Meetings In Profile: Sharing Meeting Planning Best Practices Internally

Canadian financial and insurance company Royal Bank of Canada earlier this year held a meeting planners' conference to share best practices throughout its decentralized meetings environment, which already has led to better volume leveraging with hotels. An internal blog also was started to allow planners to communicate ideas and information.

Prior to the event, a business case was provided to senior management to demonstrate the financial benefits such a show would generate, said Jennifer Dela-Cruz, senior meeting planner for event production for RBC brands and communications.

Dela-Cruz, whose department handles mostly internal employee conferences, but also some public events like client meetings and the company's annual meeting, took the idea to her boss and they "decided to see, first off, is there a real need for it," she said.

Dela-Cruz found approximately 80 people in the company who touched meeting planning by going through her company's internal database and by reaching out to her internal clients and regional operating officers. She sent a survey out to those identified and saw there was a desire to share best practices.

She created a business case to show senior management the potential takeaways and costs, demonstrating the possibility of cost savings generated by planners sharing best practices.

Dela-Cruz's business case included obtaining as much sponsorship from hotel suppliers as possible. She sent a request for proposals to hotel chains, telling them to "come and meet the most influential people that you'll need to know when dealing with meetings," she said.

The Fairmont Royal York in Toronto agreed to host the conference, and other area hotels in the hosted meals and a reception for the day-and-a-half conference.

The conference was co-hosted with the company's procurement department, and each department contributed half of the event's $5,000 budget, largely spent on transportation and one meal that did not have a sponsor.

The conference, held in January and attended by 43 of the 80 planners that Dela-Cruz identified, featured moderated sessions on negotiating and working with the procurement department, as well as group discussions for the planners to share with each other.

"We took some of the hot topics that were within the industry—green meetings, professional development—and we broke up into groups within the room and reported back to each other afterwards," according to Dela-Cruz.

"It was a really good way of sharing specific individual ideas on the hot topics that are out there right now," she said.

The conference already has made an impact on the company. During the event, two groups realized they were bidding to hold separate events on the same days. They combined the events to leverage the volume, eventually holding them at the same property. One attendee has scheduled a conference for administrative assistants where one of the topics discussed will be special events.

The conference also included a marketplace exchange, where suppliers and planners could meet with for brief periods of time, much like a "mini-speed-dating" event, Dela-Cruz said.

Representatives from 12 suppliers attended, ranging from hotel chains to marketing product suppliers to audiovisual suppliers.

During the process of planning the conference, RBC also launched a planners' blog on its internal events intranet page in order to keep communications open. Preselected planners post anything from special offers from venues to professional development advice.

The blog can be viewed by anyone in the organization, which is good for administrative assistants who do not plan meetings the majority of the time, Dela-Cruz said. The intranet page also hosts templates for internal and external event planning, including an event checklist and schedule. A blueprint for planning a green meeting also is on the page, as is a standard addendum used for hotels, which includes a no-competition clause, a re-booking clause and proper force majeure and indemnification clauses. Dela-Cruz also is working with procurement on a meetings contract template to use with hotel chains.