Thank you for writing us at the Community Tool Box with your important question, and please excuse our delay in getting back to you. It’s excellent that you want to develop and further strengthen relationships and partnerships in your community, and the type of luncheon you describe could be an excellent way to do this.
What will best attract community vendors to a luncheon? While the details may vary somewhat from community to community, in most cases some of the major incentives will be good food, the promise of a good time, the opportunity to network with their peers, and the promise of some beneficial outcome from the meeting. We should also include implicit peer pressure – i.e., their colleagues will be attending, so they probably should attend too.
In other words, people generally act in a certain way if they think they’ll gain benefits from so doing, which means you want to provide as many benefits as you reasonably can, and to make sure those benefits are well communicated. So in your place, we would want to make the event as special as we could within the resources we had. It may be worth investing some money to do this, if you have it.
For example, you could serve better-than-usual food, or find a distinguished keynote speaker, or maybe there’s some appropriate and fun local entertainment that could fit somewhere into the program. You could also make personal appeals when you can, suggest that their colleagues will be coming (if they are likely to), tell them space is limited, and give them a response deadline. It will also help you to be clear in advance on what specific outcomes you would want from such a meeting, and to plan the luncheon so that those outcomes are achieved. What follow-up activities would you want, and how could you structure the luncheon to ensure that those follow-ups take place? ,
We hope some of these comments may be helpful to you. Thank you again for writing to us, and all best wishes for a successful luncheon and continued success in your work.
