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PCMA@LinkedIn: Building a Better RFP A key role “we have as meeting and event planners is to generate effec- tive RFPs that ‘sell’ the value of our meeting,” ConferenceDirect’s Doug Baarman wrote in a post titled “How Can Meeting and Event Planners Cre- ate Effective RFPs?,” which he recently shared on PCMA’s LinkedIn group. (You can find his original post at convn.org/ planner-playbook.) His post generated a lively discus-
sion, including the following comments:
We meet with our sales reps and ask them what they need. We have also created an RFP template that is now standard across our department, and shared this with all national sales reps so they better understand us and our needs, and they can pass that along to the hotel sales rep when an RFP is submitted. The most important thing is clear, concise communication. No RFP should be five pages long, and the meet- ing planner needs to make sure they cover the information the hotel actually needs, not what they think they need.
Shari Lynn, CMP, Meeting Manager, American College of Radiology
Planners have to realize that this may be the first message seen by a property, and just like in person, first impres- sions do matter — even with an RFP. If the RFP is set up looking “clunky” and unprofessional, properties may not value the potential business and, therefore, your effort toward the RFP is not as positive. If the RFP is seen as professional, clean, and detailed, there may be opportunities for better rates, etc. Your business relationship with properties is valuable, so maximize your communication with them.
Chris Derrick, Senior Client Advocate, SignUp4
From Convene’s blog For more on the meetings industry, visit our blog at pcmaconvene.com.
WHY YOU SHOULD BE ASKING FOR BANDWIDTH-USAGE REPORTS In January, Assistant Editor Sarah Beauchamp wrote about the APEX Bandwidth Estimator, released by the Convention Industry Council in partnership with PSAV (convn .org/band-together). The estima- tor gives planners a general idea of how much bandwidth an event will require, by allowing them to input the number of attendees and the projected level of bandwidth they’ll be using (low for things like email or web browsing; much higher for video-streaming services). But such estimates can only go
so far, Matt Harvey, PSAV’s vice president of client network services, told planners from organizations within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) who met in August in New York City. As Assistant Editor Katie Kervin reported on our blog, Harvey had this advice: “While it’s important to plan ahead to determine the bandwidth that will be needed before discussing price with the venue, it’s also crucial to ask questions of attendees to track actual usage and find out what worked and what didn’t.
We’ve taken a step with our startup, AVforPlanners (avforplanners.com), to try to help everyone begin to have a little better conversation in the AV area. On our website [along with for-fee services], we have a free-to-use AV RFP Builder. Anyone can create an RFP for an event, and all of the questions are in plain English. And, it’s based on a combination of 25-plus years of doing AV, as well as the APEX forms [found at conventionindustry.org].
APEX is a great idea, but in the AV realm it is so chock full of questions that pretty much no one actually uses it. It’s 13 pages, and while there are certainly events that need all that infor- mation, I think the length has been off- putting for people.
Jon Trask, CMP, CMM, Senior Account Director, Grass Shack Events & Media
“For instance: How many devices
were attendees using on the net- work? Were they satisfied with how well the Wi-Fi worked for their online activities? “Harvey also suggested that plan-
ners ask venues to supply a report on their meeting’s bandwidth utiliza- tion. A graph can show the amount of bandwidth being used to both send and receive files and information in hourly increments. Gathering several such bandwidth-usage reports year over year — say, for an annual meet- ing — could give a planner a good idea about their meeting’s usage and how much it increases over time. “At this point, most hotel venues
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are not routinely creating these reports, Harvey said, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. Like our bandwidth needs, that could certainly change over time.”
OCTOBER 2013 PCMA CONVENE 7