Successful Meetings - August 2008 - (Page 63)

MeetingMetrics in Toronto. According to Ira Kerns, GuideStar and MeetingMetrics managing director, the Phillips-inspired ROI component was added just last fall. “ROI is just part of it,” Kerns says. The application, which is intensely survey-driven based on templates with thousands of questions, also measures knowledge, opinions, attitudes, enhanced abilities, attendee intentions, and behaviors, he says. The modular solution—planners can choose which tools to use and which meeting attributes to measure—establishes benchmarks before meetings against which follow-up surveys are compared. Individual conference-session surveys are paperless, received by attendee PDAs or notebook computers following conference sessions. Follow-up surveys can go out two weeks after meetings to help determine return on event, or ROE, but Kerns notes that ROI can be a bit more elusive. “ROI is the way to translate the ingredients of the meeting into financial values, and thus the financial survey doesn’t get run until two to four months after the meeting,” he says. “You need time for the financial results to accumulate.” Planners can go through Web-based wizards to help them establish benchmarking and follow-up questions. Pre-meeting surveys tend to inform the content of the actual meeting, Kerns says, and can be considered market research of attendee attitudes and skills. Postmeeting surveys show how far the needle has moved. Kerns, like many others in the field, stresses that the financial benefits of meetings often have to be extrapolated; it’s not always evident. For example, a truck manufacturer might have a particular diesel engine that continually breaks down, leading to unhappy dealers and customers. While manufacturing struggles with making a better engine, sales and customer relations people can attend a training meeting to learn how to deal with an unhappy public in the meantime. “And fixing customer complaints translates into financial value. It’s not highly technical,” Kerns says. sands of meetings multiplied by thousands of attendees. “Our organization uses this for training, coaching, leadership meetings, sales meetings, new hire orientations, and so forth, and all our evaluations get stored in our system,” says Jeffrey A. Berk, chief operating office of KnowledgeAdvisors, based in Chicago. “That data is benchmarkable, so when clients go into the system and pull their own data, they can pull measurement criteria that matches their own meeting.” Berk stresses that Metrics That Matter isn’t “just a bunch of questions,” like Web-based survey tools by Survey Monkey or Zoomerang. Evaluations are based on aggregated industry benchmarks, which Berk estimates now total about half a billion. A new meeting can measure its own results against these existing benchmarks, or devise new ones with KnowledgeAdvisors. Berk cites eight business outcomes that Metrics That Matter addresses: sales, costs, productivity, cycle time, quality, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and elimination of on-the-job risk. Like some other applications, Metrics That Matter offers predictions of business results in line with the Phillips model, along with surveys that go out 60 to 90 days after the meeting, to help confirm those predictions. “The technology, for the most part, continues to get more sophisticated, with a greater emphasis on measurement,” Berk says. “I look at it as a post Sarbanes-Oxley world, where regulations have changed the way we do business. What we’re also saying is that most people don’t have the time and resources to do this on their own. They want tools to press buttons and get ROI figures that can be benchmarked.” MEETINGMONITOR MeetingMonitor is a Netherlands-based company with an online ROI application designed for post-event surveys. It, too, is based on Phillips’ ROI Institute methods, but addresses only Phillips’ first two levels, satisfaction and learning. But that may be enough, according to Director Nico Meyer. “It’s all the majority of meeting organizers require most of time,” he says. “By offering an easy-to-use tool that doesn’t require much time to execute the surveys and create reports, the planner can focus on analyzing the results, proving the success and value of the meetings, and taking improvement measMeetingMonitor’s online ROI tool ures.” Meyer notes the application has a type of text-mining capability that can analyze attendee sentiment as expressed in a survey’s open-ended questions, an interesting and advanced technology. METRICS THAT MATTER KnowledgeAdvisors’ Web-based application Metrics That Matter can handle multitrack programs for conferences over multiple days, with default session evaluations and benchmarks developed from thouSUCCESSFUL MEETINGS AUGUST 2008 mimegasite.com 63 http://mimegasite.com

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Successful Meetings - August 2008 Contents Editor's Note Industry Trends Industry Events On the Record Technology Calendar Websites of the Month Personal Success Technology Talk Food & Beverage Pre-Event On Site Tools of the Trade Pre-Event Crude Awakening Oil’s Well Betting on Development The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of No Spa, No Dice New & Improved Bean Counting Places & Spaces Cleveland Palm Springs, Desert Resorts Midwest Meetings San Antonio Yucatan Peninsula Gurus

Successful Meetings - August 2008

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