For the last six years, American Express has conducted a world-wide survey of meeting and event professionals in an attempt to uncover the trends that will characterize the meeting and event industry in the upcoming year. They survey thousands of event owners, meeting planners, corporate meeting producers, venue operators, airlines, meeting vendors, and travel professionals around the globe.

Premier Meeting Services studies the survey carefully and produces an extract of the findings. Here is what the industry is predicting for 2017.

OVERVIEW

• The number of meetings will likely see a decline in 2017 and overall spending on meetings and events will remain flat. The uncertainty in the U.S. presidential election, the economic slowdown in Canada, Brexit, and world-wide terrorism will all serve to moderate meeting activity in North America and Europe. The collapse of the Brazilian economy and the outbreak of the Zika virus will depress meeting activity in Latin America.
• Because of a world-wide increase in corporate M&A, internal meetings (trainings and sales meetings) will increase while other types of meetings will decline.
• The Asia Pacific is the only region that will show an increase in all meeting activity.
• Rising group air rates and hotel accommodations will serve to increase the cost per attendee in 2017 putting pressure on budgets.

BARRON’S
A recent article in Barron’s said this:
“Non-Profit accounting is arguably one of the last vast wastelands of corporate accountability; rules are lax, disclosure is minimal and available data are usually months, or even years, old.”

Robert Kesten, a consultant, policy advisor, and nonprofit executive added:
“A good accountant or bookkeeper working for a nonprofit can make it pretty hard for a donor to pick up on accounting issues.”

Recently, the FASB (Federal Accounting Standards Board) introduced new recommendations regarding: net-asset classification, improved disclosures of information useful in assessing liquidity, whether NFPs would be allowed to use either the direct method or indirect method of presenting operating cash flows, and whether unrestricted net assets should be renamed net assets without donor restrictions.  

Question - Do some nonprofits utilize poorly worded, but entirely legal and ethical, accounting rules to hide their true financial position?

How Important are Volunteers?

One of the most important steps in planning events for nonprofits is attracting, recruiting, and retaining volunteers. Our post-event feedback questionnaires ask the question: What was your event’s most critical element of success?  By far, the number one answer is – the volunteers.

It is surprising how many event planners come to us with no clear plan of how to attract, and hopefully retain, volunteers for future events. It’s not that it doesn’t occur to them that they will need volunteers, it’s just that they don’t seem to realize how important the volunteers are to their event’s success.

On March 20, 2016, President Obama made history when he became the first American leader to visit Cuba in the post-Cold War era. Prior to his trip, the last American president to set foot in the country was Calvin Coolidge in 1928 – more than 88 years ago. Since the time of President Dwight D. Eisenhower the U.S. has placed an embargo on the communist nation of Fidel Castro. During his visit, President Obama declared the embargo will end when Congress approves the final legislation. Many restrictions are still in place, however.

American companies seeking to do business in Latin America have begun to contact Premiere Meeting Services about the meeting and event possibilities in Cuba. They see our pending new diplomatic relations with this communist country as an opportunity to educate their employees about the Cuban culture. They want to “immerse” employees in the still unspoiled local culture to help them develop a deeper understanding of Cuban and other Latin American markets. 

A BRIEF CASE HISTORY

A large pharmaceutical company asked their meeting planner to design an event around a new medical technology they were about to introduce to their sales force. They wanted the event to be a training in the new technology – a celebration of the product itself – a party that would motivate the sales force – and anintroduction of the technology to the medical community at large.

PRIORITIZE OBJECTIVES

When the pharmaceutical company first contacted the meeting planner, they said they wanted to hold a national sales training for a new product introduction. The planner, of course, immediately started to scan 

How does a nonprofit with a couple thousand Facebook likes and an Excel spreadsheet of donors utilize the digital leverage of big organizations? In the absence of physical contact, digital communication is the new virtual glue that links stakeholders to organizations. The digital universe, however, has rapidly expanded into a vast, crowded, and mercurial communication space that favors the leverage of large organizations.

SMALLER ORGANIZATIONS FACE BIG CHALLENGES

NO DIGITAL STAFF - A recent poll of small nonprofit's revealed that 68% of them had no digital staff at all. They rely, rather, on their communication staff to take up the slack and test various digital platforms as they evolve, believing that they will intuitively know what works. This approach, of course, has failed.

Strange Bedfellows –

The conference industry is booming, expanding more or less in parallel with the Internet. The very way information is exchanged is evolving, different now than in pre-Internet days when events were less plugged-in and interactive, more limited to the so-called sage on a stage.

Even as everyone predicted the rise of digital would do away with face to face, precisely the opposite is happening, as the value of in-person meetings and conventions rises. And the need’s only getting bigger, much to the delight of the travel industry and CVBs. – Rafat Ali

The more that people are connected electronically, the more hunger there is to meet face to face, says Michelle Russell, editor of Convene magazine.

There is a longstanding belief in corporate America that financial incentives are the most powerful motivator of performance. The findings of various studies by behavioral psychologists suggest otherwise.

In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Riverhead Books, 2009) author Daniel Pink outlines the potential unintended consequences of using monetary incentives exclusively: extinguishing intrinsic motivation, diminishing performance, crushing creativity, encouraging unethical behavior, and fostering short-term thinking. Rather, he says, “autonomy, relatedness (connection with others) and competence (a sense of mastery, accomplishment and achievement) are the core human needs and key intrinsic motivators.”

Event planning is a complex management job that requires advanced planning skills. Organizing a major event or meeting is not unlike opening a small business. It requires settling on a strategy, connecting with vendors, opening a venue, hiring employees, developing a marketing plan, establishing a budget, and executing the ultimate client interaction.

THE FOUR ATTRIBUTES

When hiring an outside planner to take your event from conception to completion, look for these four superstar success traits: