International Meetings: Perspective By James F. Hollan III, CAE
What Does It All Mean? Non-dues revenue is the primary source of financial support for the vast majority of successful associa- tions in the United States. Many associa- tions have many meetings every year, and they expect each and every one to be financially successful.
Defining. A great meeting helps define an association by bringing together every element of the industry to share best practices, learn, network, review products, review services, sell and buy industry-specific products, listen to clients, and grow new customers. Meetings are their own source of public relations and public information—for both external and internal audiences. Great meetings addi- tionally allow for col- laboration across industries when each has something signif- icant to contribute to the other. They also are cash cows when managed correctly. continued on page 44
It Comes Downto The Dollar
Inmy series of InternationalMeetings columns exploring the different expectations ofmeeting professionals around the world, I said that planners in North America often anticipatemuch higher profitmargins onmeetings than our European and Asian colleagues. Several of you have askedme to bemore specific about those expectations, so here is a financial breakdown.
Withall that iswrittenabout theplanning and execution ofmeetings, perhaps the least amount of informationwe professionals sharewith others is the rawdata on ourmeeting income and costs. We gladly talk about betterways tomanage reg- istration or negotiate speaker fees or planmenus. We will wax eloquent about every detail of the meetings process except for that thingwhich is of key interest to all of us: the real income and expense figures for our event.Without that infor- mation, none of us has a real sense of how our events performrelative to others. Let’s say that you host a three-daymeeting for
300members of your association and you realize a net profit of $40,000 (allmonetary figures in this columnwill be inU.S. dollars).You knowthat is a good thing — as opposed to a net loss of $40,000—but you don’t really knowhowyou performed compared to other associations. Is a net profit of $40,000 good for a meeting of that size? Was your profit typical? Did the event under- or over-perform?More importantly, is it reasonable for you to budget for the same profit for a similarmeeting to be held in the near future? It is my goal here to share real data without
divulging proprietary information unique to any individual association. To that end, the data I’ve used here reflects an average fromeight separate meetingshostedby fourdifferent associations from 2007 through early 2010. The paid attendance ranged from approximately 800 attendees to
1,300 attendees.Allmeetingswere hosted in the United States and lasted two-and-a-half or three days. In general, attendees arrived on Sunday afternoon or evening,with themeetings starting first thingMondaymorning and concluding on Wednesday afternoon. All of these meetings were held on site at
hotel properties. The number of hotels that can host large on-sitemeetings for 800 to 1,200 del- egates with exposition space is quite large in North America — not the case in Europe and Asia.On-sitemeetings athotels aremucheasier for attendees to navigate andmuch easier for planners tomanage. It’s important to note thatwhen I do use conference or convention centers in North America for largemeetings, the costs are slightly higher than the costs to use similar facilities in Europe andAsia. In the charts on the following pages, a few
budget elements did not overlap directly from meeting tomeeting,but I stillwas able tomake fair- ly accurate estimates in those instances. I’ve aver- agedthedata as ameeting for1,000attendees. Iuse this data asmy own very rough rule of thumb for budgeting meetings of this size held in North America. I have similar rough charts for different sizemeetings andfordifferent locationsworldwide. These quick evaluation sheets are extremely useful when I start to budgetmeetings and conferences around the globe. I’ve included notes about each of the budget items following the charts.