Growing demands advance planners’ skills
Qualifications and strategic management skills are major discussion points among industry membership groups lately, heightened in the past week on MeCo, an online meetings community. The chatter has focused on the winding paths—from education to experience—many took to becoming meeting and event planners.
Forty years ago there were a handful of university hospitality programs, though none offered majors in meeting and events management, says Sue Walton, an independent meeting planner and MeCo moderator. Walton majored in history, worked in a local museum, opened her own business and got her planner training on the job. Others cited communications backgrounds that gave them a good start in planning because of the marketing experience. One planner said her psychology degree was good background for the industry.
Diverse experience is an advantage in a job that requires strong leadership, negotiation and organizational skills, and interacts with service providers, destination managers and other outside businesses as well as internal teams. “Inherent to all [of the discussion] is the service component and the need for multiple intelligences to understand how and who we work with—in all types of capacities,” says Diane Devitt, an events professor at New York University’s Tisch Center of Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Marketing.
Meetings and events are specialized, with no two ever alike, and they require multiple skill sets, Devitt says. Today’s meeting and event professionals provide critical expertise in experiential marketing and brand perception. Their skills, mostly learned on the job, are the result of unique business partnerships, she adds, and encompass marketing, advertising and public relations. Their responsibilities extend beyond the logistics of putting an event together.
Planners are responsible for taking non-tangible objectives and goals, and applying learned skills and techniques to create solid objectives that can be measured and realized. Integral to a planner’s strategy is designing, planning and executing a core point that can be assessed for results. Today, these tasks fall into the acronyms SMM (strategic meetings management) or SMMP (strategic meetings management program). Formally defined, a strategic meetings management program is the strategic management of enterprise-wide meeting related processes, spend, volumes, standards and suppliers to achieve quantitative cost-savings, risk mitigation and superior service.
There are strong structural parallels between marketing positions and strategic meeting management, Devitt points out. The director of media usually secures the services of a media agency and a creative agency. The media agency assists in defining and building an advertising campaign; in other words, its responsibilities include strategy and planning. Once the plan is approved, the creative agency employs the message in various parts of the campaign. The industry now has sub-specializations including the Internet and other emerging services. The structure and methods of advertising and public relations professionals should be a blueprint for today’s meetings and events, Devitt says.
Meeting planners must further cultivate their roles as strategically oriented professionals. For instance, Devitt suggests throwing away the term “third party” and recognize the growing trend toward outsourcing specialized goods and services to multiple external players. You can reach out for help in site selection, registration, production, entertainment, destination management and even creative planning without compromising your internal role as account executive with direct responsibility for the overall event and communicating your organization’s message.
“We need to push the country’s top business schools to be as insistent that their students pursue electives in meeting and event planning as they are about electives in public relations and advertising,” Devitt says. “We must continue to market ourselves as meeting professionals while educating the internal customer about the integral power of the event.”
It’s an exciting time to be a meeting professional—almost a revolutionary period, Devitt says. From the talk in the blogosphere and at industry events, that’s a universal sentiment, despite (or because of) all the growing performance demands.
Read “5 Rules for Creative Success” by Bruce Turkel for more ideas about how to work and develop skill sets outside the box.
