Managing meetings deals with extreme amounts of minutiae that matter. Keeping track can sometimes be both a nightmare and a customer service dream. Kathy Ginder responded to one such experience with the diligence, dedication, and detective work typical of DWA staff.
It started with a simple dinner meeting.
“The venue I had sourced and contracted for a dinner meeting closed its restaurant without notifying us. I spent countless hours contacting individuals in the area trying to confirm that the venue had indeed closed. Then, of course, I needed to find another venue and locate the box of on-site program materials that was shipped to the closed venue.”
“After quite a few days and on the day of the program, I was finally able to get a hold of the carrier and we were able to have the box delivered to the new venue just in time to have the materials on-site for the program.”
Logistical challenges with the venues and the best laid plans are part of daily life for meeting managers and the project support services team as they work to keep the backdrop of the communications event in the background. And that’s where Kathy likes to be—in the background, making sure programs run so smoothly that the hard work behind it all is invisible to participants and even colleagues. She prides herself on being dependable and trusted to do what’s right.
Kathy started out as a contractor for DWA in 2001 and joined the company full-time in 2005. During her time here, she has assisted with several responsibilities of different departments, including fulfillment and transcription of speaker evaluations. Her title today is Meeting Manager, managing as many as 300 programs at a time. Since she can’t attend every event, on-site supervision is frequently outsourced to on-site managers who live in and around the program city, but Kathy is always on-call the night of a program. “Every day is different. I definitely don’t get bored.”
Kathy appreciates the family feeling at DWA. “I love the people I work with. We finish each other’s sentences. We help each other out. We work well together.”
When not at work, Kathy enjoys being a mom and daily cycling classes at her local gym.
Kathy describes DWA as “awesome,” a term she uses to encompass her experiences here as well as the entire DWA family.
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