MeetGreen eNews Volume 4 Issue 1 | May 2009
Meeting Strategies Worldwide is now MeetGreen!
Not to be left behind, The Daily Plan-It is following suit with a new name and look.

Welcome to this issue of MeetGreen!
Strategies, insights and resources that empower organizations to connect, sustain and thrive.
 

In this issue

Announcements

New Offices:
MeetGreen announces the opening of offices in Washington DC and Vancouver, BC to better serve the growing demand for green meeting services.


Team Expands:
MeetGreen welcomes two new team members, Rebecca Mebane as a project manager and Della Green as a sales manager. Both come from distinguished backgrounds in the hospitality industry and bring a passion for sustainability.


Look for MeetGreen at:

IMEX
May 26-28, 2009

 

Meetings Are Not Junkets

Polishing Our Industry's Unfairly Tarnished Reputation

Amy Spatrisano, CMP, Principal

The sky is falling! It feels a bit like Chicken Little is on the loose in the meetings industry at the moment. It started with the legislation you may have heard about that passed on February 17th as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act which put limits on luxury expenditures, including meeting and events. The Act's language says that companies that receive funds under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) must have a "...policy regarding the excessive expenditures on: entertainment or events...aviation or other transportation services; or other activities or events that are not reasonable expenditures for the staff development, reasonable performance incentives, or other similar measures conducted in the normal course of the business operations." A rather reasonable set of policies actually.

Unfortunately, like most well intended rulings this one too went a bit awry. It created an impression that all meetings are excessive, wild boondoggles dismissing any value of meetings.

Well, you can imagine the effect this news had on a multi-billion dollar industry that has been challenged over the years to be seen as an industry at all. Finally, the meetings/events industry gets recognized! Not obviously the impression we wanted the world to have about meetings. The good news is the industry mobilized. One group spawned a petition called keepamericameeting.com which asks people to send a message to their legislators to publicly support the meetings and events industry. In addition, a coalition of industry leaders published their own policy statement calling it a "Model board policy for approval of meetings, events and incentive/recognition travel" (for the details: http://meetingsnet.com/financialinsurancemeetings/news/model_guidelines_tarp_0209/index.html)

The irony about much of this is all of these processes, the Act, the petition and model all came out of MEETINGS people attended to decide all this. But the most troubling part is that no where in any of these initiatives does anyone tie the correlation of meetings to the creation, preservation, implementation or journey of sustainability. Considering the thousands of many conferences, summits, meetings that have been and are being held worldwide that play a significant role in the path towards sustainability while illustrating the power of meetings, it seems like a HUGE missed opportunity that not once did any of these groups underscore that meetings are an essential component of creating sustainable communities.

Even the events themselves can be seen as opportunities to educate attendees on the impact of meetings. The US Green Building Council's Greenbuild International Conference and Expo is a great example. The conference has won the IMEX Green Meetings award twice and most recently went through the certification process of BS 8901 for Sustainable Events. Attendees are asked to minimize their impact before coming to event with before-you-leave-home tips reminding them to bring a reusable beverage container and use public transportation. The organizers work in advance with all of the vendors, hotels, venues, food and beverage providers and transportation companies to minimize their negative environmental footprint through initiatives that also often save money. The conference's environmental impacts are measured and use as benchmarks to ensure continued improvement. This is only one example; there are many other meetings building similar awareness.

At the end of the day our connection to each other, the planet and our impacts are realized when we meet. It is in those gatherings/meetings that innovation breathes life, relationships create connections and amazing things happen.

Be Green: Technology Focus

Virtual Keynotes Cut Costs

Mary Peters, Project Manager and Britta Ehnebuske, Speaker Coordinator

In order to both raise the bar from the previous year's conference and to help save money due to the sagging economy, the Greening the Hospitality Industry Conference, held in February at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, chose to use video conferencing to bring their keynote speaker to its attendees. The conference showcased the new technology to those in the industry looking for ways to hold more sustainable meetings by utilizing this technology. By agreeing to broadcast live from Boulder, Colorado for a reduced speakers' fee, the keynote, L. Hunter Lovins helped to not only diminish the carbon footprint of the conference, but also eliminated the cost of airfare, hotel, and other travel expenses for the Green Meeting Industry Council.

The idea of implementing creative technology as a way to reduce both cost and environmental impact is not one that is unfamiliar to the industry. As Kristi Casey Sanders, blogger for PlanYourMeetings.com commented after attending the event, "[what] a fascinating example of how a little thought in the planning process can make a huge impact. Here we were attending a conference on how to green our events, and the organizers surprised us with this brilliant technology that's innovative, interactive, functional, fun, unexpected and which is a great example of how planners can use technology as a sustainable solution. Typical of most green strategies that reduce waste, booking Lovins' virtual keynote also cost less money than flying her in for a speech." The moral of this story? In these lean economic times, it makes a great deal of sense to approach each meeting from a fresh perspective, prepared to use your creativity and technological know-how to create both fiscally and environmentally smart meetings.

Managing the Incredible Shrinking Conference

How to keep your event in the black when registration falls short

Mary Cameron, CMP, Project Manager

The Challenge: It's January 2009, the economy is tanking, participants are not registering, but the organization has committed to having their annual conference. We need to figure out how to reduce costs below what was already contracted. BUT! We also need to have those that attend the conference have a great time and not notice the huge cuts. They need to believe they got great value for their conference dollars. The organization realizes the daunting task and has made peace with the idea they are going to loose money this year because of the high fixed costs. All they ask is that we (as their meeting management arm) try to minimize their loss.

Our Promise: Because of our great working relationship with all the vendors involved, we were pleased to alert the organization--weeks prior to the conference--we might be able to reduce their loss from near $300K to less than $30K. But we wouldn't know for sure till all the final numbers came in.

The Final Results: Attendance in 2009 was down 32%. But when the dust settled and the final numbers came in, we managed to save more than $350K on the items we managed. In fact, the bottom line was…drum roll…they didn't lose money--they made a profit of more than $57K!

Here's how we did it:

  • Enrolled our vendor partners by having frank conversations to get every single person thinking of ways to cut costs. No idea was too crazy to consider! Everyone stepped up to do their part to help. Every business we called did whatever they could to help us out, and we say thanks with extra recognition to:
    • Santa Clara Convention & Visitors Bureau - lowered room pickup minimums
    • Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, Hilton Hotel Santa Clara, Holiday Inn Santa Clara - kept room blocks open right up to the end and waived attrition
    • Hyatt Catering and ARAMARK - Chefs suggested alternative menus based on cost limitations
    • Corporate AV - negotiated some freebies and selected lower tech/less expensive items such as wired mics rather than wireless lavaliere mics.
    • Champion - determined ways to keep costs down such as: selecting less expensive furniture rentals; limiting the use of meter boards; selecting less expensive plants to rent and eliminating everything extra possible. It's important to note Champion gave us discounts at the last minute to help.
    • SmartCity - helped to reduce WiFi costs
    • Brown & Bigelow - Looked for the most cost-effective, creative alternatives possible.
  • Kept F&B as low as possible:
    • Simplified food choices - even at board meeting they had a cold deli buffet lunch rather than hot meal.
    • Advised catering from the start that we would keep the food costs to the minimum required by contract. They were really great about this and still produced wonderful tasty food!
    • Never served sodas - instead substituted lemonade & iced tea, and water all served in bulk.
  • Reduced the quantity of signs produced by reusing previous year's signs over again (keeping the same basic logo each year without the current year identified).
  • Eliminated some expensive give away items like USB keys - this decision saved the cost of the item, the cost of preloading the conference data, and also the associated shipping costs. Instead the presentation materials were kept very current on the conference website, so the attendees could still get the information on site and after the conference.
  • Reduced the number of conference bags ordered. We asked the participants during online registration if they wanted a conference bag, and told them we would give an extra drink ticket to those refusing bags - and surprisingly learned that more than 50% said "no thanks, I have plenty of bags," and "sure, I'll have an extra drink!" The savings on this was huge because with the decision to eliminate the bag we also chose to eliminate the exhibitor items getting pre-stuffed in the bags. This meant we saved:
    • on shipping of the bags (50% fewer means 50% less poundage shipped)
    • on the cost of drayage with the decorator (lower poundage)
    • less exhibitor promotional materials shipped (they knew they wouldn't need as many for just at their booth)
    • fewer temp hours required because no bag stuffing done
    • less trash produced: fewer shipping boxes used and the promotional materials taken at the exhibitor booths are actually taken by choice, so many fewer were discarded than would have been from the pre-stuffed bags
  • Eliminated phone lines: In the past we had a dedicated phone line at registration. We realized everyone has cell phones so there was no real reason to have this.
  • Reduced labor: We opened registration early on move-in day and encouraged delegates to register early thereby reducing the rush the 1st day. We re-evaluated the registration labor and reduced it by 30%. In addition we carefully evaluated the entire registration processes to try to get by with less staff. It all worked perfectly - we never had more than 3 people in line at any given time.

Overall cost savings from what was projected:

  • Freight/handling reduced by $1,400
  • Temps reduced by $3,171
  • Sign production reduced by $4,054
  • Decorator costs reduced by $27,471
  • F&B reduced by $208,700
  • AV reduced by $20,280
  • Promotional products & general swag reduced by $86,080
Total cost savings: $351,156

Resources

Vanessa Adelmann, Online Development

 

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