Meetings management programs are under a lot of pressure to prove their value. They could be mature programs that have been delivering savings and compliance for years or newer programs led by marketing departments that instinctively know that meetings and events help deepen relationships with their customers, engender brand loyalty and influence attendee behavior around buying decisions. The challenge? They are hard-pressed to prove it.
Proactively managing meetings generates many types of value for organizations, including procurement savings, regulatory compliance, logistics enhancements, increased customer satisfaction, participant behavioral changes and increased brand loyalty and sales. They also create duty of care benefits like attendee safety and security, intellectual property protection and attrition penalty mitigation.
Unfortunately, meetings leaders generally have done poor jobs of articulating this value and now, as Marriott and Hilton cut group hotel commission to 7 percent, find themselves having to justify meetings management costs. Developing better value stories is critical for those who have used commissions to subsidize meetings management and may suddenly need to submit a supplemental budget request or charge meeting stakeholders for the costs of managing the program. Get started with the following guidance:
Procurement savings: Savings are created through a combination of meetings policy, standardized sourcing and planning processes, savings and demand management initiatives and preferred supplier programs for venues, A/V and ground transportation.
Regulatory compliance: Not every company is subject to regulatory compliance, but most in life sciences or financial services are, as are those that have facilities and employees outside the U.S. who interact with foreign government representatives. Creating not only policy, processes and procedures to prevent regulatory violations but also reporting to document potential violations and remedies mitigates the risks of noncompliance. It is becoming even more essential to ensure compliance as the General Data Protection Regulation go-live date of May 25 approaches. Penalties under GDPR legislation are truly prohibitive.
Logistics enhancements: One goal for meetings is to provide a positive experience for participants, whether they are internal employees or paying customers. Frictionless travel to events, seamless registration and sign-in and an enjoyable event flow significantly contribute to attendees' perceptions of the event. Measuring how logistics contribute to the program can be accomplished through surveys, especially in real time through event apps.
Risk mitigation: Meetings management provides numerous risk-mitigation components: It prevents duty of care lapses, ensures safety and security of event attendees and protects the corporate's intellectual property and attendees' personal data. Meetings management also mitigates fiduciary breaches like misappropriation of company funds and signature authority breaches. Each of these requires proactive prevention strategies, and some require additional back-end processes like audits.
Customer satisfaction: Whether an event is attended by internal employees or external customers, participant satisfaction is crucial. For employees, event satisfaction can have a positive correlation with lower employee attrition and can reduce the costs of onboarding and training replacement staff. For external customers, event satisfaction directly contributes to deepening relationships, brand loyalty and sales. New technologies like event apps, second screen technologies, smart badges and beacons are emerging to enhance a participant's event experience and capture engagement and satisfaction data.
Strategic value: This value category documents whether organizations are holding the right events, whether those events are achieving goals and producing ROI. Historically, meetings management programs have not clearly articulated ROI because of the difficulty in measuring whether the event goals have been achieved. New technology is making it easier to document participant engagement and satisfaction, session attendance and feedback, lead capture and overall event health. To document event or strategic-level ROI, goals must be clearly defined, metrics must be delineated to demonstrate that the goals were achieved and tools like attendee registration apps, event apps, second screen technologies, smart badges and beacons must be put in place to collect, consolidate, analyze and report on the data.