Strategic Meetings Management

From time to time, I like to highlight industry leaders who raise the bar and achieve success in their meetings programs.  Having said that, this blog post recognizes Tim Bone, director of union conventions, events, meetings and travel for Service Employees International Union. Tim was quoted recently in a BTN piece and, with stats that he provided, dramatized how important it is to harness small meetings volume and apply centralized planning, sourcing and other key meetings management strategies to those events. BTN was reporting on a panel discussion at NBTA, led by StarCite's own Linda McNairy, VP of Business Development and also Vice Chair of NBTA's Groups & Meetings Committee. 

Tim recently began focusing on bringing order to the management of small meetings, but prior to that, SEIU dealt with them in a very typical way (I say, "typical," because I hear it all the time from meetings managers): administrative assistants would plan meetings on an ad-hoc basis. One of the major downsides to this is that assistants, while they're experts in their core competencies, are not meeting planning specialists, and are often unfamiliar with SMM issues -- from risk mitigation, to using preferred suppliers in order to maximize buying power, to standardizing contracts and addendums.

But Tim turned things around, first by collecting data on small meetings expenses from the company's purchasing cards, invoices and expense reporting tool. He then took that information to senior executives to show them the huge impact of small meetings. Impression made, Tim rewrote the company's meetings policy to mandate that all planning for those events flow through the meetings department. Tim was recently on a webinar we sponsored where he speaks openly about his outsourced program model, here’s a link for you to hear a playback. Currently, between his own internal management process improvements and help from dedicated planners, Tim is now saving SEIU an average 20-30% on meetings -- and that's just in the first year!

It's way too easy to ignore small meetings. But statistics show that meetings and events with fewer than 100 attendees represent nearly 90% of many companies' meetings and events mix. So, it's unwise to ignore the potential added purchasing power and control that a small meetings management strategy and process can give your company. Tim's work, however, demonstrates the value of capturing data even from small events and putting that information to good use for achieving real savings!