Building professional capacity through face-to-face meetings is a cornerstone of the meeting planning industry, a field often praised for delivering intangible, values-oriented benefits to businesses and professionals. Theresa Breining, principal of Breining Group LLC in Encinitas, California, told participants that for the industry to progress and survive—especially in a challenging economic climate and an increasingly competitive marketplace—the field needs quantifiable credibility.
“Most of our family members don’t know what [meeting planning professionals] do for a living,” Breining told a packed room at MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress Sunday afternoon. “One of the reasons that people don’t understand the value of what we do is that we haven’t explained it in business terms.”
Quantifiable outcomes help financial executives understand and support the value of meetings. They prove meetings are necessary to advancing the productivity, capacity and economic growth of businesses and professionals.
“Hundreds of thousands of meetings have been cancelled because people don’t understand the value of meetings,” Breining said.
She presented a methodology developed by human resources and consulting expert Jack Phillips of the Birmingham, AL-based ROI Institute. Return on Investment (ROI) methodology has been refined in other industries for more than 25 years, but has only emerged in the meeting planning field during the last six years.
ROI methodology uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative data, as well as an algebraic formula, to measure meeting effectiveness. “The difference with this methodology and what we’ve always done is we’ve only talked about intangible benefits” in the past, Breining said. “Now we have data and the intangible.”