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Independently Yours Contractors take the Stress out of Planning Meetings
November, 2007
By Scott Anderson
When a group of hijackers crashed planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on September 11, it set off a devastating chain of events that would take years for the world economy to recover.
An inestimable amount of money was lost in travel and tourism as business and pleasure travellers reduced or even cancelled flight bookings. This hit the meetings and conventions market also as companies and associations around the world opted to scale back or even cancel their meetings and incentive travel plans. The Canadian travel industries would not escape the pain.
But this was not the end of the woes for the hard hit industry. A little more than a year later, the SARS epidemic also sideswiped the travel industry and related industries when the disease killed 800 people around the world, including 44 in Toronto.
These two events led to the drying up of the travel business, forcing companies to downsize their meetings and conventions divisions.
But when one door closed another opened as the corporate cutbacks spawned a whole new breed of independent planners. These enterprising people quickly filled the void created when the businesses shed their divisions.
“Earlier this decade, many corporations and meeting associations laid off staff and really cut back on meetings, so a lot of independents were created at that time, because they had a department of four or five people and they created their own self-employment and contracted back to do their conference,” says Grace Vale, owner of Venues Inc., an Ottawa-based independent meeting planner.
Established in 1994, Venues plans and oversees meetings, conferences, fundraisers and events for large corporations, small businesses and associations. Its services include hotel accommodation, transfers, meeting rooms, food and beverage, décor, team building programs, audiovisual support, speakers and entertainment, evening and tour programs.
Despite a downturn in the sector for a good many years after the double whammy of 9/11 and SARS, those involved in the meeting planning industry now see a dramatic shift again which has changed both the method and style in which events are planned.
“Meetings are getting bigger. The change may be due to the way people are looking at meetings and events. These meetings and events are looked at as an integral part of marketing and sales process. People embrace being able to see meeting sales opportunities face to face and being able to market to potential clients,” says Samantha Mobin, sales and marketing coordinator at Showcare, in Markham, Ontario.
“More people are attending, industries are growing and marketing budgets are getting bigger. You know what they say? Go big or go home.”
Venues’ Vale also sees the number of meetings and conferences on the rise again as corporations recognize the need to host events for both their clients and their employees.
“Corporate clients are recognizing the value of meetings and they are holding them again. People work so intensely within their business milieu that they just know who they are working with on any given day,” she says.
“Within an organization, everyone normally has a 24-hour work day that they are trying to do in eight hours. They know the people that are within the team, but that is about it. So, the benefits of having a conference are that they can have one-on-one dialogue with clients or sales people and it has tremendous benefits and corporate clients are seeing that.”
While recognizing the importance of once again holding meetings and conferences, Vale says the larger groups are reluctant to relinquish control of the planning process. To that end, she encourages the companies to worry about the vision of the meeting and leave the rest up to her team.
“Big businesses hate to relinquish that control, but what they want is the creative ideas for evening events and offsite socials.”
But the key to running a successful meeting is to be accommodating in the planning and implementation of the ideas. “I offer a lot of flexibility in how I deliver my meetings, but with other companies, when you speak to them, you might find that they want to do the whole and not necessarily a specific portion of it,” she says.
Technology has also changed the way in which potential clients handle the preliminary planning stages. Clients now prefer to do their leg work on the Internet and gather as much information as possible before contacting a planner.
“My phone rang non-stop in 2000 and I had to have three or four phone lines,” she says. “But what I find now is that with the nature of the business, 90 percent of my clients prefer to work on the web and until we are at that decision making stage, the use of the telephone has dropped dramatically.”
Vale says it is important that an independent planner has a well designed website that fully explains all that the company has to offer.
“The way to go for me was to have really good information on the web. When you first created the website in its design, it was more to give a client a sense of what we do and the client rarely went to it and if a client went to it, it was for a very short space of time,” she says.
“What I find now for information tools, everyone is going to the web to do all of their research and they also find if it is a good quality website, they spend longer time there to look at more pages.”
The upswing in the use of technology and the use of software-related packages has benefited companies such as Showcare, which provides a full range of event management solutions for businesses, associations and event organizers in North America.
Showcare’s team of 80 people provides services that include online and full-service registration, housing, lead capture and measurement, data analysis and reporting, event networking and E-marketing, as well as a range of additional products and services.
“As far as larger meetings and events, technology is constantly changing the way meetings are conducted,” says Mobin. “We see this now more than ever with areas such as E-ticketing and RFID.
”In fact, Ottawa Tourism decided in 2006 to do their entire request for proposals on the web using software, with satisfying results.
“This has had a tremendous impact on conferences in the city. In actual fact, it represents almost 15 to 20 percent of their requests now,” Vale says.
But, technology has also led to procrastination for many of the meeting goers. They now know that they can instantaneously book their flights, hotels and their attendance and receive instant ant confirmations.
“You will find a tremendous number of people will register a day or two before the cut off date for the hotel room, because they know with the web that the information is instantaneous and that it is accurate and reliable and they get an automatic confirmation,” Vale says. “People don’t like to plan more than six weeks out because they never know what’s going to come up at work.”
That is where a company like Mobin’s comes into play. Its software can take the headaches away from the meeting planners with a few clicks of the mouse.
“Here at Showcare we embrace taking on the responsibilities that companies should not worry about. An event or meeting is already such a stressful project, so it is nice to know that you have help. We take care of everything from registration, onsite temp staff, badges and mailing.”
Both Mobin and Vale agree that companies have too much to worry about when planning that big event, so they stress the importance of keeping an eye on the overall theme or purpose for the event while doling out the responsibility to a fully experienced independent planner who can then work their magic to turn the dreams into reality.
“What an independent meeting planner brings to the table is that you can outsource everything else. We can meet the budget you’re looking at, save you a lot of money, so that you can focus on the delegates and the program content,” Vale says.
Filed under: The Industry
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