White Paper on the Meetings Industry

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Meeting the Meeting Industry: Putting the Puzzle Together By Drew Stevens, PhD. SPC Regional Director

When was the last time you tried to put a puzzle together? If you had all the pieces, and lots of patience, you ended up accomplishing something great. If just one piece was missing though, it could ruin everything. And, if you didn’t have the patience or the time, “the big picture” was almost impossible to see.

This article will help you see the big picture. It will help you fit together the pieces of a very important career puzzle – how the meetings industry impacts you. In fact, by putting these pieces together, you’re certain to enjoy greater success, greater profitability, and greater satisfaction as a professional speaker.

What is the Meetings Industry?
You are! As a speaker and a member of MyNSA, you are part of what the 2003 US Department of Commerce estimated is a billion dollar per year, industry.

The other "players" in the industry include any corporate, government or independent organization that plans, coordinates, negotiates or otherwise puts together an environment (a meeting) where people gather to network, learn or study.

The people and groups who help meeting planners produce their meetings are also considered part of the meetings industry. That’s where we come in! We are meetings “suppliers”. Caterers, florists, technology people, hotel sales people, speakers bureaus, and convention hall managers are examples of other types of vendors and suppliers.

Like speakers, many other supplier groups belong to educational associations. Caterers, for instance, belong to The National Association of Catering Executives (NACE), sales professionals belong to Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI), exhibit managers belong to the International Association of Exhibition Managers, and speakers bureaus belong to the International Association of Speakers Bureaus. (How lucky we are that each of these groups needs speakers!)

MPI, Meeting Professionals International, and PCMA, Professional Convention and Management Association, are two of the largest associations geared to the people who actually plan meetings. Both PCMA and MPI offer supplier memberships, and have roughly an equal number of meeting professional members and supplier members. Though the primary focus of both of these major organizations is to educate the planner side of the business, they invite suppliers to join them because their goal is to elevate the entire meetings industry.

Creating a successful meeting
Speakers would have very limited success, if there were no meetings! And because meeting planners assist, directly book, or recommend speakers on a daily basis, it behooves us to understand the needs of meeting planners, and the issues they face. The more we can truly work with meeting professionals to help them create successful and memorable meetings, the more successful we are personally and collectively.

Issues facing meeting planners typically revolve around operating a meeting that is effective and efficient. With ever changing technology both from meetings delivery and connectivity standpoints, shorter meeting lead times, and necessary security measures, the professional planner is constantly challenged to produce a meeting that delivers everything to everybody! As if that isn’t enough of a challenge, the actual meeting ROI – return on investment – determines not only whether the meeting was a success, but if the planner will have strategic impact on the company, or not. A meeting that doesn’t yield appropriate ROI can negatively impact future meetings budgets and force the planner to take a lesser role in helping to shape overall corporate/association strategy.

The more closely a speaker helps the meetings professional partner to create a meeting that achieves measurable ROI, the more likely the speaker is to be evaluated as a success, and the more likely he or she is to be invited back!

The more we understand, the more we work!
NSA is a member of the Convention Industry Council (CIC). The CICs 30 member organizations represent more than 100,000 individuals, and 15,000 organizations, hotels and halls, involved in the meetings, conventions and exhibitions industry.

NSA, through its Strategic Partnership Council (SPC), has also developed important one-on-one relationships with meetings industry partners. During the past few years, mutually beneficial partnerships, with both MPI and PCMA, have been established. For instance, many NSA speakers have agreed to speak both at MPI’s and PCMA’s Annual Meetings, and other events, in exchange for soft-dollar compensation through branding and exposure opportunities. Awareness of the professional caliber of NSA speakers is part of this branding effort.

The SPC also supports the formation and growth of state or chapter level gatherings of meetings industry partners. These local gatherings, or Meetings Industry Councils (MICs) have flourished from Colorado to Indiana. MICs offer great networking and learning opportunities.

The Big Picture
Reaching out to our partners in the meetings industry simply makes sense. Helping them to see us as part of their professional community, paying attention to the issues they struggle with, and doing everything we can to be easy and enjoyable to work with, is the key to a long and profitiable career as a professional speaker.