Companies today are focusing more heavily on
managing their strategic meetings and events (M&E) programme via streamlined
sourcing and strong policies to control spend. But a truly
successful M&E programme needs to go beyond these basic foundations. Here are
three top areas that must be fully realised to maximise the value delivered to
your business:
Stakeholder Buy-In
Developing an M&E strategy requires buy-in and ongoing
collaboration to drive the right outcomes. Start by identifying all of your
stakeholders: budget owners, planners, clients, senior leadership. To drive
buy-in, ensure your objectives align with your company culture and articulate the value of a managed M&E programme in a
way that resonates – find the “what’s in it for me” factor for each audience.
To counter resistance, focus on both the potential benefits and risk avoidance of having a managed meetings programme, for example:
- Regulatory: full compliance
with regulatory requirements, e.g.,
Sunshine Act, Sarbanes Oxley Act, Organisational reputation: reduce
exposure – manage contractual risks, insurance, document control/retention
for audits,
- Business operation: having the
right resources, duty of care, branding, competitive analysis, client
satisfaction, data security, e2e business processes,
- Financial: maintain control,
report savings, manage penalties, analysis
to understand full insight into costs, negotiation power
- Engage and
communicate: Create a task force with representatives from each
department/country, provide clear goals, and baseline and benchmark
progress. The earlier you engage and the more visibility you provide, the
more sustainable buy-in you’ll achieve.
Key Technology
It’s important to consider the role technology
plays in a successful meetings & events programme. For example:
- Attendee tools: With technology
advancing and providers merging, you can now source multiple attendee
applications from a single solution. Registration can be integrated with
automated approval processes, and mobile meeting apps can incorporate survey tools to provide
real-time feedback. Identify all of the technology touch points throughout
your attendee process before selecting any given tool to get the most value from your investment.
- Data: What data and analysis
capability do you need to have a complete view of your M&E programme?
Pre-meeting, you’ll collect registrant information, but what about their
behaviour? How can you impact registrant behaviour at the point of sale?
How are they using your technology? Do you have visibility into how you’re
tracking against your budget? Do you
have actionable insights pre/during/post event? Are you able to measure
and report ROI? The right data and reporting tool will enable you to
identify trends and opportunities for improvement.
- Payment and
Reconciliation: Who owns the payment and reconciliation process? Does it
meet regulatory or compliance requirements? Emerging virtual card payment
solutions can support the reconciliation process, improve efficiency, deliver
a more auditable and compliant process,
and feed into data tools to provide
business intelligence.
Attendee
Experience
Face to face meetings remain critical for organisations to drive their strategy forward
and achieve their goals. Managing costs isn’t sufficient to generate a positive
return on meetings investment: the attendee experience is critical to deliver on meeting objectives.
For example, if the objective of your meeting
is to promote a new product, not only do you need the program content to be
persuasive; you need attendees to have a positive end-to-end experience to
ensure they’ll buy/sell/promote your product post-event. New tech-based attendee
engagement solutions are gaining in their ability to deliver real-time, innovative, customized experiences.
Combining seamless registration, booking, onsite and post-meeting engagement,
will provide best-in-class attendee
experiences.
In
closing
Taking the core foundations of strategic
meetings management and combining it with these critical
elements of effective marketing and experience management, will help deliver
Meetings & Events program success for your company.
This blog was posted by Henrietta Balint, Director of Global
M&E Sales for Radius Travel, who is exhibiting at the Business TravelShow this month.
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