Meeting professionals have made great strides over the last few years in measuring the return on investment (ROI) that clients and participants receive from some types of meetings.
But solid as that work has been, the limited scope of the analysis is coming back to haunt the industry, at a time when any meeting might come under attack as a waste of public money.
The gap in the industry’s understanding of ROI was an underlying cause when media and at least one taxpayers’ lobby group set their sights on a two-day, $671,000 training meeting organized by the San Francisco Region of the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA). The meeting, the region’s first live gathering since 2001, was held at Arizona’s Biltmore Resort and Spa, after the facility won a competitive tender with a room rate of about US$85 per night.
As we reported Tuesday on MeetingsNet, an intensive educational program was portrayed as an expensive government boondoggle after a television crew with a hidden camera recorded a stretch break, complete with music, with no reference to the hours of education and training sessions that had gone before.
“It was the last 30 minutes of the last day of a two-day conference,” said SSA media officer Mark Lassiter when I contacted him late last week. The reporter “came in right at the end of the two-day session. He didn’t see or attempt to view any of the substantive training that went on.”
Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m rarely inclined to give TV news a free pass. But the back story in this particular mini-drama is our industry’s failure to equip SSA, or any of our other clients, with the facts, arguments, and metrics to add up the benefits of a meeting that doesn’t set out to generate profit, sales, or revenue.
We know how to measure the industry’s broad contribution to national economies. And there is a brilliant, well-established methodology in place to track the ROI produced by corporate meetings, up to and including the financial impact of the largest, most expensive gatherings. But none of that will help SSA make a convincing, winning case that its meeting was worth holding.
There should be two gold standards for meetings that aren’t designed for monetary gain:
• Was the meeting organized as inexpensively as possible?
• Did the meeting deliver maximum benefit to organizers, participants, and the stakeholders who depend on participants for the products or services they deliver?
Although the second question may be orders of magnitude more important, the response to the SSA meeting showed just how quickly our industry orients toward the first.
When news of the SSA meeting first broke, the defence began and ended with cost data…and the numbers told an interesting story. The $85 room rate at the Biltmore was almost eerily affordable, and it turned out that the agency would have broken federal law if it had failed to pick the low bidder in a competitive tender.
And it got better: Lassiter said SSA managed to pare its room pick up from three nights per participant to two, by running a two-day program over an afternoon, a full day, and the final morning. That meant participants could make the trip to and from the conference venue without staying over an extra night, and without travelling on personal time—an expectation that, once again, would have violated U.S. government regulations.
So far, so good. But by emphasizing price and cost savings, we missed the most important questions about the SSA gathering: Why did participants need to meet? Did the conference achieve its objectives? And through that lens, was the $671,000 an investment or a waste?
You might think the group was due for a meeting when its last gathering took place eight years ago. But here, again, it gets better. Lassiter said many of the 675 participants had been in their jobs for less than two years. And one of his colleagues told the Arizona Republic the meeting had convened at a crucial time for SSA.
Leslie Walker said the agency is grappling with a wave of Baby Boomers becoming eligible for social security, and used the workshop to transmit practical skills—helping applicants process documents online, or dealing with angry clients in a tough economy.
“The public is very stressed right now,” Walker said. “We’re getting threats every day in our offices.”
SSA responded with a two-day program that (quite appropriately) reads like concentrated, nearly non-stop work. Lassiter said the general sessions were an opportunity for participants to hear from senior SSA management, and for management to hear public concerns directly from front-line managers. A list of 14 breakouts covered topics like multigenerational communication, managing diversity, SSA e-services, and reasonable accommodation for people with disabilities.
The value of the meeting seems pretty self-evident. But our industry has yet to develop a clear, widely-understood set of metrics that would have helped SSA define and assess that value.
Will the conference help participants do their jobs more cost-effectively, using online systems to serve more clients in an hour, a day, or a week?
Will greater efficiency improve client satisfaction, or give social security recipients greater confidence in the services and benefits they receive?
Will an improvement in client satisfaction contribute to a reduction in on-the-job stress, thereby helping SSA cut absenteeism or employee turnover?
What other questions should the agency be asking? And why isn’t our industry helping every client frame, ask, and answer those questions?
As long as the meetings industry focuses on the cost of what it consumes, rather than the value of the results it produces, programs like the SSA meeting at the Biltmore will be vulnerable. It’s tremendously encouraging to see the industry rise up in its own defence. But we’ll be so much more effective with the right facts and arguments.