New Orleans Spurs Mtgs.' Community Service Focus

Large corporate events can be a significant revenue boost for the communities they visit, but some companies are looking to give back more personal contributions to their host cities. Community service projects for attendees are in hot demand, especially in New Orleans, where rebuilding efforts continue after last year's devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.

St. Louis-based meetings and incentive travel management provider Maritz Inc. in May held its annual global sales conference to New Orleans specifically to support the local events industry. During the conference, attendees spent a day rebuilding local City Park and the company donated $50,000 to the community.

Christine Duffy, president and CEO of subsidiary Maritz Travel, said Maritz consultants also would promote the city and community service projects there when working with customers.

"In the conversations I've had with customers about New Orleans as a destination, if people want to come here they want to make giving back part of the program," Duffy said. "Right now, if you're going to bring a group here, they're going to want to see what happened. It's a historical event. People want to be able to give back."

Though community service events may seem like an easy add-on to an event, Duffy said a third-party facilitator might be the best option for corporations. Maritz partnered with Chesterfield, Mo.-based non-profit Service International to make the project arrangements.

"People think it's a simple thing to bring 500 people and do a community project, but there's a lot of planning, organization and logistics that have to go into being able to have a productive experience where you actually do leave something positive behind," Duffy said.

Philanthropy also can be an important image boost for companies in the wake of high-profile cases of corporate malfeasance and Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, she said.

"It makes New Orleans an easier sell in this environment, and it is a better value. That's the reality. If there was a premium, people might question it," Duffy said.

The first national conference in the city since Katrina was the annual summer conference of the American Library Association, held last month. It was attended by 17,000 librarians and exhibitors and more than 900 attendees volunteered to help paint, sort books and clean the city's public libraries.

"One of the most amazing aspects of this conference has been the opportunity to spend time working shoulder to shoulder with our library colleagues and others working to ensure our public, school and academic libraries are restored to the people of New Orleans," said ALA president Leslie Burger in a release.

"We're being reached out to by corporations across the country," said Stephen Perry, president and CEO of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau. The bureau aims to launch a new marketing effort aimed at the corporate meetings market, which Perry identified as the city's fastest-growing segment of incoming business.

The bureau has created a list of the city's most well-established charitable and nonprofit organizations, and information about how to contribute to them, according a bureau release.

After Katrina, $2 billion in meetings business was cancelled in the city. The local Louis Armstrong International Airport is at 77 percent of the pre-storm level of cities it serves, and Perry said airlift into the city should be back to normal by year-end.

Strategic Hotels & Resorts, which owns the New Orleans Hyatt, among other properties, on May 30 announced plans for a major downtown revitalization project to include a renovated Hyatt hotel, according to the bureau. Of 140 metropolitan-area hotels, 103 are open, and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, already partially open, will be operating at full capacity by November.

Some hotel chains have begun to offer corporate groups help in arranging community service activities. Omni Hotels of California, with properties in San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco, on June 15 announced a new program called "Groups for Giving."

Beginning in September, the hotels will facilitate a day working with local Habitat for Humanity International projects for interested groups. In addition to arranging the activity, the hotels also will offer attendees construction materials and lunch.

Ed Netzhammer, general manager of the Omni San Diego Hotel, said the program grew out of a community service project to celebrate the hotel's grand opening two years ago with Habitat for Humanity, a nonprofit organization that builds homes for people in need. The property does 70 percent of its business in meetings, he said, and corporate meetings account for half that amount.

"It's more than just the economic impact. It really made me feel good to go in and do some of those things," Omni's Netzhammer said. "It's just a natural fit for us to offer this to groups coming into town."

The program also was inspired by community service events held during industry trade shows and conferences, he said.

"You've got to organize a little in advance, but with six months we can generally find dates that work at the beginning or the end of any program," he said. "Thirty days out, they have to commit to the exact number of people that are going to go. If they don't have enough people and there are more slots left, we have people on all three hotel staffs that are eager to go out and do this. We'll send an engineer if they've got a slot left."

The maximum number of attendees that the projects can accommodate is 40, but Netzhammer said less than half the number of event attendees typically participates in these types of volunteer events.

"It's the right time to have this program," Netzhammer said. People in today's environment, with so much going on in the world that we can't change, making a difference here is so important. People want to do that and it can really get your meeting off to a great start."