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The past 10 months have been a maelstrom for the meetings industry. The collapse of the economy, the public outrage at meetings in wake of the AIG scandal, and the federal government's attempt to curtail meetings activity through legislation led to many meetings cancellations.

But one of the positive things to come out of the whole fiasco has been the renewed vigor to prove the strategic value and worth of meetings. But the road to proving strategic value is a long and winding one. Earlier this year, Mary Boone, president of Boone Associates, an Essex, CT-based meetings consultancy, released a paper, "The Case for Meetings and Events: Four Elements of Strategic Value," through Meeting Professionals International (MPI). The brief examines four elements crucial to establishing a system for measuring the strategic value of meetings: portfolio management, meeting design, measurement, and advanced logistics.

Last month, Successful Meetings conducted a teleconference roundtable with Boone; Susan Radojevic, president of the Peregrine Agency, a Toronto-based meeting planning firm; and Jack Phillips of the Chelsea, AL-based ROI Institute to discuss the four elements and how they can form the basis of measurement and procurement policies.

Element 1: Portfolio Management

Successful Meetings: What is portfolio management?

Susan Radojevic: Think about how a financial planner manages a portfolio of investments. He or she considers all of our investments and then determines the best combination that will meet our financial goals and then how the performance of that portfolio would be measured. That's what portfolio management of meetings and events is. When we perform portfolio management, we look at an organization's enterprise-wide activity of meetings and events. Our agency's approach and process to that is what we call Strategic Event Alignment.

Strategic Event Alignment focuses on event effectiveness and event efficiency. Event effectiveness is the strategic part of the equation. We're assessing how an event fits in with an organization's business goals. Event efficiency addresses the cost efficiencies and best practices.

SM: Is there a specific criterion for measuring a meeting's contribution to a corporate strategy?

Susan Radojevic: One of the things that organizations are so famous for is operating in silos. Most department and business units do their own thing as far as meetings and events go. So the first thing an organization needs to do with a strategic alignment is figure out the who, what, where, when, why, and how of their events.

We start at the enterprise level across all departments. Then we drill down and look at it from an individual meeting level to determine whether each event is aligned with the business goals of the organization. And if they are not aligned with business goals, that is when some meeting redesign needs to happen.

Any type of a meeting or an event that is not aligned with the organization's business goals or for which the organization hasn't determined what success is going to look like and how it is going to be measured, should not be held.

SM: So when you are looking across the whole breadth of a company's meetings, you are looking at their trade shows, if they have them, their sales meetings, their board meetings, and any consumer events they might have? Is it sort of like that?

Susan Radojevic: We are looking at everything where a company is either funding a gathering of any kind or sponsoring a gathering of any kind.

Especially now with the rise of corporate social responsibility, a lot of these companies are funding a lot of different initiatives around the environment and all the greening stuff, but they are actually just doing it because it is a good PR thing to do. They are not really looking at it in terms of how it is driving their business value. So there is an enormous opportunity to look at it and to redesign their approach.

SM: What role does procurement play in the alignment process?

Susan Radojevic: Procurement has a place at the table when an event's strategic alignment is being determined, but it should not be leading it. Procurement is supposed to make sure the contracts that are in place are covering the legal aspects of what the company is to be liable for. Yet we have allowed them to lead it, because so much emphasis is placed on the cost aspect of measuring value. And that is because the idea of measuring efficiency has been around for centuries while the concept of measuring effectiveness is fairly new and C-level executives still view it as a cost rather than an investment. But there are a lot of people out there who are measuring meetings effectiveness.

SM: That brings us to the next element in proving strategic value—design.

Element 2: Meeting Design

SM: Can design be linked to measurement?

Mary Boone: In the meeting design process, you are working to make certain that not only are you going to meet the objectives for that meeting, but that you are also, at the same time, connecting the achievement of those goals to the larger business objectives of the host organization. So the whole purpose of the process of design is very much integrated with the measurement process. If we set the objectives of a specific meeting properly upfront, the event is going to deliver a tremendous amount of strategic value to the organization.

SM: Describe the difference between planning and designing a meeting.

Mary Boone:

Planning a meeting is quite different from designing a meeting, but they are integrated and they are interrelated. So when I am planning a meeting, I am looking at all of the logistics associated with that meeting and all of the things that have to happen in order to make the meeting come to pass. When I am talking about meeting design, I am instead looking at the content and form of the meetings.

When I am working on meeting content, I might hear one perspective from an executive who is planning to do a presentation and I might hear a different point of view from another executive also planning to do a presentation. Then I can say, "Hey, it is very interesting; these are two different ways that you guys are looking at the same thing. Have you talked to each other about that?" This gets back to that whole silo issue that Susan brought up earlier.

In the process of working with executives in meeting design, you help them shape their communication; you help them shape what is happening in terms of content in the meetings.

With form, we are looking at what the organization wants to get accomplished and that dictates how we set up the meeting and the way people interact at the meeting.

So for example, an executive might say to me, "You know, I really would like to know what they are thinking about this initiative that I am talking about." So we might suggest that they use some form of audience response system. We might suggest that they collect information before the meeting or after the meeting, using some kind of online tool. That is where we are affecting the form that the meeting takes.

So if I am doing design work, I am very much involved with the business objectives for the meeting, I am very much involved with what the meeting owner is trying to accomplish with the meeting, the way that we set up the environment and the way we share information between people about the meeting regarding the content, and how we help facilitate that process. Those are the things that the meeting designer is doing.

Let me take a step back and say you can't do meeting design in a vacuum. Somebody who is a meeting designer never works by themselves, because meeting design is a process that involves multiple people. It involves the meeting owner. It involves the meeting planner. It potentially involves the production company. It could involve people from IT, people from communications. It is just going to depend on what it is that you are trying to get accomplished with that meeting.

The meeting designer should be the person who is very good at pulling together the right people, the right team to address an issue.

Element 3: Advanced Logistics

SM: What is the difference between advanced logistics and just logistics?

Mary Boone: At its most basic level, somebody who has a grasp of advanced logistics is capable of sourcing the kinds of things that a meeting designer would need in order to deliver a highly interactive and impactful meeting.

If I needed to incorporate some virtual elements into an event, I should be able to go to somebody in advanced logistics and they should have a generalist knowledge of the different kinds of vendors that might be able to provide me with something like that. They should understand the effect the venue has on the content. They should be able to be on the team that says, "Let's do the design before we pick the venue." So it's having the knowledge and understanding of the importance of a strategic approach to meetings so that they are one step ahead of us in terms of knowing where to go to get things and how to make things happen when we are trying to do a meeting design.

Susan Radojevic: It is enhancing that strategic component so that instead of worrying about what the destination is going to be or how we are going to get there, you are looking at how the destination is going to support the content that we want to deliver.

Element 4: Measuring the Impact

SM: What are the criteria of meetings measurement?

Jack Phillips: Well, in our model there are five levels of meetings measurement:

1. Reaction and Planned Action—what are the participants' reactions to an event and what are they planning to do with the information?

2. Learning—what skills, knowledge, or attitudes have changed and by how much?

3. Job Application—did the participants apply what they learned on the job?

4. Business Impact—did the on-the-job application produce measurable results?

5. ROI—did the monetary value of the results exceed the costs?

SM: How do you decide how much measurement a meeting requires?

Jack Phillips: Not every meeting needs all five levels of ROI measurement. It's important to have criteria to apply to a whole meetings portfolio to decide which meetings should have one measurement and which should have all five or any combination of the five.

And here is the criteria. First, we look at the cost of the meeting. Obviously, very expensive meetings need ROI more than inexpensive ones.

Second, assess the strategic value of the meeting. Some are very connected to the strategy, either of the organization (for a corporate meeting) or of the association (for an association meeting). The more it is connected to strategy, the more it needs to be evaluated at the impact and ROI level.

Is it addressing a particular organizational issue or an issue in a profession or field? If it is trying to solve a problem or crisis or issue or something that is causing a problem, then it needs a higher level of evaluation.

Next is the attendee. If it is only a few participants, maybe not, but if you have a thousand or ten thousand, yes, we have to know the value.

So those are the principal criteria, but there is one overriding criterion for internal corporate meetings. If it is a meeting that attracts the interest of the top executives in terms of them wanting to know the accountability, they want to know the value.

SM: How do you make the jump from measuring individual meetings on some level and translate that to the portfolio management system? Can this be applied to a whole portfolio?

Jack Phillips: Suppose a company has 100 meetings a year. We suggest measuring all 100, at Level 1, Reaction, making sure that we have the right kinds of reaction measures. Here we are going to focus on content-related questions; how relevant is this to your work? How important is this to your success? Is this new information for you? Is it valuable for you?

Then we suggest measuring takeaways for around 80 percent of them, which is Level 2, Learning. But there we focus on very simple measures. Did you learn what we wanted you to learn? Did you learn what was in the objectives? So now we have 80 percent of meetings being measured at Levels 1 and 2.

Now we push it—we recommend 30 percent of the meetings to go to Level 3, Application. It could be as simple as just asking three questions: Did you use what you have learned? Were you successful with it? If not, why? Just asking those three questions would give most organizations more data about their meetings than most have right now.

The goal is to get a macro view of the meetings for the whole portfolio. So now we pop down to 10 percent at Level 4, where we connect it to an impact measure.

There we are looking at the consequence of the action. Did it increase sales? Did it improve market share? Did it help my productivity? Am I saving time? Am I more satisfied? Are my customers more satisfied? Only 10 of the 100 get this level.

Then half of that gets pushed to the ROI measure and that is the ultimate level of accountability, where we compare the monetary value of that impact to the money we are spending. So five of the meetings out of 100 would be evaluated at that level.

That kind of portfolio does a couple of things for us. It makes sure that every meeting is evaluated at some level, and we very purposely and deliberately decide which ones should go to the next level, all the way up to Level 5.

We also combine measures across meetings to see how we are doing overall. It is like a macro-level scorecard, saying, "Okay, here is what we are doing on the Reaction on all of our meetings. Here is what we are doing on the Learning for all of our meetings. Here is what we are doing on Application for those 30 percent we are following up," and so forth.

Originally published July 1, 2009

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