Having just returned from one of our industry’s biggest and most engaging events, Ariba LIVE (more about that from Andrew tomorrow and next week), I thought it would be a good time to tackle another complex spend category – meeting and events management.

“Evolution” is a common theme around these parts (CPO Rising). In the spend/supply management arenas, we’re living in exciting times. Travel and expense management is becoming a strategic force. Contingent workforce management has extended across all facets of the contemporary organization through its umbrella. Even the accounts payable function, long mired in the nether regions of the back office, is actively proving to be a value-add series of processes.

This brings us into the realm of meetings and events management, a broader term now leveraged to describe the competencies, capabilities and intricacies of modern strategic meetings management (click here for a refresher on my first CPO Rising post on this topic). While I’ve been on record as saying that events could be considered a “sister” category to business travel (I’m not alone there; many organizations manage these two categories, at least from a supply management perspective, under the same program), the truth is that meetings management is evolving into something entirely different from its corporate sibling.

Modern events management does not a focus on cost savings, nor is it based on consolidating the many suppliers that comprise an event (airlines, hotels, resorts, caterers, A/V, entertainment, etc.). For many groups, the “best” events aren’t the ones that drive the most revenue or client sales. Instead, their focus is on the attendee experience and keeping those attendees engaged beyond a simple live event which is where the notion of “engagement management” fits in.

Engagement management follows a cyclical series of processes that includes measures beyond simple registration and the actual live event. Aspects such as social media engagement and consistent touches of “value” (mini-webinars that will tease / preview the event, whitepapers regarding the agenda content, relevant blogs / articles, etc.) will keep attendees engaged and excited until the actual live meeting. The concept of engagement management has birthed other interesting aspects that build on the classic processes of strategic meetings management programs (“SMMP”):

• Post-event analytics. To be fair, analytics isn’t necessarily a “new” aspect of events management, since they are considered an intermediate / advanced component of the typical SMMP. However, leveraging analytics for post-event reporting can be beneficial to improve the attendee experience in the future, as well as highlighting agenda items, speakers, and other event aspects that may have not been up to par. Post-event surveys and questionnaires are a major component in determining / analyzing these shortfalls.
• Attendee profiling. One of the advantages of treating events as “engagements” is not just the consistent contact between an organization and its attendees / registrants, it’s the information gleaned during the engagement management cycle. This information can be leveraged to tailor event content and ensure that attendees make the most out of meetings…which, of course, can lead to higher-quality events.
• And, speaking of quality: emotive return.  As I discussed earlier, quality and effectiveness are fast-becoming more critical than cost reductions, revenue, or savings in regards to events management. Marketing, sales and event management teams are focused on enhancing the attendee experience and driving true emotional value from their meetings. Did our social media presence increase after the event? Are more people talking about us? Did we provide an event that helped attendees better themselves or their organizations?
• Mobile! Mobile finds a way to sneak into every complex spend category, doesn’t it? Within engagement management, mobile applications can be utilized to create tailor-made, custom agendas for attendees, help those attendees identify sessions, exhibitors or speakers that are aligned to their needs, provide access to relevant content (videos, infographics, etc.) and support event navigation by providing information related to dining or entertainment. For event planners and marketing executives, mobile apps can be leveraged for on-site management, communicating with staff easily, capturing real-time feedback for sessions and improving event revenue by broadening sponsorship space to apps and portals.

Tagged in: Category Management, Christopher Dwyer, Complex Categories, Events, Events Management