By Mitchell Beer, CMM, and Woody Huizenga, CMM. This article originally appeared in the Editorial Advantage newsletter.
The meetings industry has been through quite a journey over the past few years, as planners and suppliers have tried to gauge the relative merits of live and virtual meetings.
But while the choice of venue is largely resolving itself, there may still be hurdles ahead, if we hope to make consultations as useful as they can be for host organizations—and as meaningful as they should be for participants.
In the months following the 9/11 attacks, virtual events seemed like the perfect answer for organizations that wanted to avoid the cost and perceived risk of business travel. Teleconferences replaced smaller live gatherings, and many annual meetings saw a dramatic decline in attendance.
But meeting professionals are now concluding that virtual events are most useful as a supplement to face-to-face contact and informal networking among people with a common interest, expertise, or concern. “Nothing replaces putting people in the same room at the same time,” said Theresa Breining, CMP, CMM, International Chair of Meeting Professionals International (MPI), in an interview prior to the New England Meetings Industry Conference and Exposition (NEMICE 2004) in early April. “A face on the screen is good for communicating information, but it doesn’t work as effectively to establish relationships. And business is still about relationships. Technology can supplement live meetings but not replace them.”
Q and A Are Keys to Success
That same concern for relationship building should underlie every decision about the design and execution of consultations, whether live or virtual. In that sense, whether people are being asked to share their knowledge, opinions, hopes, and fears in a local town hall, a downtown boardroom, or an online discussion group, the two key success factors are still the quality of the questions and what the organizers do with the answers.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of getting these elements right. In many topic areas, public input has become so routine a part of the decision-making process that consultation fatigue is beginning to set in. Stakeholders are becoming cynical about the effort they put into consultations and the practical results they get back. And their worst fears may be justified, if they have reason to believe that nothing will be done with their feedback.
In the crucial weeks before an event, when everyone is preoccupied with the logistics of venue, program, invitations, and handout materials, no one may be focusing on the hoped-for result, the actual product of the meeting: in other words, answering the questions “What do we want to accomplish?” and “How will we communicate that information?” Yet, when a meeting and its complex logistics are history, the final report stands alone as evidence of the extent to which the meeting organizers kept faith with the participants.
We are biased, of course—we write meeting reports. But when you ask people to share their time and knowledge, in person or in a virtual consultation, they want to know that it was time well spent. The answer is in the report.
Mitchell Beer is President and Woody Huizenga is Vice-President of The Conference Publishers. Beer is an active member of MPI’s Ottawa Chapter, and Huizenga co-chairs the Ottawa Chapter of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2). Both hold MPIs Global Certification in Meeting Management (CMM).
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