IACVB To Add Corp. Mtg. Data
<B> IACVB To Add Corp. Mtg. Data</B>
The International Association of Convention and Visitors Bureaus may soon add data about corporate meetings buyers to its extensive database of association meetings.
That effort would get a particularly significant boost if IACVB president and CEO Ed Nielsen can build on his diplomatic efforts earlier this month to forge a partnership with the International Congress and Convention Association, which is headquarted in Amsterdam and led by executive director Tom Holton.
The two organization executives talked about sharing data on prospective and previous customers and holding a joint annual world congress. If they do agree to merge databases, they would combine ICCA's profiles of 1,100 primarily European-based corporations with the meetings histories of 10,000 organizations, mainly U.S.-based associations, which reside in in IACVB's Convention Industry Network, or CINet.
Nielsen left the meeting doubting that a full merger of the databases would take place, but said he also is speaking to other meetings industry organizations about the need to have one database. Meanwhile, he is "committed to making CINet as comprehensive as possible" and said CINet soon will have the fields it needs to collect corporate data.
The latest version of five-year-old CINet, which will come out in July, is "the Dun & Bradstreet of association meetings," said Jeff Hungate, the former IACVB vice president of finance and administration who Nielsen promoted two weeks ago to chief operating officer. Hungate said the CINet database contains a complete meetings history for organizations, including attendance, peak room nights, food and beverage spending, frequency of meetings, organizational profile and key meetings contacts.
Hungate expects to begin building a database of U.S. corporate meetings buyers in the fall. While the object of the expanded database would be to give CVBs more negotiating leverage with their customers, he also foresees that the warehousing of this data could prove to be a lead generation system that could, in some instances, replace the costly request for proposals process.