When Visit Milwaukee decided to bring a group of national meeting planners to Milwaukee and wow them, planner Denice Waldhuetter got the call. A national planner herself, the co-owner and vice president of Professional Events and Consulting knew Milwaukee was up to the task.
Waldhuetter ran the resulting FAM under the heading “Experience Milwaukee’s Rich and Colorful Culture.”
“We wanted to make this a sensory experience; they see it, taste it, they embrace it, they hear it—we wanted them to be interactive,” she says. “First, we have a new statue of Fonzie from Happy Days, so we brought Fonzie to life. As guests were arriving from their hotels to their first location for a reception, we had a professional actor perform the part of the Fonz.
“Our next experience was that as they arrived at Discovery World, we had Native American dancers and drummers,” she continues. “We had created a fire pit and lights that were projected on the outside of Discovery World, and tiki torches...right on the front lawn.”
Once inside, boys and girls dressed in German dirndls and lederhosen gave the visitors edelweiss flowers and performed a traditional dance.
Planners then moved into the Les Paul’s House of Sound exhibit, and dinner was served in an exhibit packed with rock history.
“As people were finishing up their desserts, we introduced this group of Irish youths, very much like Riverdance.
After dinner the group went to an “afterglow” reception at the new Iron Horse Hotel. Just down the street from the Harley-Davidson Museum, the hotel caters to the motorcycle enthusiast, Waldhuetter says.
“It is magnificent and very non-traditional, with covered parking for cycles, and every room has a place [for riders] to put their leather boots, with hooks for jackets, chaps and helmets,” she says.
The next day, the group encountered a group of Latvian singers in the lobby of a hotel before heading to the new Miller Park baseball stadium.
The Fonz rejoined the group at the next property to hand out home-baked chocolate chip cookies, after which planners proceeded to the Milwaukee Public Museum and the Potawatomi Casino.
The group’s last stop was the Ambassador Hotel, where a high-energy African dance troupe awaited them in the parking lot before a final lunch.
Throughout, Waldhuetter says, the planners were treated to views of Lake Michigan, which is so vast that “you hardly know whether you’re on a lake or on the Atlantic Ocean.”
“There’s no one who comes here as a delegate for a convention who doesn’t find something they can relate to from their culture,” she says, “or they discover something about another culture.”
