“There’s no-cookie cutter process for an SMMP [Strategic Meetings Management Plan],” said Ross VanDooser, director of value analysis at StarCite, during a panel at MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress. “The idea is to examine your organization’s culture and pick out what will work best.”
“Before you can begin any SMMP program, you need to go back to consolidation,” said Amy Doty of Doty Consulting. Kimberly Meyer, president of Meetings Analytics, added, “You have to start with reporting in mind. If you can’t report it, it doesn’t count.” Progressive organizations are incorporating corporate social responsibility (CSR) scores and meeting effectiveness into SMM reporting.
VanDooser highlighted the importance of an online tool for managing attendees and purchasing. “Most of the value in SMMP comes from sourcing,” he said. Meyer agreed that preferred vendors are very important: “It’s the only way you can begin to track and leverage your spend.”
Measuring meeting effectiveness is an important thread of SMMP, along with managing finances, risk and cost savings, said Ira Kerns, managing director of GuideStar Research. Pre-meeting research can be used to identify issues that should be emphasized at the meeting, and post-meeting research can track the meeting’s success at addressing targeted issues. “We call that ‘return on event,’” Kerns said.
Assessing the maturity of an organization’s SMMP “boils down to visibility and having a structured program in place,” said VanDooser. Not every meeting will follow the same workflow. “If you put an electronic workflow in place, the system will force them through the right process based on the registration numbers,” he said.
For a program of moderate maturity, “executive sponsorship is where you need to start,” said Meyer. Developing the components of SMMP is a matter of “baby steps,” VanDooser said, “and there will always be evolution.”