Monthly Archive: July 2010

Low-Carbon Meeting Design

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Tread More Lightly on the Planet: Advice for Meeting Planners

  • July 28, 2010

Planning a sustainable event is about doing more with less, said Andrew Walker, Toronto-based founder and managing director of Eco-Efficient Events, who led participants in an interactive Tuesday morning session at MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress.
Participants discussed strategies for reducing the carbon footprint of the meetings industry, which has a reputation for unsustainable practices. Walker quoted environmental leader David Suzuki, who said the meetings industry leaves a heavy footprint on the planet.
“Planners can either try to lighten each footprint or try to reduce the number of footprints,” Suzuki said.
“Although we know [climate change] is a social issue and an environmental issue, it’s also a business issue,” Walker said.
He invited participants to identify areas of their work that could benefit from reducing carbon emissions. Energy, travel, waste and shipping were named as four key areas. Hiring local speakers, for example, can cut travel costs and reduce carbon emissions, while composting food reduces waste on site.
While most participants expressed interest in these and other initiatives to reduce their carbon footprints, they said their clients posed the most significant barriers to implementing green strategies.
“This is the biggest challenge we’re having on CSR (corporate social responsibility) with our clients,” a participant said. “Some are terrific, and others don’t care.”
Agreeing that not all clients are green, Walker highlighted the importance of communication and educational strategies to get reluctant clients on board with sustainable planning.
To get started with measuring and reducing a meeting’s carbon footprint, Walker recommended the online Zero Footprint Calculator, which can help planners set green goals and educate clients on why carbon emissions matter.

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Low-Carbon Meeting Design

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Action Against Carbon Emissions will Raise Travel Costs

  • July 28, 2010

The end of cheap oil could affect the meetings economy in a number of different ways, but panelists in a Tuesday morning breakout on peak oil agreed that the industry must adapt to an era of volatile energy prices and drastic reductions in the carbon emissions that cause climate change.
Economists may debate whether oil prices will hit US$150 or US$200 per barrel—and if they do, whether they’ll stay there—but meeting and travel costs will be affected either way.
“We’re going to destroy the planet long before we run out of fossil fuels,” said economist Mark Jaccard. “If we don’t, it will be because we take severe action, not against the use of fossil fuels but against emissions from fossil fuels. That action is going to drive up the cost of travel.”
Marge Anderson, associate director of the Energy Center of Wisconsin, said meetings must generate the greatest possible value from every activity that relies on fossil fuels. “When we do hop on a plane or burn up something to get somewhere, we [have to] actually get the results. This is a huge charge that only we can carry out.”
She suggested a hub-and-spoke model of regional meetings as an alternative to large global events, noting that Cisco Systems, Inc. had replaced a single, 19,000-attendee meeting with three continental hubs linked by technology. Details were presented at a breakout session earlier in #WEC10.
“I think that’s really, really cool, and it might be where we’re going,” Anderson said. “The economy is going to push us into that, fuel prices are going to push us into that,” but if meeting professionals can adopt hybrid meeting strategies and relentlessly measure their return on investment, “I think we’ll be okay.”
Former British Columbia Premier Mike Harcourt traced the growing shift to sustainable cities, with “dead downtowns and sprawled ‘burbs” giving way to communities that have “re-energized downtown and reinvented the idea of suburbia.”
For meetings, the difference shapes what a destination can offer when participants come to town. “We’re really talking about what choices we want to make into the future—as cities, as nations facing the peak oil challenge and the whole issue of climate change, and as event organizers and planners.”

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Low-Carbon Meeting Design

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Gutsche Shares Secrets of Irresistible Meetings

  • July 28, 2010

“You don’t need people to go to more meetings,” Trendhunter.com founder Jeremy Gutsche told participants in Tuesday morning’s general session at MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress. “You just need them to go to your meeting.”
Noting that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” Gutsche gave participants a series of tips to make their meetings and events stand out from the crowd. “What will take you an extra mile is the culture you have at your events,” he said.
“Change equals opportunity,” Gutsche said, noting that many companies were founded and thrived in times of economic uncertainty. For instance, during the Great Depression, Kellogg’s surpassed Post Cereals by doubling its advertising budget. To take advantage of the opportunity created by the global financial situation, Gutsche said “you need to become irresistible to a specific group of people.”
He encouraged participants to concisely articulate the specific goals of their meeting. “How you articulate this will have an impact on all the decisions that make your event happen,” he said. Careful word choice attracts attention and empowers word of mouth. “Relentlessly obsess about your story.”
Presentation style is important, he said, suggesting planners should book engaging keynote speakers rather than “boringly brilliant” ones.
“Portray your event as average, and that’s all it will ever be,” Gutsche said.
Earlier, participants heard from Ken Cretney and Dave Gazley, co-chairs of the WEC 2010 host committee, and Ken Sanders, chairman of the MPI Foundation Board of Trustees, who thanked attendees for their support of the Foundation. Rick Antonson, president and CEO of Tourism Vancouver, thanked Bruce MacMillan, MPI president and CEO, for suggesting that Vancouver bid to host the 2010 Olympic Games.

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The Conference Publishers

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Venue Set-Up Can Limit Meeting Design Options

  • July 26, 2010

The influence of venue on a planner’s options on site is one of the hottest topics in meeting design, meeting designer John Nawn told a Monday evening session on the meeting of the future.
Too often, venues “define the kind of meetings we can have, as opposed to us designing the meeting we want and the venue supporting that,” said Nawn, founder of The Perfect Meeting. If meeting professionals are to create comprehensive experiences and collaborative contexts for their participants, “we really need to spend more time thinking about where we meet and why we meet there.”
Nawn defined meeting design as “the creative use of meeting elements, driven by measurable business objectives, which result in a framework for an event,” then listed the design characteristics he’d gleaned from a recent social media discussion among meeting professionals. Keywords included: strategic; collaboration; stakeholders; sharing; venue; audience; objectives; the “how” of getting things done, and participants’ physical, social and emotional needs.
Asked what an effective meeting design would look like in practice, the online respondents talked about participatory keynotes and panels, peer-to-peer learning and sharing of content through multisensory experiences like songs, skits and game shows.
Using a World Café format, session participants circulated through the room to identify key design elements for the periods before, during and after a meeting. At the end of the session, the top three items in each category were:
• Before: Clear, measurable goals and objectives; audience polls and review of past meeting results; and efforts to generate buzz and excitement “through every kind of meeting you can think of”
• During: Taking the meeting outdoors; using bicycle power to recharge electronics; open meeting formats and Unconference sessions where participants set and run the agenda
• After: Online forums that extend beyond the onsite participant group; case studies to capture practical applications of onsite learning; incenting case study submissions by offering sessions at future conferences to present the best ideas.

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The Conference Publishers

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Drive Branding, Align Meetings with Business Needs

  • July 26, 2010

Like advertisers, meeting professionals should learn showmanship to drive branding and help sell the value of meetings, said Kate Lastinger, founding partner of Metaphrasis Group, during a Monday morning session at MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress.
Teresa Bria, managing partner of Phase to Phase Strategy, said, “People aren’t considering meeting planners on that strategic corporate level, even though that’s a value we can provide.” Instead of aligning with hospitality and tourism, meetings should align with marketing and education, “so procurement sees that we bring value to the organization.”
Panelists agreed that meetings must play a strategic role in business development. Lastinger stressed the need to align meetings with the organization’s overall goals and direction. “Some meetings aren’t necessarily worth having in a face-to-face environment.”
Lastinger noted the trend toward “commodification” of meetings. While it can be helpful to discuss meetings as commodities when speaking with procurement, Bria said, “the true essence of what meetings are is not a commodity.”
“Some realities of meetings are not so pretty,” she added. Attendees retain about 15% of meeting content and, on average, 90% of a meeting budget is spent on logistics. “No wonder public perception is so tarnished.”
In the briefing paper, The Case for Meetings and Events: Four Elements of Strategic Value, Mary Boone, president of Mary Boone & Associates, identified portfolio management, ROI measurement, meeting design and advanced logistics as critical elements.
Meeting design involves “focusing on the overall objective of the program,” including respecting the attendee, Bria said. Policies should ensure that for a meeting of a certain budget, a minimum number of hours are spent in meeting design consultation.

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The Conference Publishers

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Address Social Responsibility Head-on: Panel

  • July 26, 2010

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) should be renamed collective social responsibility, said Paul Salinger, vice president of marketing at Oracle, during MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress on Sunday afternoon. “It’s disappointing to me that [citizens] haven’t started doing what we would like corporations to do.”
“A lot of people know the problems, but don’t know what to do about it,” responded Ann Duffy, Corporate Sustainability Officer for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
All stakeholders must be involved to make lasting impact, Duffy said, offering examples from the Winter Games: Athletes were told they could reduce their own carbon footprint by securing sponsors, and the bouquets handed to medal-winners were made by women recently released from prison, who were learning job skills.
A participant said that in a world filled with competing ideas, “the fear of not being authentic” was her organization’s biggest obstacle.
“Welcome to the mess,” said Duffy. Citing a number of reliable information resources on offsetting, she added, “Don’t be afraid. It’s authentic when the stakeholders feel they’re a part of it. Start at kilometer one and build from there.”
Duffy agreed with David Jerome, senior vice president of marketing at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), who said corporations’ sustainable activities must leave a lasting legacy, such as a measurable process that others can follow and build on. Once sustainability is named as a core objective, others will follow.

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The Conference Publishers

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Measuring Business Benefits Communicates Value of Meetings

  • July 25, 2010

Building professional capacity through face-to-face meetings is a cornerstone of the meeting planning industry, a field often praised for delivering intangible, values-oriented benefits to businesses and professionals. Theresa Breining, principal of Breining Group LLC in Encinitas, California, told participants that for the industry to progress and survive—especially in a challenging economic climate and an increasingly competitive marketplace—the field needs quantifiable credibility.
“Most of our family members don’t know what [meeting planning professionals] do for a living,” Breining told a packed room at MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress Sunday afternoon. “One of the reasons that people don’t understand the value of what we do is that we haven’t explained it in business terms.”
Quantifiable outcomes help financial executives understand and support the value of meetings. They prove meetings are necessary to advancing the productivity, capacity and economic growth of businesses and professionals.
“Hundreds of thousands of meetings have been cancelled because people don’t understand the value of meetings,” Breining said.
She presented a methodology developed by human resources and consulting expert Jack Phillips of the Birmingham, AL-based ROI Institute. Return on Investment (ROI) methodology has been refined in other industries for more than 25 years, but has only emerged in the meeting planning field during the last six years.
ROI methodology uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, as well as an algebraic formula, to measure meeting effectiveness. “The difference with this methodology and what we’ve always done is we’ve only talked about intangible benefits” in the past, Breining said. “Now we have data and the intangible.”

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The Conference Publishers

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The Only Way to Change the World is to Meet: Gobillot

  • July 25, 2010

The only way to change the world is to meet, keynote speaker Emmanuel Gobillot told participants at the Opening General Session of MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress Sunday morning.
At a time when more generations are working together than ever before, everyone is suffering from information overload and the world of work has become more temporary and complex, meetings and conversations create the sense of shared history that leads to effective action, he said.
“The only way to change your organization, the world or your community is to meet, is through dialogue.”
Earlier, MPI President and CEO Bruce MacMillan listed a series of high-profile meetings that that led to profound changes for the organizations that hosted them.
“These are game-changing actions inspired by the meetings and events that you put together,” he said. “That’s why you do what you do. You make the difference.”
British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell said we live in a world “that wants to travel, wants to connect, wants to come together and learn from one another. For all the new technologies and ways of looking at things, there’s nothing more important than a face-to-face meeting.”
After participants reacted, he added: “I never thought that would be an applause line.”
Campbell traced the province’s experience hosting the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, an immensely challenging program that “reminded us all of how incredibly powerful the human spirit is” and brought significant benefits to British Columbia. He said the Olympics “united an entire country around a common purpose, a common vision.”
MPI’s 2009-2010 Chairwoman Ann Godi, CMP, said MPI members had used the chaos of the last year to develop new strategies for success. The MPI Business Barometer shows that the majority of the meeting industry is doing better now than last year, and Godi said MPI is positioned to “measure and articulate the results that are missed when meetings and events are cancelled.”
Eric Rozenberg, CMM, CMP, MPI’s 2010-2011 chairman, looked back on the challenges the industry has faced in a tough business environment. For meeting professionals who want to succeed, “delivering logistics alone is no longer enough,” he said. “To be relevant, you need to understand the strategy of the organization.”
He stressed the scope and importance of the meeting industry, noting that “if we were a corporation, we would be in the Fortune 500.”
John Furlong, CEO of the Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC), said the most challenging peacetime event ever held in Canada “inspired us and lifted us up.” He mapped VANOC’s success to its compelling vision.
“We believed profoundly in what we were doing,” he said. “We saw a higher purpose to the work we were undertaking, and we subscribed to a set of very important values,” including teamwork, trust, excellence and, most important, sustainability. He defined sustainability as “doing the right thing every time, no matter what, whether you’re standing in front of the camera or behind it.”

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The Conference Publishers

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Audience Profile Drives Technology Choices

  • July 25, 2010

Before deciding dates, location and venue for a conference, meeting planners and suppliers must understand who should attend, why they would want to and what they’re most concerned about, social media specialist Paul Salinger told participants in a Sunday morning breakout session.
Salinger, vice president of marketing at Oracle Corporation, described a plethora of technologies to support meeting designs based on an audience’s specific needs and expectations. But he said the choice of technologies, like other tactical decisions, must be based on a clear picture of the different audience segments on site.
“There’s a context and a reason for every event or meeting,” he said. “The way you deliver value is by understanding what your audience really needs and delivering against those concerns. You have to flip the usual tactical approach to meetings and think about how to design them strategically.”
This shift takes place at a time when live and virtual worlds are converging, with organizations using video streaming, virtual environments, Telepresence and other technologies to broaden their meetings’ reach and extend the onsite experience.
“It’s very important to think about how you’re going to keep the conversation going after the event, how you’re going to facilitate the network that allows people to continue their conversations,” Salinger said, so that an annual conference becomes a 365-day activity.
Salinger described the planning method his company uses to catalogue all the internal and external audiences for a meeting, understand their macro and micro concerns and design programs and messaging to match.
“You have to think about what your audience strategy is before you can overlay the right technology to achieve those goals.”

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The Conference Publishers

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Case Study: Fully Immersive Virtual Environments

  • July 24, 2010

Host Organization: Clever Zebra
Specialization: Fully immersive virtual environments

Objectives:
When an organization sets up a fully immersive virtual environment alongside a face-to-face meeting, the objective is to extend the live gathering in every possible way: by bringing onsite and online participants together, sharing knowledge and ideas across a continent or around the world, opening new channels for person-to-person interaction, and creating a platform that can continue after onsite participants go home.
How Does It Change the World?
The immersive environment in use at MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress shows the evolution and growing maturity of virtual world technology.
Until recently, “virtual worlds have meant large file downloads and seriously clunky interfaces,” said Nick Wilson of Clever Zebra, producers of the online community for #WEC10. By contrast, “the solution we’re using for WEC runs right out of a participant’s Web browser and offers simple, ‘point and click’ functions.” The result is that virtual attendees can be fully immersed in the experience “without having to learn a whole bunch of complex new stuff.”
Virtual environments can be used for promotional mini-events running up to a physical meeting, or as a hybrid addition that mixes virtual and live sessions. The platforms can also provide a welcoming, water cooler-style environment for participants who want to continue the conversation after the meeting ends.
Why Does It Matter?
The value of onsite is well established, but “online is a different story,” Wilson said. “Being able to actively engage with virtual and physical attendees with true spatial voice and a ‘really there’ feel has to be experienced to be understood, but the results are amazing.” While “you could never replace true face-to-face,” he said immersive environments are the next best thing for participants who can’t get onsite.

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