WHILE MANAGED TRAVEL is the core mission of the corporate travel buyers who convened in San Diego for the annual meeting of the National Business Travel Association annual convention last month, strategic meetings management is of growing importance for many. To address those members' needs, NBTA's Groups and Meetings Committee released at the show the fourth in a series of white papers on strategic meeting management programs.

The latest paper, “Mobilizing Internal Stakeholders,” is written for people who are taking a lead role in designing an SMMP — those looking at how to best manage the process of planning meetings and leveraging corporate spend. The key “stakeholders” they need to work with to set up an SMMP, according to the paper, are meeting planners, meeting sponsors, procurement, finance, legal/risk management, and information technology departments. The paper discusses the challenges of building and maintaining a relationship with each of these “customers,” with a special emphasis on meeting planners, because, as the authors recognize, “the policies and procedures designed to support an SMMP will impact them most.”

NBTA's Groups and Meetings Committee has also produced white papers on “Building a Strategic Meetings Management Program,” “Critical Meeting Components: Hotel and Air,” and “Building a Meetings Policy in Support of Your Strategic Meetings Management Program.” Only the first is available to non-NBTA members; visit www.nbta.org.