Bring hundreds of people together for days of presentations at a corporate event and hope they get something out of it. That’s a tired playbook for meetings and events. It’s not going to cut it in 2024, according to Nicola Kastner, CEO of Event Leaders Exchange, and Rob Adams, president of Bishop-McCann. The two were featured speakers at the Skift Meetings Forum held on September 17.
“We used to bring people to corporate events and want to hold them hostage for three days. We’d want to maximize every single minute that they spent with us. We cannot do that anymore,” said Kastner.
Kastner and Adams emphasize challenges planners face and ways to modernize their approach.
Relying on Data
Data is increasingly crucial in shaping events. It falls into two categories. “Success metrics that talk about an event’s outcome and then diagnostic metrics that allow you to answer why.” These are two different data sets that are applied accordingly. Understanding what is meaningful to business leaders is important. It can be used to steer business decisions.
In addition, it’s important to consider corporate events as business tools, she says. “There’s a distinct difference between the events business and the business of events. We have to understand that events are designed to serve a business purpose,” said Kastner. “If we lead with understanding business objectives, business outcomes, what we’re trying to achieve, versus logistics that changes the dialogue about events and how you address stakeholders.”
Focus on Substance
Demonstrating business acumen and value to the organization is important. “You will never earn a seat at the table if you’re talking about logistics,” said Kastner.
Adams recalls a meeting with a client dealing with a decline in the overall sentiment of the conference based on post-event surveys. The meeting professional’s plan was to ask the CEO for an additional $3 million for food and beverage with the hope this would help turn things around.
“If somebody walked into my office and said, ‘Rob, the meeting didn’t go well and the insight is that people weren’t so happy with the food and beverage, and I’m going to ask for three more million dollars,’ I’m like, are you kidding me?”
Sustainability and Corporate Events
If the industry must start taking environmental sustainability seriously, says Kastner. If not, it will create a crisis as big as the AIG fiasco in 2008 that rocked the industry. A group was on an incentive trip just days after AIG accepted $85 billion of taxpayer money to avoid bankruptcy. The backlash was severe as meeting professionals struggled for years to justify off-site gatherings.
“We must tell impact stories about our events to counter the sustainability challenge that I think is going to come and bite us one day quite soon,” said Kastner.
She recommends putting measures in place to offset the environmental impact your gathering has made. In addition, using data to quantify that the business impact outweighs the environmental impact is recommended.