Feature - February / March 2008

 

By John Buchanan

After a decade of incremental impact that has nudged meeting planning from a labor-intensive task toward one that can be managed much more efficiently, technology is on the verge of transforming the entire process, from start to finish. In between those bookends, it is delivering new capabilities not even imagined a few years ago, such as the ability for attendees to communicate and interact with one another before, during and after a meeting or convention, or for planners to know what attendees are thinking at any step along the way.

Meeting attendees can submit short-answer responses to interactive questions using Turning Technologies’ new ResponseCard XR keypads. Photo courtesy of Turning Technologies LLC

“Technology has had an enormous impact on our department, on all of our meetings, and our organization as a whole,” said Terri Clay, strategic director, conference and travel management, for the American Cancer Society (ACS) in Atlanta, GA. Clay, who has been a meeting planner for 22 years, heads a 10-person department that planned nearly 300 meetings and events in 2007. “Technology plays a huge part in the meetings industry, including in the nonprofit world.” Clay said the key benefits her organization reaps from technology are improved efficiency and related cost savings. For example, she said, even though the number of meetings she produces has grown in recent years, technology has enabled her to accomplish the work without having to add full-time employees.

Paulette Heney, CMM, director of meetings, events and travel for the United States Bowling Congress (USBC) in Greendale, WI, agreed with Clay that technology has made her life a lot easier. “The Internet has been a huge factor in meeting planning,” said Heney, who planned 50 meetings and events in 2007, including an annual convention and two major tournaments.

Paul Paone, executive director of the New York-based Meetings Technology Expo, put the issue into a forward-looking context for planners who are just now assessing what the ever-broadening range of capabilities can do for them. “Planners need to categorize technologies into three areas,” said Paone, who, as a former trade show manager, began using the earliest technologies 10 years ago. “The first is the efficiency element. The second is a capability to enhance the meeting experience, and the third thing is that it either saves you money or earns you money. Those are the three main issues to look at today.”

Lower Costs Mean Wider Access
Reggie Henry, chief technology officer at ASAE (American Society of Association Executives) & The Center for Association Leadership in Washington, DC, said that interest in meeting technologies among ASAE members continued to grow last year. “One of the things I’m starting to see is that the difference between how corporate meeting planners and association planners use technology is starting to narrow,” said Henry, who has been in his post for 13 years and observed the advent of such technologies from the beginning. “Meetings are meetings, and association planners are now looking for all the same stuff that corporate planners are. It used to be that the major difference was cost, in that many associations couldn’t afford what corporate meeting planners were adopting early on, but as these technologies have become less expensive, they have become more available to all types of organizations, including associations.”

The astonishing reach of the Internet and Web-based capabilities has had a profound impact on many association planners, Henry said. “Take registration systems, for example,” he said. “It used to be that to have the most capable registration system, you had to buy it: You had to buy a server, and you had to have people trained to use it. With the advent of the Web and software as a service, you can rent the service for the time frame of your meeting. That has brought the cost way, way down.”

Where Henry sees the fastest growth of technological applications among ASAE members is for annual meetings and other major events. “For big meetings, they’re using an outsourced service,” he said. “For smaller meetings, they’re using the in-house capabilities of their information-technology or meetings departments.”

Corbin Ball, CMP, a former meeting planner who is now among the country’s most respected experts on meeting technologies, explained the ways in which association usage differs from the corporate world. “While corporate planners will be more interested in things like speaker management, association planners will be more interested in abstract management, such as papers and presentations, especially for technical and scientific associations,” Ball said. “Another difference is that exhibition management capabilities will be a little higher on the list for association priorities. So, the same general trends that are driving the use of meeting technologies will apply to both associations and corporate users, but the applications will be a little different. Some new capabilities, such as lead retrieval, will become more important to both markets, especially for large trade shows and conferences.”

Another commonality is that the rate of change is accelerating for both markets, Ball said. “But how that’s impacting the meetings industry is as much about the refinement of existing systems, such as attendee management, which has been around for 10 years now, as it is the newest capabilities,” he said.

As a result, Ball said, planners who are just now taking a serious look at technology should understand that gone are the days when planners could simply seek out the “hottest” new applications and buy or license them. Shopping for technology today is much more complex and time-consuming. “There are 190 online registration products out there, or more, so you can’t really talk about the ‘top three’ providers in a particular

The nTAG interactive badge system was used by 130 meeting planners from across the country who attended the “Las Vegas Educational Experience” event held recently at seven Las Vegas Meetings by Harrah’s Entertainment properties. Participants, such as Baskow & Associates’ Beth Duke (above), used the badge to electronically network and to record anecdotes on the badge’s on-screen keyboard that were then displayed in real time on large plasma screens throughout the venue. © Harrah’s License Company, LLC 2008

category any more,” he said. “One size does not fit all, and a particular capability that is important to one planner is not going to be important to another planner.”

Leader Of The Pack
Although Ball and other experts such as Paone agree that an ever-increasing roster of choices makes it almost impossible to easily reduce a universe of prospective providers to a short list without a lot of research, Ball noted that one exception is the comprehensive meetings management platform from StarCite. Its capabilities stretch from site selection and the dissemination of electronic RFPs to post-event cost analysis.

Clay has used StarCite since 2002. “In our organization, we have nine to 11 people who are sourcing meetings every day, and we are using the Rapid RFP function of StarCite to source those meetings,” she said. “We are doing comprehensive meeting planning through the Meeting View capability.”

ACS planners use StarCite in an integrated function with another leading technology Cliqbook, so that meeting attendees and volunteers who travel throughout the year can book their own travel within an automated system. “It is a single, seamless transaction for the registrant,” Clay said. “They can go to the site, register and book their travel.”

StarCite also saves ACS the need for a separate online registration component because it is included in the platform, which also provides a capability for hotel room inventory management.

“Our business is very complex, because the American Cancer Society is a nonprofit with divisions throughout the country,” Clay said. “StarCite was the only tool that could navigate in the registration process for us and help us complete those transactions based on navigation of attendance sites. Every meeting that we do has a custom-built registration site, built in StarCite, whether it’s 10 attendees or 10,000. It has also allowed us to lower our overhead with our travel agency. The complexity of what we do lies in the fact that we are a volunteer organization and we have thousands of volunteers who travel on our behalf. So in order for those volunteers to be able to make airline reservations, they have to have a site to register with that connects to our travel site with our payment function linked to it. Our volunteers do

Turning Technologies’ ResponseCard XR keypad records responses to interactive questions during meeting sessions and events. Photo courtesy of Turning Technologies LLC

not pay for their travel and turn it in to us for reimbursement. We direct-bill their travel through our travel agency. StarCite was the solution for us to be able to do that online so we could reduce the number of call-ins to the travel agency, and that has significantly reduced our overhead costs with the travel agency.”

The Million-Dollar Baby
Heney has enjoyed even more dramatic benefits from Passkey, a leading-edge Web-based application that has helped revolutionize meeting planning. Passkey delivers a customized Web site for each meeting that allows for online booking by attendees and sophisticated room inventory management by planners. Heney uses Passkey for all of her meetings and events, including USBC’s annual convention, which draws more than 2,200 attendees, and a tournament, which attracts 80,000 participants between February and July.

Before adopting Passkey, Heney used travel agencies. “We now manage all of the blocks at all of our hotels in-house,” Heney said. “Our customer service is improved because it’s our employees who are dealing with all of our attendees. We also reap the economic benefits, because the travel agency used to get all of the commissions from the hotel bookings, and now we make the money, so it has really helped our bottom line. This past year, we made about $1.2 million in gross revenue from our housing.” After paying a small per-reservation fee to Passkey, USBC netted $780,000 in revenue. Under the old travel agency system, the association received no income.

Heney added that Passkey has also helped USBC build relationships with hotels that were previously overseen by contracted travel agents. The result has been improved customer service, she said. That, in turn, has led to the association booking significantly more hotel rooms for attendees than it did under the old system, when many attendees booked outside the system.

Heney is now overseeing a transition to Passkey’s RegLink system, which will allow USBC to link its three separate databases for event registration, tournament reservations and housing, so that internal staff do not have to re-input individual information. The expanded system also will provide greater capability for analysis. For example, Heney will be able to identify tournament participants who are not booking hotel rooms through the association, so they can be targeted as revenue opportunities.

Heney also has been talking to Passkey about adding an airline booking capability to the Passkey system, and she expects that it can be worked out within the next 12 months.

Webinars
One of the most interesting ways in which new technologies are impacting meetings and events created by ASAE members, Henry said, is in the alternate delivery of content through webinars.

“Associations have been doing webinars for years,” he said. The change, he explained, is the switch from a free service for members to a new business model that creates a new revenue stream with paid content. But, he added, individual associations differ on whether that is a smart strategy.

One that believes it is very smart is the USBC. Heney said the association started doing them three years ago as a free service, then added a new roster of paid webinars in the last 18 months. Last year, the organization produced 10 paid webinars, on topics such as association leadership. Because USBC has more than 3,000 local chapters as a result of the 2005 merger of four separate national bowling associations, there is fertile ground for building a solid business based on compelling content that can be delivered online for a fee. Furthermore, USBC has chosen to position and promote it as an innovative new service for members. Heney also streams a free presentation of USBC’s annual convention and major tournaments on the Internet so that members who do not attend or participate can still be part of the excitement of USBC’s most important events.

Social Media And The Interactive Web
Ball said another major trend is the continuing explosion of Web 2.0, which is a broad term that covers the “participatory Web.” It includes RSS newsfeeds, blogs, podcasts, rich Internet applications and user-generated content such as wikis. “It’s a transformation of the Web, from where you went to a Web site to read the material, to now, where you go to a Web site and participate in real time,” Ball said. The impact of Web 2.0 technologies has been huge. Now, attendees can have a direct impact on a meeting or conference before, during or after the event, through the various kinds of forums that are available, often for free, with social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace, or peer-to-peer technologies such as LinkedIn.

The debut of Apple’s iPhone will ultimately take things to a new level, Ball said, as state-of-the-art mobile technologies converge with social networking tools. “The iPhone is the best mobile Web browser ever made, and it’s an indication of where this technology is going,” Ball said. “That opens up a whole range of things. Now you will be able to bring technology with you onsite in a real easy format. That is going to be a huge trend that will really change things such as the ability to do surveys, audience polling and networking.” Meetings and conferences, he said, will be totally transformed by instant communication and feedback.

Henry agreed that the topic is a hot one among ASAE members. “The big change we saw in 2007 was the idea of trying to find ways to extend the experience of the meeting, both prior to and after the event,” he said. “Social networking is how planners are thinking about that now, but they’ve been thinking about it for several years.” What progressive planners are interested in, he said, is improving the capabilities of their attendees to interact with one another — and them — before, during and after a meeting.

“There are a number of associations that are using public-access social networking sites such as YouTube and MySpace,” Henry said. “They’ll set up a page just for that meeting, and it might not be officially sanctioned by the association. It might be set up by attendees.” In fact, Henry said, he has set up a personal page at YouTube and MySpace, and also uses LinkedIn to manage his peer network.

USBC’s Heney has started to use online chat capabilities as a way to democratize her meetings. Such a capability also gives her new levels of insight, she said. “We can find out what the larger interests are about, what kinds of workshops we should have, and now we can develop them better once we know the level of interest.”

Reading Minds
The other big trend Henry is seeing at ASAE is fast-growing interest in the attendee response and polling capabilities, from providers such as iDNA Information Systems; TouchPoll; Turning Tech­nologies, which recently released the audience response software TurningPoint 2008 and New ResponseCard XR keypad; and nTAG Interactive, which offers an interactive name badge used for networking and attendance tracking as well as audience polling.

“Now you have these technologies at the meeting, in the session, that allow the room to get a sense of what everybody is feeling about the content of the meeting,” Henry said. He added that he planned to use such a technology for the first time at a Town Hall meeting, the day before ASAE’s Technology Conference and Expo, which was held January 31–February 1, 2008 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC (technologyconference.org).

Paone has observed the growing interest among association planners in the new audience response and voting technologies. He has used Options Technologies and MS Interactive at his own technology conferences over the past year.

Ericka Carlsen, special events director at the Vancouver, WA-based Building Industry Association, a regional organization in the Pacific Northwest, used TouchPoll for the first time last August at her Parade of Homes public event that draws more than 20,000 attendees. She used it to automate the voting process for the

The TouchPoll interactive touchscreen system automates and customizes the surveying, voting or polling process during meetings and events to gain valuable feedback, the results of which are published instantly. The TouchPoll research system is the only software written in “next generation” language that allows its users to compose a survey, poll attendees, then download results in a wireless format. Photo courtesy of TouchPoll

association’s “Best of Show” awards. More than 4,000 attendees used the technology.

However, Carlsen said that such technology is only appropriate for her largest annual event, and she has no plans to use it for any smaller meetings. “Most of our events are in the 200 to 500 attendee range, which we can handle manually internally,” Carlsen said.

Heney said she is very interested in audience response and voting technologies, because attendees at USBC’s annual convention vote on important issues, and tallying those votes can take up to an hour. She said that as costs continue to come down, she will look at technologies such as TouchPoll or its major competitors.

Comprehensive Applications
For associations that are investigating the new meeting technologies, Paone advised taking the long view toward ultimately adopting a comprehensive, fully integrated system of technologies that address the entire meeting planning process, from start to finish — not just individual components of it, such as sourcing or attendee management (See box on page 54.)

“In the future, it will be a matter of managing all of the technologies and putting them together into one comprehensive tool that has interrelated workings, from a group of interrelated technologies,” he said. The key consideration, he said, is a long-range plan for executing and managing the meeting planning process in a way that truly automates it. However, he and Ball each noted, in order to get to that point, standards must be established that will allow various technologies from different providers to fully communicate and interact with one another. Although that day is still a few years off, that kind of vision is required in order to reap the maximum potential benefits.

Ball noted that it is equally important that planners who have been resistant to technology appreciate its role in their futures. “The message is that digital Darwinism is alive and well, and if you’re not using these tools, you won’t be as competitive as those planners who are,” he said. “Planners who are using these technologies correctly and effectively will be more efficient and will survive better in the long run.”    ACF

Putting It All Together The completely integrated system of the foreseeable future will replace the individual technologies that have been all the rage for the past few years, said Paul Paone, executive director of the Meetings Technology Expo, which will be held four times this year. “Planners need to look at the building blocks of a comprehensive technology application platform,” Paone said. “The challenge is that you have to be working from a blueprint.” The following components are the foundation of Paone’s blueprint. Cost management, which incorporates budgeting, cost management and analysis. Site selection, from RFP management to venue selection. Attendance building, which includes online registration, with travel management and housing fully integrated, an online booking tool, room block management, ground transportation management and hotel facility management. Attendee management, which includes customer relationship management (CRM) and membership management tools. Content management, which includes event data management, speaker management, abstract management, exhibition management, and surveys and blogs for gathering information and feedback. Other content management tools include virtual meeting tools, groupware, webcasting/webinar and videoconference services, mobile technology tools, and an ability to archive video, audio and print. Marketing management, which includes event marketing and communication tools, integrated electronic invitation capabilities including a survey component, and a Web design system. Pre-show and onsite logistical management, including project and task management tools, audio-visual products and services, Internet connectivity providers, kiosk-message center capabilities, badge-making tools and banquet seating tools. Networking tools, including social networking capabilities, appointment scheduling tools, matchmaking tools and lead retrieval tools. Revenue management, including booth sales tools, sponsorship and advertising sales management tools, pay-per-view Web archiving tools, virtual events fees and shopping cart/online content sales capabilities. For more information on Meetings Technology Expo events scheduled for 2008, go to www.meetingstechexpo.com. — JB

Corbin Ball's Top 10 List Corbin Ball is among the best-known meeting technology experts in the U.S. He has singled out what he says are the 10 technologies that have had the greatest impact on meeting planning so far. Attendee management. Sourcing and meeting consolidation. Events management. Housing management. Exhibition management, including floor sales. Abstract and speaker management. Networking tools, including scheduling. Contact management, including lead retrieval. Mobile/wireless technology, including RFID and portable networking tools. Survey and interactive response tools, including groupware. For more information, go to www.corbinball.com/bookmarks and click on “Meetings Technology.” — JB