The importance of being prepared...

My wife and I recently attended an event where I saw a bad example of not being prepared in the use of media. The event was a cruise night where representatives from various cruise lines were available to talk about scheduling a future cruise.

The event basically had four components:

• Food
  
• Tables with brochures on sailings staffed by cruise line representatives
• Travel agents on hand who could book a cruise, research prices and availability
• A large meeting room with a video projector and sound system where each cruise line made a presentation on their particular brand.

This is the second event that we have attended with this organization. Last years event was very nice but was held in a crowded venue. This year's event was in a new facility that had plenty of space for the event.

We showed up and grabbed some seats in the presentation room to sit through several of the presentations. We had three or four lines that we were interested in, so we hopped in and out of the presentation room to get some food and pick up brochures. The first presentation began with a few words from the cruise line representative and then they started a DVD video. The volume level of the DVD video was extremely low. This room was as deep as our church sanctuary but the volume was only good enough to cover the first 5 rows. The rep starting fiddling with the PC playing the DVD but could not make the volume loud enough.

The second representative begins their presentation. I had decided that it was maybe "operator error" and that the later presentations would be better. The second presentation played with no audio. The representative did their best by talking over the video in an impromptu "slide show". The third and fourth presentations were without video while the owner of the laptop frantically tried to download software drivers on their PC because of the audio problems and because some DVDs would not play.

As a media guy a nice event became irritating to me. The technical problems that were experienced should have been sorted out prior to the start of the event. I felt sorry for the cruise line representatives who showed up one after another with no idea that their DVD videos were not going to play. As a visual learner, I would have gotten more out of the video presentations than I got out of the verbal presentations as the representatives made the best of the situation.

Think about what we do in church. Do our events ever have the sense that they were just thrown together? Do we have technical issues that could have been anticipated and resolved before the event starts? Could we schedule a dry run to make sure everything is working? Often times our level of preparation will determine the quality of our presentation.