Time & Place

At the Speed of Business

Two details of a planner’s meeting or event are obvious: where is it, and when will it take place. The time to plan can vary widely for meeting planners. Compared to meetings and events they planned in 2006, most planners (57 percent) say they have had the same amount of time as before. While meeting planners claim they aren’t necessarily planning on tighter schedules, vendors feel differently. Of survey respondents, 40 percent of vendors claim that meeting planners continue to shorten the cycle.

Barbara Goin has noticed the trend. “I think it isn’t just meetings, it’s travel, it’s everything,” says Goin, the director of sales for Mystic Lake Casino and Hotel. “Bus tours should probably be reserved 60 to 90 days out, but we’ve had tours booked just 10 days out.”

For those planners who admit their planning cycles have shortened, the top reason is that attendees wait until the last minute to confirm whether they can or will attend. Other anecdotal, but related, reasons for shortened timeframes also include “shorter lead time from sponsors” or that a “client can’t get their act together.” Planners with more time to prepare this year also respond to attendee needs. More than a third say that a change in event size has caused them to allow more lead time. Other respondents gave reasons that include “more time for marketing” as well as, “Managers finally understand the need to plan ahead.”

Generally speaking, Minnesota’s meeting and event planners hole a majority of their meetings in the state. With many Fortune 500 corporations and professional associations headquartered in the metro area, and the presence of a wide variety of venues, it is not surprising that most of these meetings take place in the Twin Cities metro and its surrounding suburbs. But a small move toward Minneapolis as the chosen destination out of all possibilities emerged this year. For the first time in two years, more respondents (34 percent) conduct most of their meetings in Minneapolis than any other location—a position formerly held by metro suburbs.

Many respondents (39 percent) hold all of their events in Minnesota. Vicki Matrious, marketing coordinator for the Aveda Corporation, says that she plans at least four meetings a year, sometimes more if a meeting is necessary to accompany a product launch. Those meetings are usually for training purposes, and those that don’t take place at the corporate headquarters in Blaine are held at the Aveda Institute in Minneapolis.

Yet nearly one-fifth of respondents report that they hold only a quarter of their meetings in-state, and another 9 percent say they only hold half of their meetings here. In fact, when respondents reported on the events they planned outside of Minnesota, the picture that emerged was much more national than regional. Of those who held events outside of Minnesota, nearly 60 percent hold those events across the country, while only 34 percent hold them throughout the region. Either finding doesn’t surprise Dave Herman, director of marketing and sales for Big Event Productions in Minneapolis.

“We have some clients for whom we handle their sales meeting here, but then we also coordinate the same sales meeting in Dallas or Kansas City or San Diego, or all three,” says Herman. The prevalence of Fortune 500 companies makes it more likely that corporations here will have events out of state as much as in-state, says Herman, and not necessarily next door in Wisconsin or Iowa.

An interesting find emerges when you look at the interest in taking meetings out of the metro area or bringing them back in. When asked what type of meeting they would be interested in bringing to the Twin Cities, respondents identified annual meetings (35 percent) as the likely candidate. But the same was true when respondents were asked what type of meeting they would consider taking out-state if it was currently held in Minneapolis or St. Paul—33 percent selected annual meetings as their first choice.

Such results may indicate that particular types of meetings are less bound by geography than others. Or, quite simply, the grass is often greener where you haven’t been. Nearly 80 percent of our respondents say that they spent a lot or at least some time looking for new sites for regularly held meetings and events. The rest didn’t change locations often, or didn’t at all (or held all of their meetings on-site). As far as place is concerned, choosing an event or meeting location might be more fluid than one might think.

By far, the most cited reasons for considering new destinations had to do with client or attendee feedback (36 percent) or site quality or satisfaction (38 percent). Clearly, venues that don’t meet their planners’ needs or disappoint them in some way stand to lose business, and some planners have long memories.

“I hold 50 meetings a year, and I don’t have to change venues,” says David Oxley, executive director of the American Council of Engineering Companies-Minnesota (ACEC). “But there are some places I won’t ever deal with again, and that’s too bad for them, because we would probably have kept going there forever.”

New technologies and working environments have caused many organizations to rethink what a “meeting” is in the first place. Not all the meetings in Minnesota are real, of course; some take place over the phone or a videoconferencing connection. Still, as in previous years, planners don’t feel virtual meetings will replace face-to-face meetings anytime soon.

“We do have some virtual meetings in Blaine, over our video connection to our New York office,” says Aveda’s Matrious. “I’ve set up conference calls too for locations without videoconferencing equipment, and we’ve had calls that included groups from Asia, Europe, and the west and east coasts of the U.S.”

To be sure, increasing emphasis on cost-cutting has made virtual meetings all the more attractive—particularly after 9-11, when staying at home and avoiding expenses became a top priority. Yet, virtual meetings will unlikely become a significant function for meeting planners. According to the Meeting Professionals International (MPI) FutureWatch report for 2007, “most planning departments are not currently involved in managing these meetings for their internal clients and are not likely to position themselves as the ‘go-to’ function for virtual meetings during the next year.” Fewer than 30 percent of planning departments have responsibilities for planning virtual meetings, according to the MPI report.

Business moves at its own speed and sometimes forces everyone else to get on board or move aside. In a technological age as ours, the timeframe for planning events continues to shrink. Still, lead times may have stabilized around a new norm. Like last year, more than half (57 percent) of respondents said that they had the same amount of time to plan events as the previous year, and about one-quarter (24 percent last year, 25 percent this year) report having even more time.

“Group sales have been more and more short-term, and it’s become chronic,” says Devie Hagen, director of group sales for Madden’s on Gull Lake in Brainerd.
“I sometimes book sales for no more than a week out. That’s not so hard for us, but I don’t know how the meeting planners do it.”

When examining lead times, not all events are alike, says Vicki Orwick, an administrative assistant in the engineering department at General Mills in Minneapolis. It all depends on what kind of an event she’s planning. “The bigger the event, the more time I have to plan it,” says Orwick. “I’m working on a conference right now that happens every other year, so that means a lot of time. But if my boss tells me to plan a retirement dinner, I’m lucky if I have 30 days to put it together.”

Why the shorter lead times? Respondents to our survey had three options: a change in event size or attendance, doing things electronically, and getting attendee confirmations closer to the event date than before. Most respondents cite a change in event size was the reason (30 percent). Yet another 22 percent of respondents say that doing things electronically has cut down on their planning time.

“I think people have gotten used to waiting for that last-minute fire sale,” says Goin. “They want to wait and find that bottom-dollar deal, and there are a lot of online tools that make it easier to search for better deals.”

Hagen believes a new mindset on the part of upper management is responsible for the speeded-up timetables for planners. “A lot of higher-ups seem to be holding off on meetings until they’re sure they’re absolutely necessary,” she says. “I think planners know that, and they hold off on reservations so they can avoid cancellation fees if the meeting is deemed unnecessary.”