Interim-Management
A vacancy, a reorganisation or a departing director can stall a bureau at exactly the moment the market carries on without it. Plinth takes the role and keeps the organisation moving.
Temporary cover in a leadership or coordinating role: head of convention bureau, congress acquisition manager, a management team position at a DMO, or leading a single defined track , a major bid, a repositioning, the launch of a new programme. Includes team leadership, stakeholder management and accountability to the board. The aim is not to keep the lights on, but to hand the organisation over in better shape than it was found.
Commitment: every engagement ends with a handover document — what was done, what is ready to go, and what needs the successor’s attention.
Event Design & Delivery
Most congresses are organised, not designed. Plinth starts with the value a congress needs to create, for delegates, for the association and for the destination and works back from there to programme and delivery.
Event Design Sprint
Redesigning an existing congress around what its stakeholders actually need, rather than around last year’s running order. Facilitated with the Event Design Canvas, with the board and the programme committee in the room.
Deliverable: completed canvas, revised programme concept, implementation route.
Legacy & Impact
A congress either leaves something behind or it doesn’t. Plinth builds the programme that makes the difference, knowledge transfer to the local sector, policy uptake, involvement of early-career researchers and makes the results defensible to a board, a city or a stakeholder.
Deliverable: legacy framework with objectives, activities and clear ownership, plus measurement framework and reporting model.
Strategy & Advisory
Convention bureaus and DMOs usually know which congresses they want to win. Why they in particular should win them is a harder question. Plinth works on the answer: positioning, focus and accountability.
Destination Strategy
From positioning to pipeline. Establishing where a destination is genuinely distinctive in the international congress market, based on its local knowledge infrastructure rather than generic destination marketing and translating that into priority themes, a target list and a bidding approach. Includes the KPI framework the bureau reports on to its city, board and partners, across the portfolio as a whole.
Deliverable: positioning narrative, market approach, KPI framework.
Association Advisory
For international associations: destination selection, congress portfolio, and the business model underneath the annual meeting. Advice from the side of the table Plinth spent years sitting on.
Deliverable: selection framework, portfolio analysis or second opinion, depending on the question.
Training & Coaching
In this sector, knowledge about congress acquisition mostly sits in people’s heads rather than in programmes. Plinth turns it into transferable skill.
Training
Two programmes, both delivered in-house and built around the participants’ own congresses. Bid & RFP: reading an RFP, building a bid and presenting it, participants work through a complete mock bid. Event Design: applying the Event Design Canvas to your own congress.
Deliverable: training days, working materials, individual feedback.
Workshop facilitation
Independent facilitation of strategy sessions and network meetings: annual planning, positioning, collaboration between city partners. Plinth runs the process; the group supplies the content.
Deliverable: session design, facilitation, written record of decisions taken.
Coaching & Keynotes
One-to-one support for professionals in the congress and destination sector, newly appointed managers, or people making the move into international work. Alongside this, speaking at congresses and industry meetings on the international congress market, legacy, and the changing role of destinations.
