Robyn Renner
A number of tools
exist to help planners assess a meeting’s return on
investment from a monetary perspective. To determine whether events
live up to educational and institutional goals, Maritz Travel has
introduced Meetings Effectiveness, an ROI tool that uses attendee
surveys and other processes.
“The methodology, and the predictive
modeling research that supports it, enables organizations to
understand better the needs as well as the learning and
communication styles of their attendees,” said Christine Duffy,
president and CEO of the St. Louis-based meetings management
consulting firm.
The process begins with the alignment
phase, bringing the meeting’s stakeholders together to match the
event’s objectives with the company’s goals. This information is
used to create a pre-event audience survey and a customized
simulator to predict attendee response to various event
scenarios.
Surveys also are conducted during and
after the meeting. The results are fed into the Event Measurement
Scorecard, which demonstrates how the event performed against
corporate goals. Finally, all the information is gathered to build
out a plan for the next year.
One of the earliest adopters of the
service was Bayer HealthCare, based in Morristown, N.J., which used
Meetings Effectiveness to help evaluate its national sales meeting.
At the time the assessment began last November, the meeting’s
budget hadn’t increased in eight years, “and I was facing a cut,”
said Robyn Renner, manager of sales performance and development,
sales solutions, at Bayer. When the results came in after the
meeting in January and post-event assessments were completed,
Ren-ner’s budget was increased, and Maritz was brought in last
month to begin evaluating a series of sales meetings scheduled for
next year.
“[Management] is not cognizant of the
tool,” said Renner. “They just are very cognizant of the results
that came out of it.” She added, “Rather than judging the
effectiveness of an event by what people liked or didn’t like, this
judges it by what people actually learned and what they took away
for application to the business.”
The cost of Meetings Effectiveness
varies, depending on the consulting arrangement and scope of the
surveys.