While many planners find themselves squeezed for time these days, the good news is that there is a growing choice of technology tools that bring efficiency and cost savings to the meeting planning process.
Although there is no one perfect answer for every planner’s needs, a wide variety of software applications have been developed over the years to automate the extensive—and sometimes tedious—details involved in meeting planning.
Following are some examples of a few technologies available now.
Standard Practices
Among the important new meetings tech tools available is Toolbox 2.0, which was released last fall by the Convention Industry Council (www.conventionindustry.org), an umbrella group consisting of representatives from 32 meetings and exhibition industry associations. The organization has been working toward a set of Accepted Practices Exchange (APEX) standards designed to enable planners and venues to communicate in the same language.
Toward this end, Toolbox 2.0 includes more than 200 event management and business templates, covering such industry aspects as RFPs, rooming lists, show contractors, destination management companies, audiovisual providers, transportation requirements, registration, event specifications, meeting and site profiles, function schedules, post-event reports, contracts, best practices, and more.
The templates cost $99 (a free trial version is available, and an upgrade is free for those who purchased the 1.0 version). While the templates don’t yet connect planner and venue electronically (some commercial applications that do are listed below), they do work with Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Address Book Extreme
Managing and organizing contact information is made simple through a software program called Plaxo (www.plaxo.com).
John McCrea, vice president of marketing for Plaxo, says this free system, with over 15 million people registered, is a “smart address book you can use for your entire life. It’s self-updating, so whenever someone in your address book changes jobs, moves, gets a new cell phone number, your contact information is automatically up-to-date.”
With that many registrants (and growing daily), McCrea says “that’s probably a pretty good percentage of the people in your address book.” The system can be used with Outlook, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, Mac OS X, and Mozilla Thunderbird.
Remember the times you’ve tried to reach a sales person only to learn that person is now with a different hotel or has moved to another city? Think about all the phone calls you’ve made to a wrong number, or when you’ve sent mail to a wrong address. You’ve wasted time and money and you’ll waste more by trying to update the information. Throw in a little frustration factor and you should already see a benefit to becoming a part of the Plaxo community.
Among Plaxo’s many features are the ability to merge and remove duplicate contacts, to recover data, to search contacts, and to view a calendar from a mobile phone. There is also 24/7 phone and e-mail support, one-on-one remote live assistance and the capacity to store more than 1,000 contacts. The cost is $49.95 a year.
You provide as much or as little business and personal information as you wish when signing on with Plaxo, including primary and additional e-mail addresses, phone numbers and even your birthday. Whenever you meet someone new, you determine whether he or she is in the Plaxo system and key in the name. The person’s contact information will already be entered in the system.
Plaxo information is hosted on secure Web services, and lets you access it via a regular Web browser from wherever you are—at home, at the office or on a mobile phone (it doesn’t even have to be a “smart phone”). The system is available in 80 countries in English, with foreign language capabilities scheduled to be added by the end of the year.
On Schedule
TimeBridge (www.timebridge.com) is a new free service that makes planning small meetings almost a breeze. Started in May 2005 and launched in private beta in November 2006, it incorporates your Outlook calendar, noting when you have something scheduled and when you have free time. It includes the calendars of your company’s personnel, so you can see when they’re available.
Yori Nelken, CEO and company founder of TimeBridge, says 80 percent of its target offices are using Outlook for their scheduling or contact maintenance.
“There are about 380 million users of Outlook, and that’s why we started there,” Nelken says. “We want to include virtually everybody who has a scheduling problem.”
John Stormer, vice president of marketing, adds that the service also works when communicating with people outside of your company.
“You simply send an e-mail to the people you want at the meeting with a suggestion of two or three times when you’re available and they respond with their availability,” he says. “While the meeting time and place are pending, the possible times are put in a tentative slot and once the meeting is scheduled, the tentative time slots are eliminated. No more writing in your desk calendar and then going back to delete the alternative times and dates. You receive a report that notes when the most people are available for which times, then you set the meeting and select the most ideal time block. Then an e-mail is sent confirming that information.”
Nelken says that TimeBridge is designed to coordinate meetings for up to about 25 people.
“You wouldn’t want to use it for more people,” Nelken says, “because at that point you’d say, ‘This is when we’re meeting. Who’s going to be there?’”
Additional third-party services will eventually be available, including maps, weather, reservations, conferencing, and online meetings.
StarCite
You are charged with planning a meeting six months out for a dozen or more people. You need a resort property in a specific region and amenities that include golf, tennis and spa treatments. You check your electronic or paper version of a Rolodex, do a Google search, or try to find suitable meeting places some other way. You contact each of the sites with an RFP (request for proposal) or an e-RFP (electronic request for proposal) asking about availability and costs. Perhaps a dozen properties or venues respond, each in a different format.
Some properties have the amenities you want, but do not have the dates you need. You try to compare the apples and oranges of the responses and hope you come up with something that doesn’t resemble fruit salad.
StarCite (www.starcite.com), which recently merged with OnVantage, offers a far more comprehensive and efficient alternative to traditional methods of site selection. After you enter the meeting specifics, it searches its database of 93,000 meeting venues and providers, and sends responses that precisely fit your needs. Additionally, it keeps track of who is or is not attending, hotel room preferences, peak attendance of the primary meeting or event, profiles and locations of attendees, classes of acceptable facilities, appropriate locations, meeting room setups, audiovisual requirements, and food function requirements.
StarCite also lets users enter criteria concerning activities and/or special events associated with the meeting, initial and alternative meeting dates and the number of sleeping rooms required. If you wish, you can choose the suppliers or preferred vendors to which the RFP will be sent. You receive responses from just those venues and in a format that is consistent among all the properties.
From there, users can research the suppliers, conduct site inspections, and often obtain referrals from groups of similar size and industry.
Along with streamlining the planning process, StarCite also functions as a meetings management tool that can help companies gain better control over their overall spending, says Mike Malinchok, vice president of business development for StarCite.
“It can also help you manage transient travel with meetings spending, estimate the costs of meetings in various locations, and capture and manage the spending associated with meetings of 50 or fewer people,” he says, adding that “up to 70 percent of meetings and events spending typically goes unmanaged. Compiling all this information in one place can save as much as a third of your meetings budget.”
As an example, Malinchok points to a situation where an organization has multiple people in various departments working on travel arrangements and meetings. If all this data is coordinated through StarCite, a planner might notice that several departments are scheduling meetings at the same hotel. With this knowledge, planners are in a position to negotiate better rates for their organizations.
By having everything in the same format, he adds, a planner can start compiling information about meeting expenses and venue choices that can be used for future comparisons.
For example, it will let you know what your company paid in room rates for an incentive trip in 2005, so you can compare that with what you are paying for one in 2007. With StarCite’s benchmarking component, you can also see how much is being spent on this incentive program in comparison with similar companies in your industry.
There are two levels to the StarCite program. The first is at the administrator level, designed for someone who has the technology background to configure the software. That person receives a two- or three-day course that can be taken in person, either at their own company or at StarCite’s training site in Philadelphia, or online.
“The user level is much simpler,” Malinchock says, adding that user-level training is done on demand via the Internet and can be understood by anyone who has familiarity with Word or Excel.
Although StarCite was initially designed for Fortune 1000 companies, it is now accessible for smaller organizations or consortiums. There is an entry-level price tag of $20,000 to $25,000 for start-up costs.
Spreading the Word
Although most meetings are directed to a known and finite audience, there are also meetings directed to an undetermined audience. Examples of these latter events typically include boat or automobile shows or seminars on investment and wealth-building.
To attract attendees to these types of events, companies such as Zephyr Media (www.zephyr-media.com) create advertising and infomercials that go into print publications or network and cable television. These can be small or large print ads or 30-second or 30-minute broadcast productions.
“Zephyr does the infomercial production, scripting, fielding the phone calls, strategizing, and placing the media,” Dan Zifkin, president of Zephyr Media, says. “Using this long-form advertising will make an audience more widely aware of the meetings.”
The cost of advertising can be shared among participants. Taking a boat show as an example, Zifkin says a dozen or so companies that are exhibiting boats and nautical supplies in the show could jointly share the cost of an infomercial. The infomercial would highlight each company’s products and mention their locations at the show.
Mobile Marketing
Saul Fruchthendler, president of Red Mountain Group (www.redmountaingroup.com), a marketing technology consulting firm, notes the growing importance of mobile marketing in the meetings industry, particularly trade shows.
“Someone can take a photo with their cell phone of a product, a movie, or a service, whether it’s on the Los Angeles freeways or a booth at a trade show, and they’ll receive information about what they’ve photographed,” he says. “It may be a discount coupon to a restaurant, a free upgrade for a hotel or cruise ship, or qualifying for a line of credit and a free weekend at a casino.”
By using GPS technology, he adds, the customer will know where or how to receive more information, the nearest places to buy the product or service, and be able to contact them.
“If a trade show attendee is too busy to spend a lot of time at a booth or if the booth personnel are swamped, the photo grabbed by the phone lets the attendee establish contact once the show has closed,” he says. “This is an optimum example of opt-in technology. The customer knows that no one from a company that doesn’t meet his or her needs will establish contact.”
Hybrid Meetings
Recognizing that it can be challenging at times for doctors and others in the healthcare industry to attend meetings in person, MedPoint Communications (www.medpt.com) developed a hybrid format that adds a virtual component to on-site medical meetings.
“We recognize that planning a face-to-face meeting requires a unique and talented skill set, and also recognize that planning a Web-based meeting requires the addition of the technical aspect,” says Brian McFadden, vice president of MedPoint Communications. “To accomplish our hybrid meeting offerings, we have combined 16 years of rock-solid meeting planning with a rock-solid Web conferencing platform that goes back 12 years, with actual Web conferencing starting in 1999. In 2003 we began to merge the two types of meetings to the hybrid format.”
While McFadden acknowledges that there will always be a place for face-to-face meetings, he adds that adding a virtual component can provide both cost savings and convenience for attendees.
“On a 225-person meeting, with half attending virtually, we can save approximately $100,000 in overall meeting costs, figuring $1,600 for each face-to-face attendee,” he says.
Those who can’t attend a meeting in person can still join the virtual part of the meeting. And because the sessions can be archived, an attendee can view the presentation days or months after it was given.
“With hybrid meetings, there are other efficiencies where we get more attendees—and the top-tier attendees—because if they can’t travel, they may be able to attend via the Web,” McFadden says. “They may have been going to too many meetings or traveled too much. If you have a virtual option at that point it’s no longer a cost-saving model but an attendee-preference model.”
He believes that this hybrid format will quickly gain wide acceptance, as have other tech-oriented alternatives.
“A few years ago, Web registration was the exception and now it’s pretty much the norm,” he says. “It saves a ton of time over using the phone and fax.”
Trade Show Tracking
A wireless system with an electronic chip embedded into attendees’ badges, iBahn technology tracks attendees as they enter and leave a meeting session or an exhibit area. The planner can measure exhibit attendance to determine if the exhibit hours are appropriate or in conflict with other activities, thus providing guidance for future meetings.
Larry Dustin, president of North America Group, iBahn (www.ibahn.com), says the technology also performs as a social network that enables attendees to identify people they want to meet during the conference. It also furnishes useful data for planners.
“Following the conference we break down the data, providing post-meeting analysis on key metrics such as attendance and usage reports that provide show management and meeting planners with a way to evaluate meeting effectiveness and ROI,” Dustin says.
The iBahn system has been used in about 2,000 properties in 18 countries, including large Marriott hotels in Orlando, New York, San Francisco, and Phoenix. It has been used for everything from small meetings of 15 to 20 people on up to a giant air show in England that drew 250,000 people over a 10-day period.
According to Dustin, the system is highly secure.
“There’s an unfounded assumption that wired is more secure, but that’s not true,” he says. “We are experts in creating private networks across public spaces. We safely connect road warriors to home offices and groups to each other, whether across a conference table, across town or across an ocean. We lock down event security by installing firewalls and our own patented, secure broadband network.”
Please RSVP
Part of maintaining a mailing and marketing list is separating those who are attending the meeting from those who haven’t yet committed. It is also a key factor in keeping those who are attending onboard and convincing those who are not to reconsider.
According to Clate Mask, president of Infusion Software (www.infusionsoft.com), a builder of on-demand CRM (customer relations management) software, auto responses are an essential part of the attendance tracking and building process. With Infusion CRM the right people receive the right messages, he says.
The software lets users plug in marketing messages for multi-step marketing sequences that include e-mail, direct mail, fax, and voice broadcast. It also helps users avoid sending duplicate messages to meeting registrants or original solicitation mail to those who are already registered for a meeting.
Once someone has registered for a meeting, Mask says, “you can provide them with the right information for the right track for the meeting.”
He adds that “when the attendee [or prospect] clicks a link in an e-mail, that information can be included in our software and kick in another set of responses. As an example, someone sends an e-mail to 1,500 potential attendees and 60 click on a link and the other 14,40 do nothing. When the 60 click, the software puts them in a sub segment with an automatic follow-up by e-mail, direct mail, fax, or voice blast that speaks to the individual and differentiates him or her from the other 1,440, based on the expressed interest level.”
According to Mask, another important feature of the software is that it enables planners to follow up with attendees after the meeting, thereby cultivating relationships that will lead to repeat attendance for future events. Another advantage is that the system is Web-based, so it can be used on the road and at the meeting.
The learning curve for the system depends on the user’s basic direct marketing knowledge and appreciation of the value of correct follow-up, Mask says.
“Someone who already understands that value can be up and running with our system in as little as two weeks,” he says. “For others, it can take three months. If they don’t have any marketing materials, then they’re going to have to write them or use some of our templates to create them. Anyone who has worked with ACT! software or GoldMine will understand what we’re doing and how they can benefit.”
Infusion CRM is ideal for small and growing businesses, he adds, unlike some CRM software that is only geared to large companies.
A set-up and licensing fee is about $5,000. A year-long contract for $299 a month includes monthly upgrades, unlimited tech support, secure (tier 4) data hosting, and regular data backups.
Best Practices
These applications are just a few examples of the types of technology available. Which software you use depends on the size of your organization, the types of meetings you hold, and your budget.
For more specific advice and comparisons, the Groups and Meetings Committee of the National Business Travel Association (www.nbta.org) has developed information for their Strategic Meeting Management Program (SMMP). A spring 2006 report covers best practices for buying a technical system to assist with meetings. You must be a NBTA member to download the white paper and other reports.
Will any or all of these applications help you reduce your meetings workload? Maybe. At the very least, it should allow you and your staff to be more productive, save some money, and maybe even a few trees.
