News

10 Mar 2009 Further support to keep meetings and events happening

Following on from our news story which focused on the thoughts voiced at the MPI conference in Atlanta, the issue is cropping up in blogs, meetings and opinion polls all over the world.

Friend of Rapport, Susan Radojevic posted the below article on her company, The Peregrine Agency’s website. We think it sums up our ethos perfectly and is a viewpoint we are keen to spread!...

The recipe for great meetings: Align & Design

Posted By MARY E. BOONE on 03/02/2009 at 9:30 AM

Meetings are one of the most powerful communication tools available to the C-Suite. They are essential to helping leaders survive the current economic downturn and they can strategically position the organization to thrive once the upturn begins. However, in order to exploit their potential, it is important to fully understand how they really deliver strategic value by considering meetings and events at both the aggregate and the individual level. We need to ensure that individual meetings deliver value and we need to look across all of our events to understand how they add up to create value across a whole portfolio.

Meetings and Events in the Aggregate: The Alignment Process

Event alignment incorporates change management, technology analysis, policies and compliance, processes and measurement to achieve results. An important distinction between alignment and other approaches to Strategic Meetings Management Programs (SMMPs) is that alignment focuses on balancing both efficiency and effectiveness in the process of assessing a strategic events portfolio. A frequent mistake with SMMP is to focus almost exclusively on cost reduction – the efficiency side of the equation. Instead, we need to make certain that the effectiveness side of the equation is considered as well. That is, we need to know how events impact the company’s key goals, objectives and strategies.

The process of alignment begins with a series of interviews with a company’s executive team. The first goal is to determine what kinds of events the company holds throughout the year, who the key stakeholders are, and who manages or coordinates the events. Event profile details (location, cost, size) are filled in later. The resulting event matrix indicates how many conferences, training sessions, employee events, seminars, etc. are conducted annually, who initiates them, and why. Armed with this information, companies are able to trace the event back to the firm’s corporate goals.

The Art and Science of Meeting Design

Understanding meetings and events at the aggregate level is important, but we also need to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of individual events – particularly those that are most closely aligned with organizational strategy. Even one event alone can deliver tremendous bottom line benefits if it is both well-designed and well-aligned with the direction of the organization. Many individual meetings may be expertly planned, but not expertly designed. There is a real and significant difference in these two concepts.

Meeting design is the purposeful shaping of the form and content of a meeting or event to achieve desired results. Meeting design incorporates methods and technologies that connect, inform, and engage a broad range of relevant stakeholders before, during, and after the meeting. Good design helps meeting owners establish clear objectives and desired outcomes, integrates the meeting with other communication activities, maximizes interactivity, and results in a significant return on investment.

Meeting planning, on the other hand, focuses primarily on the logistics of the meeting – venues, travel arrangements, lodging, registration, entertainment, staging, etc. All of these components must be expertly orchestrated for the meeting to be a success. Of course, meeting planning and meeting design overlap and have deep impacts on each other.

Meeting design is a cross-disciplinary activity. In order to do a good job of designing an event, it is necessary to have working knowledge of a number of disciplines and to be able to pull together the right team from those disciplines including (but not limited to) communication, marketing, IT, Organizational Development, and education/training. The theory underlying meeting design draws on a broad range of natural and social sciences.

While people have been planning meetings for centuries, it is only recently that a more scientific approach to design has emerged. Therefore, meeting design skills are not abundant. Planners and executives need to be smart buyers of meeting design services – hiring people who have proven track records in designing meetings and who have the range of skills necessary to do good design work.

Integrating Alignment and Design

Organizations who want to receive a high payback on their investment in meetings and events will necessarily attend to both alignment and design. An organizational alignment can lead to the identification of meetings that merit a significant design effort. By looking across a whole portfolio of meetings, determining where to cut or increase investments, and applying the principles of meeting design, companies can rest assured that they will be fully exploiting the power of meetings and events to enhance strategy execution and bottom line results.

Send this news item to a friend...