Meetings technology provider Bizly has added features to its "playbooks" that allow user groups to establish event creation pathways on the platform and customize to their specific needs.
A buffet-style approach—which allows the enterprise to define the marketplace of vendors, including eligible third parties; pre-set budgets and cost centers per meeting type and open certain playbooks to regions or brands—retains control at the corporate level. What it doesn't do, said Bizly CEO Ron Shah, is dictate the mix and match of vendors that every user must follow.
“We decided to build a tool that gets… buy-in from the ground up,” Shah said.
Prior to the recent release, users had access to playbooks, but the platform only enabled users to duplicate past meetings. The product now offers bona fide templates available for users to spin up their own events, while staying within the bigger-picture fencing around compliance to budget and preferred suppliers, Shah said.
The move was critical, according to Shah, because operations have changed so drastically during the pandemic, and meetings management will have to reflect those changes as events gain momentum in 2022. Through the pandemic, the office "mothership" turned into a thousand remote outposts and, as a result, decentralized even more than before the responsibility for meetings. It also created new use cases, like gathering more often to bring remote employees together. "It shifted the meetings responsibility to everybody in the company," said Shah.
Compounding the challenge of that shift, "when it comes to meetings, [companies] have multiple suppliers," he added. The pandemic only added to the supplier complexity by layering virtual technologies like Zoom, Teams and others to the mix. "[Companies found] they have dozens of these vendors and apps and things for virtual and hybrid. Employees don't know where to go.”
At the same time, if there is a one-off provider required for a single meeting, the user can put through that request for a non-approved vendor and those communications will be stored in the tool. Communications between vendors and the meeting organizer are also stored in the app.
Making a Play for Third Parties
Bizly often has targeted corporate clients directly, but Shah said the company had made some key inroads recently to support agencies. Playbooks can help third parties that don't have their own meetings tech stack, particularly for smaller meetings organized by non-professional planners, he said.
"They use email and phone calls, and it's a lot of wrangling," Shah said. "We believe that we can be a very complementary partner to TMCs that need a tech layer.”
One of the first meetings and incentive management firms to sign on with Bizly was Intent Strategy Group, a division of Meetings & Incentives Worldwide. The company has integrated Bizly with its strategic meetings management platform and specialized services to create and comprehensive meetings solution that wraps in small and simple meetings, which have been the first to return as the pandemic wanes.
"Before the pandemic, event professionals were eager to find more efficient ways to manage the scores of small or simple events being planned in their organizations," said Lisa Palmeri, VP and principal consultant of Intent Strategy Group. "This new offering simplifies the requirement for an end-to-end, compliant and user-friendly small and simple event solution."