your audiences to have a voice from multiple locations.

Other approaches include:

- Using LinkedIn’s Questions & Answers to get feedback/buy in
- Using an app such as TwtPoll to launch a quick Twitter Poll
- Use text messaging (SMS) to facilitate audience responses using a tool like Polling Everywhere

Additional resources:

• http://mashable.com/2009/09/28/social-media-feedback/
• http://technorati.com/posts/_Y7f84WXiB3TFyaqHQKYWxaj7hhMh8Es_c8KBEquuiY%3D
• http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/10/6-great-twitter-quiz-and-polli.php
• http://www.socialfish.org/2009/09/crowdsourcing-asae.html