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to be able to do that — but maybe there is other expertise that they can lend.” Looking at the skill sets of your attendees and connecting them to a real need in the meeting des- tination is what Smith called an “interesting angle”

— and something Heisman agreed is a good idea. The meeting planner should try to work with “the kind of orientation or bent” a group has, Heisman said. For example, real-estate professional attend- ees might be interested in volunteering for a hous- ing project, she said, or a psychology group might want their efforts to go to improving children’s lives. “It’s good to get a cause that is a reasonably good match to what the organization does,” Heis- man said. “There aren’t charitable parallels for everything, but for a lot of things there are. There are charities that focus on education, the arts, and the environment. Charities are so diverse. You have to sort of pick big or small, and then pick what part of the sector you want to participate in. And then within that, you have to narrow it down from the whole universe of a million charities down to where you’re going to be and who is there and also who is willing to have you.” Kristin Bakota, CMP, meetings manager for

APICS, the Association for Operations Manage- ment, used those parameters to select a charity for the APICS 2013 conference next month.

“Based on the location of our conference this year — Orlando — we decided to partner with Clean the World to create a CSR activity for our attend- ees,” Bakota said. “It’s the first time we’ve done anything like this, and the idea stemmed loosely from the activity PCMA conducted with Clean the World [at Convening Leaders] earlier this year. We plan to start our tour at the Gaylord with a brief behind-the-scenes look at how soap is col- lected, and we will then bus everyone to the Clean the World facility to put together the hygiene kits [for those in need] on site. Since we work with supply-chain professionals, they will enjoy the process of seeing everything from start to finish.” While that seems a natural fit for APICS, find-

ing a charity and activity that will provide the most benefit to a community is not always an easy feat. “I do feel for a planner, because this is only one aspect of what they’re doing — and then we make it that much more complicated for them,” Smith said. “But I do think that it’s actually quite exciting when you think of the opportunity. Because the will is there — I think people really want to make a difference and want to feel like they’ve left a place in a better way than when they got there. I think that is a human desire.”

. Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene.

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