Events in 2023 will need to continue to get more high-touch and personalized for attendees, and this will be enabled through better tracking.
Meetings and events are back in a big way, bringing both triumphs and challenges. While global inflation and hiring issues are two of the top issues planners must contend with in 2023, the overall outlook for the industry is incredibly optimistic.
BCD Meetings & Events (BCD M&E), global experts in corporate meetings and events, shine a light on the industry’s biggest challenges and opportunities in a new, post-pandemic world.
“We have quickly turned a corner and leave behind a long trail of restrictions and uncertainty caused by the pandemic—finding ourselves in a time of extreme change,” said Scott Graf, BCD M&E’s Global President. “Covid has revolutionized the way we meet and the way we collaborate both internally and externally. It has shown us that experiencing human-to-human connections is not only essential for business, but for us all, as individuals.”
Sponsored by Hilton, the report uncovers three emerging industry trends and highlights five popular event destinations for 2023.
BALANCING SOARING COSTS WITH STRATEGIC CREATIVITY
From groceries to gas, prices for all the daily essentials are on the rise. It’s difficult for anyone to manage a budget these days, but especially so for event planners. While Covid is no longer the driving factor, challenges such as soaring sourcing and travel costs, inflation, supply chain issues, staffing, increased meeting requirements, payment issues and more, are forcing planning teams to keep a close eye on containing costs. They must train and hone their creative muscles to deliver successful meetings and events and high ROI for all stakeholders.
Forecasting spend for meetings and events in 2022-23 is challenging when using 2019 as a baseline, as costs have risen greatly over the past three years and continue to do so. For instance, an event that cost $20,000 in 2019 may now run $27,000. The pent-up demand for meetings is not easing the strain on planners’ budgets, either.
Event venues, especially those in popular destinations, have limited availability, and revenue management teams are being much more strategic and more selective about which groups they’re bringing in to maximize their own revenue. It used to be that a venue may have held space for a planner, giving them first right of refusal if a competing piece of business popped up over the same dates. Now, this option is off the table due to the rate at which competing opportunities are coming in. The speediest to contract will be who secures spaces first.
Looking ahead to 2023, cost-effective planning means booking venues far in advance and getting creative with budget-eating line items such as travel and food and beverage. Events, and especially incentive programs, are taking place closer to home and shrinking in length (think three or four nights instead of five). Shorter flights mean shorter programs that can still be effective yet result in overall cost savings.
As the world continues to shift post-pandemic, some countries are only now emerging from Covid restrictions and opening to travel again for the first time. Planners must employ smart sourcing as an important part of risk mitigation from a health and safety standpoint as well as budget. Moving an event to a closer destination and shrinking the program by a day or two enables planners to take that entire amount in cost savings or reinvest it in one-of-a-kind experiences for incentive winners or leveling up the on-site experience for meeting attendees.
STRATEGIC MEETINGS MANAGEMENT IS CHANGING
The foundation of meetings management is shifting beneath the surface. With significant challenges in staffing and forecasting, items such as data, sourcing and compliance are not the only considerations.
Customer service, flexibility for meeting stakeholders and individual program needs are shifting higher in the priority list. If companies did not have SMM in place pre-pandemic, they experienced a great disconnect in understanding the impact of their meetings and events. The past several years have demonstrated more than ever the importance of creating guidelines around how meetings are run, both to contain costs as well as drive visibility of the value they create. Prior to 2020, business travel was always the frontrunner; now, meetings and events have been leading the rebound, outpacing the return of business travel.
As companies contend with sending teams back to offices, these office spaces take on a greater role. Employees are utilizing them to collaborate and connect with others, and as such, these facilities will be used in different ways. Planners need to consider how they can adapt their physical spaces to drive more internal meetings and collaboration among teams.
Teams in general are presenting another challenge for planners. Many organizations shut down or disbanded their internal meetings teams, leaving a skeleton crew of people who now must rebuild their teams. They’re turning to agencies more frequently to help them build back in scale and provide meetings services they’re not currently able to handle internally.
In addition to agencies, collaborations with trusted suppliers, including hotels or venues and travel management, are of growing importance. The pandemic underscored the value of developing strong relationships with suppliers that have financial stability along with the expertise to fill in gaps that may exist on internal teams. Another benefit to these partnerships is the element of shared risk.
An overarching, ongoing consideration for SMM in 2023 is finding ways to demonstrate the value of meetings and events to all stakeholders, including leadership and management, to drive adoption of M&E programs organization wide.
HUMAN-TO-HUMAN CONNECTION: NOT IF WE SHOULD MEET, BUT HOW
Post-pandemic, no one is questioning the need to meet; yet the how is on the table for discussion. Hybrid events now take many different forms, and planners need to flex their creative muscles to define what human-to-human connection looks like in meeting programs for their organizations.
The building blocks of event planning (personalization, engagement, targeting) have changed, but the need and desire to meet have not. A planning teams’ first step in shaping meetings programs of the future is getting a strong handle on the types of meetings that exist within their organization, along with each of the respective goals and audiences. This looks like dissecting the types of meetings taking place, why they’re happening and reflecting on what worked well — along with what wasn’t quite right, and what was lost by either eliminating them or going virtual during the pandemic. It’s important to identify any gaps caused by lack of face-to-face connection and to determine where, going forward, it makes the most sense to bring people together in person while balancing cost containment.
“Hybrid” may mean a dozen different things these days but, in the true sense, this type of event is an experience entailing a subset of people in one room and another subset attending virtually for the same content. This format can work well for meetings such as town halls that take a one-to-many delivery approach, yet it becomes less impactful for events requiring greater interaction among attendees such as breakout sessions.
Even with advanced technology, it’s difficult to replicate an event experience that’s similarly engaging for in-person and virtual audiences. That’s why hybrid events in 2023 may more often take the format of having two individual tracks — one live, one virtual — that utilize the same content but present it in a different way to enable interaction and flow that will engage each respective audience in an effective format.
Events in 2023 will need to continue to get more high-touch and personalized for attendees, and this will be enabled through better tracking. Technology makes it possible to get in-the-moment feedback through features such as live polling or RFID tracking (in person) in order to accurately measure the engagement of participants. When their interests are easily identified, it’s easier to tailor content for future events directly to them and market for next year.
SUSTAINABILITY
Sustainability has been a hot topic over the last five or so years, yet the greater movement toward making events better for the planet lost momentum during the pandemic as health and safety concerns became top priority. For 2023, sustainability is on the rise again, but in the current climate focused on cost containment, it’s not quite ready to be a decision-maker —yet.
Green elements are no longer a nice-to-have feature of events, with planners making concerted efforts to reduce their programs’ carbon emissions as part of an organization-wide goal. Companies that don’t yet have sustainability targets should spend time intentionally looking at the data points they need to collect to really show the value of making more sustainable decisions and compare those with company objectives.
One example of this is examining the carbon footprint of events, rather than focusing on carbon offsetting. Reducing this footprint can be achieved through actions such as choosing destinations closer to home, transitioning all communications to digital, incorporating personalized gifting that enables attendees to choose what they want so nothing gets wasted, building CSR programs into events to give back to the community, and working with venues to ensure proper recycling as well as reducing food waste by donating to food banks. The important thing to keep in mind regarding sustainability is that small steps toward achieving larger goals add up.
Don’t try to tackle everything at once; planners can start by making more sustainable choices for a subset of meetings, then use what they learn to translate those efforts into larger-scale meetings. Giving attendees choices (i.e. noting on a menu that choosing a vegetarian entrée compared to a steak will save this amount of carbon emissions) helps them to feel positive about the change (rather than like they’re compromising) and part of a greater mission to reduce the overall impact of the event, a win-win.