Feel the Heat

As economic times remain stubbornly difficult, many meeting planners are adjusting to yet another round of detailed inspection of their events by their bosses. In a June SM survey of 101 meeting planners, 63 percent said that executive-level scrutiny of meeting spending has increased this year.

What's more, that scrutiny comes in forms other than simply looking at each budget line to see which items can be reduced or eliminated. For instance, more firms are pushing for better coordination among departments that hold meetings, so that planners can use a firm's volume of events to secure better contract terms from individual properties or hotel chains.

Another of management's concerns is how to determine the precise benefit of each aspect of a meeting. "The pressure we've faced has been a catalyst for many of us to implement return on investment [ROI] and return on objective [ROO] measurements," says Terri Breining, president of San Diego-based planning firm Concepts Worldwide and new chairwoman of Dallas-based Meeting Professionals International (MPI). While certainly labor-intensive, such initiatives serve to "reinforce the message that meeting planners need to be strategically involved at higher levels in their organizations," Breining adds. "When planners do this, they are considered integral parts of their businesses."

Cynthia Dugan, event manager for pharmaceutical firm Abbott International in Abbott Park, IL, has been asked by management for specific ROI figures for a few years now. But she just recently convinced her bosses to accept her ROO calculations in order to get a more useful indicator of each event's educational and motivational successes. Dugan brought the ROO concept to their attention after learning more about it in MPI's Certified Meeting Manager program.

"There are times when you simply can't come up with specific numbers from a meeting that go straight to the bottom line," she says. But ROO tactics, such as testing attendees' knowledge and skill sets before and after each meeting, can produce figures on how well attendees met management's objectives for a meeting -- objectives that executives feel are most important to increasing the bottom line. "It's a definite shift of thought, but management has been receptive and even encouraged by it, because it previously had been tough to give them numbers they could use to determine our value," Dugan says. "And the ROO reports let them know that we aren't just logistical people."