Reporter's Notebook: MPI Spotlights Meetings Metrics

Cancun, Mexico—Many corporate meeting buyers now are required to show return on investment metrics, provide business cases before booking meetings, work with procurement departments within their organizations and apply strategic meetings management practices, according to panelists and attendees at Meeting Professionals International's MeetDifferent conference here last month.

Some speakers addressed how their organization's meetings teams are adapting to this new business environment and how they are embracing working with procurement instead of shunning their influence.

Deloitte is training meeting planners to become "procurement specialists," according to MPI Foundation chairwoman and Deloitte director Margaret Moynihan, who oversees the company's meetings and conferences.

Investors Group Financial Services' procurement department has helped the company's meetings team build more efficient processes and develop business cases for meetings, according to Angie Pfeifer, assistant vice president of corporate meetings, incentives and travel at the Winnipeg-based company.

"They still value what you bring to the table as meeting professionals," she said. "We need to put some input into this. It's not all about the numbers."

The meetings team's success came from providing management with a clear financial picture of the benefits the company was gaining from holding meetings and not drastically cutting events during the economic downturn, she said. "We have done a really good job of defining how we move the business forward," Pfeifer said. "That directly goes down to the bottom line."

* * *

MPI at the conference announced new research initiatives, educational formats and efforts to standardize meetings-related business performance metrics.

Reed Travel Exhibitions and the MPI Foundation announced a research partnership to develop a report and standards on measuring the business performance of meetings, with results to be released at the Americas Incentive, Business Travel & Meetings Exhibition as part of America Meetings Week in Baltimore in June 2011, said MPI president and CEO Bruce MacMillan. The agreement also will drive the development of educational content focused on the business of meetings for other Reed events in Barcelona, Abu Dhabi and Beijing.

"If you want your ideas acted on or listened to, you have to have a business case for it," MacMillan told BTN. "We are really pushing the whole language-of-business initiative because that is where this is all going. It's got to drive performance."

The association also continues to change its global knowledge plan, the educational road map for professional certifications. Part of the change is an attempt to build global industry standard meetings management practices, such as ROI measurement and education through expanding university partnerships, which are already in Canada, France, Hong Kong, Qatar and the United States and developing an executive leadership program for senior management, according to Eli Gorin, president of GMeetings and founder of Train2Meet.

InterContinental Hotels Group announced a five-year, $500,000 donation to the MPI Foundation to fund research, the development of standards and educational content focused on corporate social responsibility and tools to help evaluate meeting program performance. The foundation said it would build a "sustainable meeting and event training program and a recognized CSR meeting and event measurement platform."

"Corporate social responsibility is an area that our industry has been behind on," said MacMillan. "In a recession, corporate social responsibility is even more important in some organizations because people want the credibility of their organizations to resonate with customers. It has to go from end to end, and meetings and events are a part of it."

* * *

Throughout the conference, which had more than 1,100 attendees, planners discussed adoption of virtual technology.

Instead of holding a large meeting last year, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based software company Ariba hosted a virtual event, which then expanded into a six-city physical event tour.

"Now that we are doing it again and back to our normal 1,500-person meeting, we are having virtual elements with it," said senior manager of global corporate events Traci Oziemblowsky. "Having the extension of our reach is huge. If we can get 1,500 people in the seats and an additional 500 or 600 people watching, it is huge for us at not a huge cost."

Deloitte is evaluating virtual options particularly for some training events, Moynihan said.

"We are doing a much better job of evaluating whether we should be having a meeting where people would just get together for the sake of getting together," she said. "That's what we are learning. It's not a matter of having a face-to-face meeting or not a face-to-face meeting. It's making us a lot smarter. Its very different than when teleconferencing came in and everybody thought this was going to take away the business. It didn't take away the business, but we are getting smarter in how we deliver the programs."

Liberty Mutual has used the technology for several years, but Lark Nemerever, senior meeting planner for its Agency Markets division, is skeptical of replacing meetings with virtual formats.

"We have plenty of it going on at the company to save on airfare, but at the same time I don't know if it is important to have the visual," she said. "You can do teleconferencing, which is just as good."