A last-minute addition of wellness sessions made all the difference
When going to and from session to session during an event, it’s easy for attendees to neglect themselves: not being mindful of what they eat, how active they are or, simply, if they need a break.
This is something Melissa Paige, co-CEO of Healthcare Advocate Summit, realized. When she brought her annual event to Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, she decided to take action. Paige was three months away from her event when she decided to add selections from Caesars Entertainment’s Wellness Menu to her event. She almost wouldn’t have made the addition, had she not gone to Caesars’ Wellness Forum (previously Wellness Summit).
“We had to pause and think if we were actually going to go to the Wellness [Forum], if we had time for it. At the end of the day, we needed to make time for it,” Paige says. “We knew nothing about wellness. We didn’t incorporate wellness on our own, outside of exercising and getting those endorphins running.”
An Intro to Wellness
Caesars’ inaugural Wellness Forum took place in June, where the company showcased its wellness sessions and health-focused F&B to 100 meeting professionals and media. This is where Paige discovered that she needed this at her event.
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“Going through each of these types of classes—of meditation, of sound bathing, of the forest bath—I’m like, I have no clue what I’m even walking into,” Paige says. “But with each of them, we felt a little bit better at the end. I’ve never been to an event where [all the food] was healthy, like 1,000%—and you still got full off of the stuff, and I didn’t feel like crap.”
After the Wellness Forum, Paige says she and Elizabeth Johnson, co-CEOs of Healthcare Advocate Summit, realized they needed to figure out how to incorporate wellness into their next event. What they started with this year was three wellness sessions and a roundtable across three days—attendees had the chance to experience calm in a meditation room, a breathwork and sound bath session and morning yoga.
In incorporating these wellness sessions into her event, Paige says she was okay starting small, because she didn’t know what she and her team could do or who they could grab this late in the game to help support their wellness sessions.
Exceeding Expectations
After connecting with Reina Herschdorfer, director of marketing for national meetings and events at Caesars, Paige decided she wanted to run a meditation room for 20-30 people for three wellness sessions with Tiffany Zwinge Berger, owner of ZwingeWellness, who isn’t only in wellness but also has a background in healthcare. After incorporating these wellness sessions, Paige ran into a problem she didn’t expect: There weren’t enough seats to accommodate the influx of attendees.
“I’m like, ‘This is amazing.’ We ended up moving in a room behind one of our stages so we could have up to 90 people in there,” Paige says. “We had to Instacart yoga mats and all these things at the last second; I made that change 72 hours from our event.
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Paige says it went so well that they had some guests, like patients and family members of some of the keynote speakers, that wanted join in on the wellness sessions as well. “They’re like, ‘Can I sneak in the meditation or the sound bath?’,” Paige says. “I’m like, ‘You don’t have to sneak, walk in.’ She says she enjoyed seeing that surge of people actually wanting to do this.
Paige says what they learned from this first year is that they just didn’t have enough. “We’re meeting the attendees in the morning. Some people don’t want to do mornings.” Next year, she says, they’ll let attendees pick up yoga mats at the front desk and do something virtual. “Tiffany can be down in the room, but why can’t you do it in your room? In your guest room, where you’re comfortable. You can have your makeup off and everything.”
Berger says one question posed to her during the roundtable on the last day was how attendees can incorporate what they learned in their everyday life while working at their respective hospitals.
“Those involved in the session were able to reflect on what they learned in that session so they can use it through their everyday life. The movements we did weren’t just headstands, handstands and things like that. It’s stuff you can do at your desk, so not only were they doing it at the sessions, that they can use it while they’re at work or with their patients.”
Looking at Next Year
Given that Paige and her team only had three months when they decided to incorporate wellness, she says they missed an opportunity. Next time, she says they will get a pulse on what attendees want beforehand. “We need to promote this like any other agenda or session item,” she says. “We added it on pretty late. People had already carved out their agenda and sessions.” Next year, she says they’ll start up front saying that wellness is just as important as the other key things on the agenda.
“I hope this inspires more leadership to put their budget and funding toward [wellness],” Paige says. “You don’t have to go crazy with it. There are things that you can do. There should be no excuse why you can’t do wellness, even if that’s teaching people how to stretch in a chair.”
