The National Business Travel Association's groups and meetings committee recently released three new white papers, which offer tactical overviews of types of venues and the role of destination management companies, and methods to evaluate a strategic meetings management program.
The papers will be available this week at NBTA's International Conference and Exhibition in Boston. "Some travel managers were asking us to look into other topics that they have been tasked to manage, such as destination management companies and their involvement in meeting planning and unique types of venues, so we determined that those two were the next best topics for us to focus on," said Debi Scholar, co-chair of the groups and meetings committee and PricewaterhouseCoopers meeting and event services director
http://www.btnonline.com/businesstravelnews/headlines/meetings_today_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003612882(see story).The paper concerning strategic meetings management program evaluation comes with a scorecard through which companies can rate their SMMP and see where it needs improvement and could advance further.
"The evaluating-SMMP paper was really a desire to help those who may already be starting their programs or may have a program in place, want to take it to the next level and want to know what everybody else is doing," Scholar said.
"As we came up with criteria that might help someone evaluate the different aspects within their strategic meetings management program, we determined that it was something that could easily translate into a metric that one could actually track and improve upon. The scorecard allows people to look within their own companies, talk to their meeting sponsors and their stakeholders to help determine what components they have in place and what they want to improve," she said.
The scorecard allows meetings executives to self-grade their program based on 59 aspects of six major areas, such as risk mitigation and savings. Scores are given for how important the aspect is to the company, and how much has been achieved. Once the figures are totaled, the score determines if the program is entry-level, intermediate or advanced.
Future topics can be decided upon by soliciting feedback from NBTA's members.
"We do surveys every two years and we ask our membership what's important to them and what they are seeing as relevant topics they'd like to have addressed," Scholar said. The committee members, including co-chair Lee Ann Adams Mikeman, assistant vice president and director of conference planning and special event for Science Applications International Corp., decide on topics.
The committee began publishing white papers in March 2004
(Meetings Today, March 29, 2004) and so far 10—six strategic, four tactical—have been produced. In Boston this year, the entire collection of white papers, including the three new ones, will be available on a CD and at meetings technology firm and CD sponsor StarCite's booth on the trade show floor.
"We've been asked to publicize our papers. Last year, we produced a book filled with our papers, which was a tremendous hit. This year we wanted to update the book, and what better way to do it then put it on a CD?" said Scholar.
Scholar said the committee is working on new white papers, including a tactical paper about audiovisual services due to be released in the fall.