Affordable Meetings National - September 10-11, 2008 - (Page 16)

Thursday, September 11 Strategic Meetings Management: Leveraging Your Travel and Procurement Department Chuck Ghoorah Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing Cvent McLean, Virginia So your travel manager wants you to track your meeting spend? Or worse, your finance department or CFO is suddenly involved in your meetings department? With corporations spending over $350 billion on meetings annually, companies are striving to tighten spending across all departments. Meeting planners must seek new methods of managing the planning process to gain better visibility into meetings spend. Planners are faced with the challenge of reaching budget goals while still improving their events and increasing attendance from year to year. This session will describe the true value of SMM programs, and instruct and advise you as to how you can leverage the best practices of travel and meetings departments to create better meetings and events, as well as become more strategic to the organization as a whole. vant and productive meetings and conferences. You'll gain insight into the methods, and resulting benefits of how attendees and speakers can carry on relevant topical conversations both before and after the gathering, thus extending the event and brand life-cycle. You'll also see how organizations can analyze these conversations to determine what topics are of greatest interest, and thus produce the most relevant programs for their constituents. The session will include an analysis of the most productive of all the online community tools that are now available. The Next Generation of E-RFPS: Deal or No Deal Reggie Aggarwal Founder and CEO Cvent McLean, Virginia As the meetings industry continues to grow, it has become increasingly important for planners and organizers to rely on the advancement of technology to remain efficient, increase event attendance, and decrease costs. Selecting a destination, confirming a venue, and negotiating with suppliers can be a time-consuming and stressful task. This session will show you how to directly connect with suppliers and streamline the lifecycle of an event by utilizing event sourcing tools. You'll gain a complete understanding of the techniques and importance of collecting and comparing multiple bids, knowing your event history, offering flexibility of dates, exploring alternative destinations, negotiating multi-year deals, and defining event requirements to significantly reduce costs. Location, location, location is everything when planning meetings or events on any size budget. ETE SESSIONS Seminars: 10:15 am - 11:30 am Online Community: Extending and Enhancing Meetings and Conferences Chris Dworin Vice President Business Development GoLightly, Inc. Mill Valley, California This seminar will focus on extending and enhancing an organization’s meetings and conferences through the use of online community and collaboration tools. The information presented will be based on actual experience with the original MySpace startup, along with examples of managing an international online community of 15,000 members. During this highly focused and benefits-oriented presentation, you'll learn how online communities can deliver benefits to both the attendees and speakers at a variety of events while simultaneously helping planners and organizers create more rele- Engineering Your Technology Solution in a State-of-the-Art Facility Michael Waxer Chief Technology Officer Washington Convention Center Authority Washington, D.C. Eager to push technology to the edge but afraid of getting cut? This panel discussion brings together the experts who can help you identify new trends in event technology, maximize facility and service partner relationships, and avoid costly mis- 16 Your e-badge will arrive via email prior to the show.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Affordable Meetings National - September 10-11, 2008

Affordable Meetings National Resources Invaluable Information Schedule of Events Wednesday, September 10th Thursday, September 11th Exhibitor List About HSMAI Housing and Travel

Affordable Meetings National - September 10-11, 2008

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