Technical Service Center

Client Support and Technical Presentations Office

Meeting and Conference Services

CSTPO can help make your conferences, workshops, and meetings more effective. We can develop provide attractive invitations, information packets, agendas, public involvement documents, conference proceedings, meeting records, other documents for your session. We can also provide facilitation and note-taking services during the sessions. writers and editors have significant experience providing decision process facilitation, based on the principles contained in the Decision Process Guidebook, which writers and editors helped develop.

Writers and editors can help you develop all your meeting documents. This includes communicating with you and other team members to write, review, revise, and edit your text. We can help you integrate material from a variety of disciplines into a cohesive, coherent, and consistent document.

We also provide the visuals you need (such as graphics and powerpoint presentations) to help get your points across before, during, and after the meeting.

Meeting and Training Resources

We have written and coordinated the development of a variety of training materials, including workbooks, user manuals, field manuals, safety manuals, and online help systems.

Expertise and Experience

Our staff includes writers experienced at developing scripts and materials for training. We have developed curricula for courses and workshops both inside and outside of Reclamation. We also have developed an award-winning process of online training, Decision Process Guidebook, for teams, managers, and publics to get to effective decisions.

We can coordinate a video or slide show to complement your training. We can help you present your ideas in interesting, informative, and cost-effective presentations.

Planning your meeting

The more you plan your meeting, the smoother the meeeting will go. Meetings are expensive and time consuming, so make sure that your meeting uses time and money wisely. People appreciate well run, professional meetings and this will go a long way toward building credibility, consent, and support for your actions.

Take some time to answer some basic questions about the meeting before you hold it:

Why are you having this meeting? What are your objectives? What kind of input are you looking for? What will you do with the results of this meeting–what do you hope to walk away with?
Who are the participants? Who is attending? Why? What do they know about the topic? What is their attitude toward the process, your agency, and the problem? Are all sides represented?
How will they be involved? Will they be giving input or reactions to plans? Planning actions to take? Developing decisions?
Answers to these questions will help you plan your:
Format. This depends on who the participants are, how many there are, and what they will be doing in the meeting.
Place, time, and duration. This may depend on how available the participants are, rather than the meeting objectives. Be flexible.
Agenda. You need a written and displayed agenda with times and schedule.
Presentation. Make an outline and decide on the best way to present information
Players. Who will do what and when?

Get the most out of your meeting. Once the meeting is over, evaluate the results of the meeting and how well the process worked and plan out how you will use the information you have gathered. Send this analysis to everyone who participated.