Sharing Best Practices

When Greto and Tamer were invited to represent Coca-Cola on MCAF in 2001, they were in the early stages of developing a strategic meeting management program, so the feedback they received was invaluable. They were able to benchmark their processes against what other MCAF companies were doing and to incorporate some best practices into their model.

“That's one of the reasons it piqued our interest — that accessibility to 20 major corporations that are sharing information,” says Greto. Based on feedback from the others, they were able to formulate a new standard letter of agreement with suppliers, for example. Often, members will initiate surveys of members on a topic of interest, such as tax deductibility of incentive programs. “Once all the information is compiled by the person who was asking, they are in turn able to share the results, which is phenomenal, and usually it happens within a two-week turnaround time,” explains Greto.

The give and take is why members are so enthusiastic about MCAF and why, for most of them, it has replaced other educational outlets. “We can talk through these issues and get some great ideas because someone else there has done it,” says Snock. “And we have no qualms with someone taking our idea and redoing it in their company.”

For example, based on MCAF feedback, Snock developed an internal Web site to better communicate Cisco's meeting program to the administrative assistant community and facilitate the process of registering meetings. It proved to be an effective method of tracking the many smaller meetings throughout the company. “It was beneficial to me because we kind of piggybacked off some ideas the others had,” she says.

Hearing about the various technologies that companies use has been most helpful to Jack Eichhorn, director, meeting services, at Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif., who joined MCAF a year ago. “To sit in a room with 20 of your peers and understand not only what they're using, but the challenges they have been able to overcome — it's a great opportunity.” Learning what other companies are doing has helped him to avoid “re-creating the wheel,” says Eichhorn, because chances are, one of the members already has tried it.

Debi Scholar, meeting and event services director at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Florham Park, N.J., who joined MCAF four years ago, has incorporated elements of other members' meeting policies into her company's meeting policy. “What is the definition of a meeting? What does a meeting policy look like?” These are some of the questions that she asked. “Our meeting policy today is a combination of that of probably three or four other companies. We just tweaked it for our internal environment.”

She has also gotten insight into the types of metrics that executives are looking for from meetings managers. “While I think I might know what interests our chief financial officer, in terms of sharing metrics, it's also really great to see what types of information others are sharing.”

Creating the Recipe

Some would say MCAF is part of another movement — the rise of niche educational groups in the meetings industry. In recent years, Joan Eisenstodt, chief strategist at Eisenstodt Associates, a Washington, D.C. — based meeting consultant, training, and facilitation firm, has seen a growing number of such groups. She is involved in two of them: W2W, a group of women leaders in the meetings industry that formed in 2003; and INMEX, Unite Here's meetings education arm.

“It's the specialized education that we've gotten so far away from at these huge industry meetings. That, to me, is where we lose the sense of community,” says Eisenstodt, who had not heard of MCAF. The role of the meeting professional is much more complicated now than it was five to 10 years ago, so there is a growing desire by people with similar jobs — whether it's pharmaceutical planners or meeting department heads — to convene in niche groups.

Eisenstodt does not see smaller groups siphoning off the big association meetings, but rather complementing them. “A lot of us like to go to the big meetings,” she says, for the networking, the socializing, and the education. She suggests that the big associations develop niched hot topic areas at their meetings for people who want to get together on their own.

If MCAF does inspire other organizations to form, that's a good thing, says Eichhorn. “Our industry would be better off if there were additional organizations or opportunities to drive education and knowledge and the skill base.”

As far as MCAF, Snock hopes that the group's shared experiences and educational efforts will someday make strategic meeting management the norm throughout the industry. “Once upon a time, companies didn't have travel departments,” she says. “Now they all do, and they all operate all pretty similarly, and I think meetings departments will do the same.” Over time, she believes, the process will be less cumbersome, less daunting, and more companies will jump on the SMMP bandwagon.

Between now and then, “there's so much more to happen,” says Snock. “That's why it's exciting. We're in the beginning stages, and we're kind of creating the recipe.”

Strategic Meeting Management 101

What exactly is strategic meeting management? “It's not really about the meeting at all,” says Michele Snock, global manager of meeting services at Cisco Systems, San Jose, Calif. “It's about looking at the enterprise and how we (the meetings department) affect the enterprise. It's about spend optimization.”

At Oracle, Redwood City, Calif., the essence of a strategic meeting management program is the three “Ts” — track, trend, and trim. “You have to be able to track it to trend it,” says Jack Eichhorn, director, meeting services. “If you can't track it, you can't trend it, and if you can't trend it, you can't trim it.”

One of the big challenges in launching an SMMP is getting senior management on board. “Unless you have an executive champion, it's really hard to get an SMMP going,” says Snock. It's a Catch-22 because you can't launch an SMMP without a business plan, but it's hard to get the data for a business plan without an SMMP.

She recommends compiling as much information as possible and finding an executive champion to support the initiative. “Once you do that, you then have to change the perception of the people in your company,” she says — not just the executives, but everyone who touches meetings, including those accustomed to planning their own meetings. “The administrative assistant community, for example, can really make you or break you. If they don't buy into what you're doing, it could be a disaster.”

For more information on strategic meeting management programs, check out the following articles and white papers:

• www.nbta.org/Members/CommitteesCouncilsTaskForces/GroupsMeetings.htm

• www.mpiweb.org/CMS/mpiweb/mpicontent.aspx?id=4386

• http://meetingsnet.com/strategy/cases/index.html

Marketing or Procurement: Where Does the Meeting Department Belong?

While there is no standard model, most of the MCAF members who have strategic meeting management programs operate within the procurement structure. Michele Snock, global manager of meeting services at Cisco Systems, San Jose, Calif., and Jack Eichhorn, director, meeting services at Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif. — who are both aligned with procurement at their respective companies — say that it's easier to implement an SMMP if the meeting department reports to procurement or operations rather than to marketing.

One reason is that marketing departments tend to focus on marketing meetings, not on the gamut of corporate meetings, explains Snock.

Also, the two departments view meetings very differently. “Marketing should really be focusing on the content and driving the marketing messaging,” says Eichhorn. “As part of procurement, we want to support that requirement, but our motivation is different.” While marketing's mission is to invest in meetings to optimize the experience for the customer, the procurement side looks at how to spend as efficiently as possible without diluting or hampering the meeting or the marketing message.

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