What's the point of measuring Business Value Of Meetings ?

During our first day on the EIBTM 2011 trade Show, we went to a conference given by Bill Voegeli, an MPI american member. This conference aimed at answering the following questions: "how to calculate the value of a meeting ?", "what is a meeting worth to a company ?".

Nowadays, only a few companies are measuring the value of their meetings  (about 1% of them) and almost none of them measure their ROI.

Voegeli started by telling the expectations of the MICE stakeholders who are using value measurment. He made a research based on 215 companies worldwide (55% USA and 32% E.U.), and stated the fact that in reality, companies are still using the old "smile sheets" to measure the attendees' satisfaction.

The event planners don't seem to realize the importance of knowing the value and the ROI of an event.

According to Bill Voegeli, all the companies which have successful business value of meeting (BVOM) share 3 common charateristics:

- they define meeting objectives before the event

- they create value measures

- they use the results to implement changes after the event.

But companies have to start small ! They should start by measuring something simple. A lot of practices are traditional. Bill Voegli suggests a new challenge which consists in sharing practices of the few companies that are successful measuring the BVOM. To do so, they have to share further information and insights. For example, it would be useful to know what changed between the time they were not measuring BVOM and the time they decided to put it in use.

The major problem is that the event planners don't really know how to use these tools properly and their companies don't encourage them to do it. Therefore, it is important to underline the lack of interest from both the event planners, the companies and the different stakeholders of the MICE industry.

Indeed, nobody understands why the sales figures are important but in the last 5 years, the firms that used BVOM didn't have any budget cuts for their events.

According to the speaker, using BVOM in the meetings and events industry is essential because it improves the meeting outcomes, it helps the event remaining relevant, it offers a good attendee experience, and it allows to rationalize and justify the spendings which reduces wates of time and money.

Sandra Robszye, Caroline Flauss and Maÿliss Redou