Plan Your Meetings

What a whirlwind few months it’s been for the meeting, incentive, conference and event (MICE) industry. Luckily, there are many active and engaged meeting professionals keeping on top of new legislation, press coverage and industry efforts.

For the latest posts and information on the MICE crisis, check out what people are Twittering about here:

Sally Allen
Executive Producer
The Water Coolers

Sally Allen and her husband Tom run The Water Coolers, a corporate entertainment group based in New York City that recently was awarded the 2009 Spotlight Award for Entertainment Ensemble of the Year.

Describe what The Water Coolers do.

I guess they’re a comedy group that sings. We draw on the Broadway talent pool to find our talent. Some of the material is about work. We figure if it bonds people in the workplace enough to keep them around the water cooler, it will bond them in a meeting.

Do you have an entertainment background?

I started as a meeting planner for an association. I did that for six or seven years. Then I moved to New York and married a comedy writer [Tom Allen].

What kind of entertainment do you provide?

Meetings [don’t have] a one-size-fits-all objective. My goal is to create things that fit into a number of objectives and budgets. We do everything from soup to nuts … whatever length of show is required: 10-minute pre-shows, 50-minute after-dinner shows, and awards shows that make the winners feel like stars and help motivate people for next year.

Why should planners incorporate comedy into their events?

Comedy can achieve a lot of goals planners need to achieve. It helps people feel more connected to each other — that’s the reason why we all come together when we could be teleconferencing. In times like this, comedy can break a lot of tension. A lot of people are feeling, in the worst case, fear; in the best case, trepidation. One planner said to me, “This is my goal: My people are nervous and I want them to feel normal again — to remind them that the sky isn’t falling; that we can be creative and find our way forward.”

How do you customize your shows for each group?

We ask the planner: “Why did you hire us? What is your objective? And what does success look like for you?” Maybe the answer is, “They’ve been in sessions all day, and I just want them to be able to cut loose and laugh and let go.” Comedy’s a super solution for that, too.

What advice do you have for planners wanting to use comedy at events?

I recommend always knowing the purpose of bringing someone in, so you can [say], “This is why I want you there.” The talent can help you reach your objective.

Make sure the comedians understand the company’s culture, where the boundaries are, what will be extra funny and what is outside those boundaries. When I was a planner, I hired a comedian who made fun of how heavy my president was. You don’t want that.

[Ask yourself,] “Do I want to have people involved from my audience, have my CEO or my CFO come in?” One planner felt most people would be intimidated by their Chief Financial Officer. They asked us to write something to humanize him, so we wrote him a rap solo. It’s better for us when we know who’s in the audience.

Ask questions of the talent … collaborate. [Get] an audio demo and sample lyric [you] can send around the organization and share with anyone that needs to see it and give feedback. … It’s important that you’re working with a comedy act that really understands the event side of the business, too.

What are some of the ways you’d recommend planners use comedy?

Customization is always great. Comedy can work interstitially — that helps when programming is really dry and people detach. A lot of times, when you’re coming back from a break, it’s kind of hard to refocus the group. The last thing you want is to have your CEO struggle to get their attention. People hire us to go out there and give five minutes; by the end, people are all settled down.

Awards shows are another place where I see [comedy] all the time because people are ready to celebrate. That’s a great example of a way to use comedy to achieve the goal. You want that room full of excitement.

Victor Borgia once said, “The shortest line between two people is laughter.” Comedy truly is a connecting experience. That’s what makes it so wonderful for meetings.

What a difference grassroots mobilization makes. This past week, the number of signatories on the Keep America Meeting petition reached 17,000; members of the travel industry met with President Obama and got his endorsement; and media coverage started getting positive.

Check it out:

• Fortune – “Not Every Corporate Trip is a Boondoggle” March 11, 2009
• Associated Press – “White House says it encourages business travel”  March 12, 2009
• Reuters – “Hotel, travel executives press Obama on downturn” March 11, 2009
• Politico – “Obama reassures travel execs” March 11, 2009
• Washington Post op-ed by J.W. Marriott Jr. – “Memo to Business: Let’s Meet”

“This was a good week, but we are not out of the woods,” U.S. Travel Association’s Geoff Freeman said in briefing distributed to Keep America Meeting supporters. “The twin threats of over-regulation and media sensationalism still hang over our industry, and it will take a lengthy and sustained effort to mitigate both. We have gotten to this point, thanks to your involvement and your financial support. We will need more of both in order to maintain our grassroots, communications and advocacy activities in the months ahead.”

For more on the turnaround, go to Bruce MacMillan’s MPI blog, which includes some “eyewitness” observations of the politico meetings.

Things seemed pretty straightforward at the 2009 Greening the Hospitality Industry conference in Pittsburgh yesterday (stainless steel water bottles, reusable china, local/organic cuisine, multi-stream recycling, composting bins) until the keynote presentation.

That’s when Green Meeting Industry Council Executive Director Tamara Kennedy-Hill introduced our keynote speaker, L. Hunter Lovins of Natural Capitalism Solutions. Lovins didn’t walk out on stage. Instead, she was beamed live from Boulder, Colo.

It was a fascinating example of how a little thought in the planning process can make a huge impact. Here we were, attending a conference on how to green our events, and the organizers surprised us with this brilliant technology that’s innovative, interactive, functional, fun, unexpected and which is a great example of how planners can use technology as a sustainable solution. Typical of most green strategies that reduce waste, booking Lovins’ virtual keynotes also cost less money than flying her in for a speech.

Lovins was still able to show us PowerPoint slides, crack jokes and answer questions. She could see and hear us, too. But, as she says in this short clip, she didn’t have to “move her protoplasm around” and got to enjoy her birthday at home, radically decreasing her carbon footprint and increasing her quality of life.

Check it out. The Web site she references in the clip, in case you want to see the whole presentation, is Natural Capitalism Solutions.

I’m totally not into the name because it makes me think something is on fire, but you’ve got to visit the Web site Meeting Industry Crisis Center.

It’s got nifty links to keep you up to date on the crazy war politicians are waging on our industry. (In case you haven’t heard, the latest nutty manuever is a ban on incentives Sen. Kerry is proposing for companies receiving emergency financial assistance.)

And, best of all, it’s got a whole bunch of action items, from research proving why your work is important, effective and necessary to sample letters you can write to your pinhead politicians, biased local reporters and Madame President herself, Nancy Pelosi.

Get educated. Take action. Or start looking for another job, my friends.

Anyone who plans incentive trips knows how essential they are for motivating your sales team and driving revenue. Especially in challenging times, keeping morale high is important. Incentive trips aren’t junkets, they are a reward for high achievers. It is their achievement that pays the bills for the program, not taxpayer money. And those increased revenues are the best chance those companies have of paying taxpayers back. I’d like to get my money back, don’t you?

But, as anyone who depends on incentives business or who plans those trips knows, there is a movement afoot to make people feel like it’s downright unAmerican to meet. If there’s any chance of economic recovery, its to gather, plan out strategies, keep sales teams motivated, team-build and train our workforce to meet new challenges in way they can overcome them.

What will not help anyone is for the President of the United States to be putting pressure on companies not to meet in American cities. Las Vegas has a reputation for luxury, true — but that’s a marketing campaign. If you talk to anyone in that market, they’ll tell you there are major bargains to be had there, especially now. But because of the reputation — not the reality — companies feel like it’s “safer” to reschedule in destinations that are perceived in a better light — even if it costs more money! Like the CEO of Wells Fargo said in his full-page New York Times/Washington Post ad: “Time out. Something doesn’t feel right.”

What is going on here?

The war on meetings is well underway in financial and insurance markets, and it’s going to trickle down to a company and a city near you. Be proactive. Get educated. And be accountable. When you read ridiculous articles in the press about your industry, comment on them. Make sure that you, the experts of our industry are telling the true story of what your work means for companies, the economic recovery, our local communities and the hospitality workers who depend on our business.

OK — the past few days covering the MPI MeetDifferent convention has blown my mind. Actually, there’s been so much going on with news releases and press conferences that I’ve skipped the educational sessions so I could process the information and write about it. If you haven’t been there, check out the link above and watch some of the Webcasts.

In a nutshell: A war has been declared on the meetings industry.

It all started with the Troubled Assets Relief Program — the bank bailout bill. Shortly after accepting TARP funds, AIG was reamed in the press for a $440,000 “executive retreat” it held at Monarch Bay in California. It wasn’t an executive retreat, it was an incentives program for independent brokers that had been planned well in advance, but it became the catalyst of what MPI calls the “AIG effect.” When the future president of the United States calls out your meeting as an example of corporate greed, as Barack Obama did AIG during the presidential debates, its only a matter of time before it becomes a crime to meet.

AIG canceled 160 meetings. But it wasn’t until several months later that the CEO went on Larry King to defend how important they were for his company’s economic recovery — meaning meetings and incentives were the quickest way for AIG to generate the revenue needed to pay the taxpayers back their TARP money, and now, since they couldn’t do it, recovery was going to take a lot longer.

But media scrutiny continued. Primerica’s 55,000 person June biennial conference in Atlanta was canceled. Wells Fargo took out a full page ad this week talking about how messed up it was that he was forced to cancel a Las Vegas event that was a legitimate and necessary business expense because of bad press. But it’s happening all over — a lot of companies canceled holiday parties because they felt it would be inappropriate to hold them after laying off employees. And a lot of companies that have nothing to do with the TARP funds are canceling events because of the perception that they’re excessive.

A coalition of meeting industry associations like MPI, SITE, DMAI, PCMA, IAEE, NBTA, AHLA and US Travel had already mobilized — they were planning to come together Feb. 17 to discuss strategy and had a 12-18-month game plan and had raised 60 percent of the $1 million needed to do an economic impact study. But they had to think and act a lot quicker than they expected.

On Jan. 6, Sen. Feinstein of California put a bill before the Senate (SB 133) that called for TARP-assisted companies to put into place guidelines on conferences, events and employee recognition programs. Sen. Dodd put an amendment on another bill that in effect asked for the same thing but required a larger swath of companies to be held accountable to the regulations and that those requirements be made retroactive. This week, the US Treasury Department issued a statement that companies receiving TARP assistance must post guidelines for use of meetings and events on their Web sites, to ensure transparency and accountability.

The coalition, led by US Travel, was told they had three days to respond by posting their own industry-sanctioned recommendations for TARP companies to adopt. The coalition has developed those guidelines and you can find them and talking points here.

So here is your chance to be proactive. Before the government starts to put any more pressure on the industry to cancel events. Before the media can spin any more stories that inaccurately paint a picture of events and meetings as being anything other than legitimate and effective and necessary means of doing business they are, you need to arm yourself with this knowledge. You need to start to measure the business impact of your events, if you’re not already. And start telling our side of the story: How meetings and events are the quickest way to help this economy recover.

Meetings are the solution, not the problem. Spread the word.