Unlocking Strategic Advantage: How Technology Elevates Your Managed Meetings Program

In today's dynamic business landscape, effective meetings and events are more critical than ever for driving collaboration, fostering innovation, and achieving organizational goals. However, as we’ve learned, managing these programs strategically can be a complex undertaking.

While there is no SMM-in-a-box technology, despite the claims of adept tech sales teams across the globe, leveraging the right solutions will aid the transformation of your meetings and events into powerful engines of efficiency and engagement.

The Power of Technology in a Managed Meetings Program

When tech is integrated thoughtfully into a managed meetings program, it becomes an indispensable tool for achieving significant benefits. It's about empowering your teams and enhancing every aspect of the attendee experience.

Driving Efficiency and Productivity

Imagine a streamlined process where approvals are swift, collaboration is seamless, and every detail of an event is meticulously tracked.

Technology platforms enable teams to work more efficiently, from initial request to final execution. For instance, a team leader organizing an offsite can initiate a meeting request within a system, triggering a structured approval process that includes leader sign-off, budget allocation, and the gathering of key details for the event's Request for Proposal (RFP). This ensures that your sourcing team has all the necessary information at their fingertips. Without these technological advancements, organizations often find themselves heavily reliant on time-consuming email chains and numerous meetings to accomplish these same tasks.

Cost Savings

Typically, where you can drive efficiencies you will also drive cost savings. While they require investment, managed meeting technology implementations, in addition to smoothing processes and improving experiences, will also provide savings in the following ways:

1. Greater Efficiency: As discussed in detail above, a technology-forward, process-driven approach to meeting and event management will create efficiencies that can lengthen lead times enabling a more proactive, planned approach, which will drive cost savings with suppliers.

2. Resource Management: The smoothed processes and insights gleaned through the technology platforms can drive savings in areas such as:

   • Labor Costs: platforms work behind the scenes and remove the need for time-consuming tasks around approvals and sourcing.

   • Supplier Costs: Insight into when and where teams are meeting provides the opportunity to make better decisions including combining events or leveraging supplier relationships.

3. Sourcing and Supplier Management: Technology platforms can ensure that preferred suppliers are prioritized due to preferred agreements, which will save time and dollars through the legal review process as well as ensure agreed-upon volume targets are hit with key suppliers to ensure preferred pricing.

Enhancing Informed Decision-Making

Making the right decisions is paramount for successful meetings and events. Managed meetings technology platforms provide built-in reporting and real-time dashboards, offering decision-makers access to high-quality data. These powerful applications can help answer critical questions, such as:

• Should this event be in-person, virtual, or hybrid?

• Which destination or venue would be most cost-effective for a particular event?

• Could multiple events on the calendar be combined to drive economies of scale and maximize your return on investment?

By providing these insights, technology empowers you to make data-driven choices that optimize your program's effectiveness and budget.

Risk Mitigation

In an earlier installment in this series, we discussed the importance of the organization’s managed meetings policy. Julie eloquently described the policy as the “connective tissue” linking the meetings program to the organization’s goals. The program technology then, would help support that structure with systems to bring standardization and centralization of data and decision-making and guardrails to reduce risks related to data security, policy compliance, and financial decisions at the program, event, or attendee level.

Boosting Attendee Engagement

Finally, the attendee experience is at the heart of any successful event, and technology plays a pivotal role in elevating it. Whether it's before, during, or after an event, technology platforms can significantly drive attendee engagement.

• Pre-Event: Empower participants to personalize their experience by allowing them to elect specific tracks or sessions at a conference, or to pre-select appointments with vendors at a tradeshow. This ensures attendees can optimize their time and focus on what matters most to them.

• On-Site: A suite of engagement tools, including mobile apps, AI-driven recommendation models, SMS session reminders, gamification, and polling software, all contribute to a more dynamic and interactive participant experience. There are also emerging technologies to provide for more inclusive experiences, including real-time captioning services to manage multiple languages as well as vision, hearing and speech disabilities.

• Post-Event: The conversation doesn't have to end when the event does. Organizers can continue to engage attendees by tailoring messages based on their behavior during the event. For example, content from missed sessions could be shared via a personalized follow-up email, or surveys can be designed to include only the sessions an attendee joined, ensuring more accurate and relevant feedback for future planning.

Partnering for Success

By strategically integrating technology, you can achieve greater efficiency, make more informed decisions, and create truly exceptional attendee experiences. Our consulting services are designed to help you harness the full potential of these technologies. We work with you to understand your unique needs, identify the right solutions, platforms, and partners, and ultimately implement a managed meetings program that delivers tangible results.