Kissimmee, Fla. - Meeting Professionals International particularly was active last week at its North American Professional Education Conference here, announcing several new initiatives, including its first strategic plan, and releasing its most significant piece of research in years. It also disbanded the search committee charged with finding a replacement for departing president and CEO Ed Griffin. Attendance-wise, the show rebounded from last year's disappointing turnout at the PEC in Hawaii: This year's show drew 2,207 attendees, a few hundred off of its 2001 record, but well ahead of last year's 1,485. This year's attendance included 680 meeting planners.
MPI adopted its first strategic plan, the principles of which will govern the allocation of its resources and time, said chairman of the board George Aguel. The plan's pillars are the creation of career pathways and resources that enable members to evolve professionally toward positions of strategic influence, increasing the association's influence with senior decision making executives and focusing on business development opportunities for suppliers.
MPI's annual budget will be tied to the plan, Aguel said, and will be a "guiding force" of decision-making regarding its marketing and member care plan.
The goal of influencing corporate executives about the financial and strategic importance of holding meetings is key to the plan. Aguel, senior vice president for Disney Parks & Resorts, said this will be accomplished, in part, through new research and best practice case studies that emphasize the beneficial effect on the corporate bottom line. "We must go in there with research, studies and statistics," Aguel said. "We don't want to be the low-hanging fruit."
MPI also announced that the search committee created in December to find Griffin's replacement
(Meetings Today, Jan. 20) "made a unanimous decision to disband" during the conference. The "decision to disband" was made after the selection criteria was allegedly were leaked to a publication that covers associations and CVBs. Chairwoman-elect Theresa Breining, who will succeed Aguel in August, will continue to lead the committee but will be the only holdover.
The association in December said it expected a successor to Griffin, who departs April 30, to be in place by May, but Aguel said there is no timetable. "The timing will not drive the process," he said. "They will do what they think is right. There is no way to forecast the timing of a successor. We will go not to the first available but to the best available." The new committee will continue to use Los Angeles-based executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles.
There is a significant difference in perception between meeting planners and suppliers as to expected meeting spending in 2003, according to a new survey conducted by American Express and MPI. U.S.-based planners on average foresee a 1.7 percent decline in meeting budgets this year, but suppliers expect revenue generated from meetings to increase by 5.8 percent. That gap, according to MPI's analysis, will increase pressure on suppliers to slash prices and hurt the concept of relationship-based selling and buying.
"These trends signal a major shift in how the business of meetings is conducted and reveals a looming threat of commoditization," Griffin said. The survey also found that one-third of supplier respondents are planning more flexible pricing structures this year. Half of all planner respondents indicated that organizational budget changes will have the greatest impact on meetings in 2003. The survey was conducted by e-mail in October 2002 and received responses from 1,340 planners and 1,130 suppliers, all MPI members.
The Corporate Circle of Excellence, MPI's group of about 15 senior corporate meeting buyers dedicated to developing best practices for the industry, tackled the concept of communicating the value of meetings and planners to senior executives. The best manner in which to do so is through a numerical representation of the return on investment of a given event, said David Rich, who focuses exclusively on IBM Worldwide events as executive director of program strategy with event marketing firm George P. Johnson Co.
For an internal event, he said, apply the percentage of total costs of a company initiative that are spent on meetings to the total financial value of that initiative, which shows the correlation between meeting expenditures and commensurate benefits. "It's reasonable to say you deserve credit in proportion to a share of the initiative's financial enablement," Rich said. "The people who have your career in their hands need to know if they give you a buck, you give them eight back. Room rates, attrition—all of this is important, but not to this particular audience."
With military action in Iraq looming, contractual force majeure clauses, which govern acts of war, are in the spotlight, but industry attorney Steven Rudner warned against their improper invocation. "If you have a real force majeure, nobody's talking about going to a meeting," said Rudner, principal of Dallas-based Rudner Law Offices, who represents hotels and resorts in meeting-related litigation. "Otherwise, you just have a lot of attrition. We'll see a lot of partial performance. There are people rewriting clauses that say if 30 percent of attendees can't come, it's a force majeure. That's a horrific idea. You cannot individualize a force majeure."