New Meetings Sourcing Demands Expanded
Skill Set 

As virtual meeting demand surged in the early days of the pandemic, meeting planners responsible for finding the proper technology providers frequently turned to Google—and not Google Meet.

“They realized the event marketing people needed something more robust than Zoom or Microsoft Teams, and they were really just Googling ‘virtual meetings’ to identify providers,” strategic meetings management consultant Betsy Bondurant said. Frequently, they did this independent of their internal IT, risk and security teams, she said, each of which could provide valuable guidance in vetting virtual meeting suppliers to ensure they could meet both technical and data security needs.

Try that method today, and an endless stream of listicles will appear, some of dubious origin, promising the best seven, nine, 11 or 27 virtual meeting and conference platforms. Perhaps that’s why many meeting planners said they still feel at sea in terms of the skill set needed to ensure program compliance from virtual and hybrid meeting providers.

“I feel there are so many options out there that it can be confusing to see what the difference between them is,” one planner said in an open-ended response in BTN’s survey. “Coordinators have to up their game and have a greater creativity and understanding,” another planner said. “[I’ve] doubled what I knew before,” a third planner said, “but many planners are still behind in knowing all the requirements.”

About 46 percent of BTN survey respondents said their organizations had purchased or selected some sort of external technology to facilitate virtual or hybrid meetings after 2019, and most of those who had not said they already had such technology in place.

The technology explosion has evolved the necessary skill set not only in vetting vendors but also in what’s required for successful execution. Many planners used to tackling such problems as avoiding long registration lines or ensuring a buffet selection could please all guests found that “they had to turn into TV producers,” Cvent CMO Patrick Smith said.

Now that live meetings are making a rebound, it’s only made the required skill set more complex. “It requires more technical skill and the ability to think differently and plan three events in one: virtual, in-person and where the two come together,” a buyer in the survey said.

Even with that complexity, about 59 percent of survey respondents whose organizations had purchased virtual and hybrid meeting technology did so directly with vendors, though 34 percent also said they used a mixture of direct sourcing and working with their travel management company. Very few said they relied solely on their TMC for sourcing the technology.

TMC expertise can be valuable not only in ensuring successful execution of a hybrid or virtual meeting but also helping to keep costs in line, said Linda McNairy, VP for the Americas at American Express Global Business Travel’s meetings and events division. “It’s become very confusing to understand which providers do what, so it’s become beneficial to have agency partners who understand the mix of technology versus service and have the ability to apply the right solution,” she said.

Some providers, for example, are standalone virtual tools, while others have more complex features including collaboration tools, gamification options or a mobile app for attendees. Different providers have different levels of technical support, with some handling such needs as rehearsals, troubleshooting and other services to ensure things go smoothly, Bondurant said. A TMC or consultant partner can help ensure planners are getting all that they need but not paying for services they do not need.

In some cases, planners might have no alternative. 

“Some customer IT requirements are so restrictive, it made it challenging for them to find their own tools,” said Kari Wendel, global VP of strategic customers and operations for CWT Meetings and Events. “So, they have to outsource to use it.”

Outside of such situations, the decision largely comes down to a planner and their team’s capabilities, along with the complexity of meeting needs, said Smith, who added that Cvent sees a mix of customers working with them directly.

Dawn O’Hearn, director of corporate travel for the American Red Cross, said that while “[Microsoft] Teams had become our friend” during the pandemic, she has been looking at platforms for more complex events herself, as she is hoping to keep some level of travel virtual even post-pandemic as a cost-savings measure, given that her organization is donor-funded. She said she’s taken stock of platforms used while attending other events, noting, for example, that Concur's annual event that went virtual in 2020 and 2021 had provided “the closest I felt to an actual conference in person.”

O’Hearn said she is also in contact with her IT team not only to provide more training around how to use virtual spaces but also to overlay a questionnaire over Teams that can see how many people would have traveled had the event not been virtual, which she can then measure as savings.

_{Measuring Success}

Regardless of who is handling the sourcing, virtual and hybrid suppliers must be regularly assessed, as their priorities can change, as can platforms.

“I love to speak to the founder or CEO or whoever is running the organization and ask, ‘What is your vision? Where do you see this going?’” McNairy said. “Some might be focused on individual engagement and enabling conversation, while someone else might be more focused on virtual congresses or speaker support, but it’s important you understand the future vision.”

Service-level agreements with vendors can help define success, though Bondurant sad they need to be “fair and equitable” and urged planners not to go overboard.

“Less is more,” Bondurant said. “Once you have to start measuring 15, 20 or 30 different activities, you’re spending more time measuring than you are actually producing the event. Determine what is critical to success and measure those things but stay away from minutiae.” 

Such basics include whether the event started on time or taking into account technical difficulties. McNairy concurred that reliability was key in SLAs, making sure participants are not having continually issues accessing a platform.

In fact, having access to such data is encouraging planners to enhance the way they conduct in-person events, Smith said. More planners are using such tools as badges with chips so they can track how many people went into a room for a session or how long they stayed, or they elect to forgo live questions in a session altogether and push everything through an app, he said.

“Organizations saw how much information they could get in virtual, and they want to bring that to in-person events as well,” Smith said.

While it remains to be seen how big a portion of the entire event space that virtual and hybrid events will occupy in the coming years, Wendel—who herself said she’s seen recent demand for hybrid and virtual events “fall off a cliff”—said planners need to remain educated about virtual options even if they don’t plan to use them. Knowing the complexity of virtual and hybrid meeting sourcing and execution, for example, can be helpful in an “elevator pitch” if an upper-level executive suddenly questions whether it would be cheaper just to move everything virtual, she said. And, as one of the lingering lessons from the pandemic, the travel landscape can change unexpectedly in a matter of weeks.

“They need to be savvy about some of the basics,” Wendel said. “We’ll see a resurgence in virtual meetings if necessary, and they need to have all of these things as tools in their toolbox.”