As Christmas approaches and successful vaccine trials signal a new year full of hope for European meetings and event planners, how to strategically plan for safer in-person events in 2021 is coming into sharper focus.
When scheduled event activity was turned upside down due to the coronavirus crisis in early 2020, those companies with a Strategic Meetings Management Programme (SMMP) found themselves better equipped than those who had no such strategy in place.
SMM programmes and meetings management software provided companies with immediate visibility into all scheduled meetings and events, allowing them to minimise risks to groups, attendees and employees, while leveraging contract clauses to cancel or postpone venue bookings and move dates.
SMM proved its crisis management credentials. Now, it can help planners to restart meetings and events safely by adding relevant guidelines and procedures to overall company strategy.
At Cvent CONNECT® Europe Virtual, Graham Pope Head of Europe, for Cvent Hospitality Cloud and Jim Abramson, Vice President, Product Management at Cvent, detailed the new features of the Cvent Supplier Network®, which when added to SMM programmes, act as vital requirements for consistent company-wide strategic planning.
Key to this is Event Diagramming (formerly Social Tables®), an online system that allows planners to create safety-minded room layouts, which can then be shared and amended when new requirements occur.
Event Diagramming allows you to position chairs, tables and podiums for social distancing and now includes features such as temperature checkers and hand sanitiser points.
Use accurate room measurements to properly scale your design so your vision maintains compliance and looks exactly how you thought it would once it’s physically set up.
Diagramming can be done in both 2D and photo-realistic 3D.
The first gives you a bird’s-eye view of the space so you can arrange furniture, space out assigned seating, and place your stage.
The second helps you virtually walk through the venue and look at your plan through the eyes of your attendees without having to visit the space.
The system can also automate compliance with the innovative new tool, Diagram Check.
For example, by adding custom distance standards to the Diagram Check tool, the system will highlight areas that don’t comply so that any member of your team can correct issues before they arise in the physical environment.
“Collaborative floor-plans and diagrams featuring company safety protocols will be fundamental to future event planning,” Abramson told the Cvent CONNECT Europe audience. “Safer meeting designs that meet social distancing and can be shared as part of a strategic meetings management programme will drive consistency, standards and attendee trust.”
The Source Safely venue sourcingTM hub is another tool which should be added to company-wide SMM programmes.
This one central database, launched in July 2020, now features more than 45,000 venue and hotel properties and more than 200 chains, management companies and destinations.
Planners can:
- Access health and safety, plus reopening information within venue profiles and ensure a chosen venue in implementing new protocols and will be available for your selected dates.
- Use a meeting space capacity calculator to understand the space you need to accommodate an event with distancing measures in mind. The calculator now has an outdoor filter added too.
- Leverage customised question templates in your RFP to ensure you are asking the most important questions to you and your organisation.
- Track cancelled space credits from other divisions or areas of the business to ensure it doesn’t go unused in order to mitigate financial risk.
“Venue research is critical moving forward and having all the necessary information in one place, with the ability to track and share RFPs within your organisation, ensures a joined-up strategic approach with attendee safety at the centre,” Pope says.
Centralising both Source Safely venue searches and Event Diagramming will help you gain valuable visibility and allow you to see where RFPs are going, share history and view internal notes.
Preferred suppliers can be highlighted for every user to find more easily and a consistent RFP process will provide company-wide confidence that, not only are you getting the best rates, but you’ve also got oversight on the entire venue sourcing process, in order to analyse trends, savings, safety standards and supplier relationships.
SMM has always been a vital process for crisis planning, mitigating risk and ensuring a consistent planning approach and attendee experience. In a post Covid world, SMMPs will also need to set new safety and design standards. Cvent has the tools to help.
