Smaller budgets! Last year’s expectations! Higher costs! Welcome to the new reality for meeting and event planners.
With the fall meeting and conference season upon us, meeting and event planners are struggling with some version of the same tricky question – How do we do more with less?
Go Hybrid or Add Virtual
When COVID hit, meetings and events were either canceled or went virtual. And while some bemoaned the loss of the connection and camaraderie inherent in an in-person meeting, Brella’s meeting and event producers started taking note that virtual meetings had real value when done well.
Now as in-person meetings have come roaring back, the importance of this insight has come into focus. With the proper planning and top-notch execution, adding a virtual component to an in-person meeting can deliver a sneaky good ROI for organizations.
So, with planners anxious to make the most of their budgets, here are 3 ways that choosing hybrid meeting components (in-person and virtual) can help maximize your budget and exceed client expectations.
Reduce Travel Expenses and Time Constraints
Historically, attendee travel expenses have always had the potential to be a budget buster along with food-and-beverage and hotel costs. Throw in all the challenges plaguing the post-COVID supply chain and travel’s potential to bust a budget has become very real. In fact, according to the 2024 Global Business Travel Forecast from CWT and the Global Business Travel Association, prices have increased significantly and show little signs of moderating.
Digital event services can be a budget equalizer, affording planners greater flexibility by letting them choose who needs to attend in-person and who can join virtually. While there are costs for adding virtual elements to an event, the extra flexibility with the travel budget makes this approach worth closer consideration.
Time constraints are another issue closely related to travel budget challenges. For many attendees and speakers, time is an extremely precious commodity, and the time investment needed for travel to and from an event can heavily influence their decision to participate.
With virtual and hybrid options in the mix, time constraints become much less of a factor. Add in the fact that virtual meeting technology has dramatically advanced since the early days of COVID, and suddenly you have a whole new set of solutions for working within the parameters of your budget. If an important speaker can’t participate in-person, they can still be incorporated using creative production techniques that maintain a high-level of audience engagement while elevating the visual look of the meeting experience.
Repurpose Meeting Materials
One reason we love in-person events is that everyone shares in the energy and the excitement of the moment. It can be a powerful communal experience. However, once the event is over, that’s pretty much it. Sure, most large events usually have a video crew on hand documenting what happens, but unless you have a sizeable budget for editing, at most you’re getting a nice recap video and hours of raw footage.
Events that build in a virtual component automatically unlock a range of low effort options for repurposing shared content. Consider a large-scale event like a medical association conference, which usually offers dozens of individual sessions, many happening at the same time. If it’s in-person only, attendees are inevitably going to miss out on valuable knowledge and there’s a good chance a sizeable audience won’t be able to attend due to work commitments.
Virtual meeting solutions neatly solve that challenge. First and foremost, each session is automatically recorded, meaning it can either be rebroadcast online for later time zones (if it’s a global conference) or the session can be made available as VOD (video on demand). Plus, features like closed captioning and real-time translation can easily be integrated, increasing accessibility. In short, building virtual components into your meeting experience broadens your meeting’s usefulness far longer than an in-person only event.
Realize the Benefits of a Diversity of Perspectives
When shrinking budgets force corporate planners to scale down their attendee headcounts for in-person meetings, those organizations lose out on something invaluable – a diversity of perspectives. This issue can be especially challenging for organizations with a global workforce. For important meetings like product launches or sales team training events, having the right mix of voices from all levels and regions can help ensure teams are aligning strategically, forging stronger connections, and building a culture of success.
One type of hybrid meeting that we’ve found to be very effective at creating this balance while on a budget is the “hub and spoke” model. The “hub” is the main, in-person meeting whose size can be adjusted up or down depending on budget. The “hub” meeting is then broadcast out to the “spokes,” which are much smaller in-person meetings taking place at satellite locations, like a company’s offices around the country/world. The “spoke” meetings allow more staff to be a part of the larger meeting experience and interact with each other or with the “hub” meeting. With this approach, corporate planners gain more room to work within their budget thus allowing their end-client to include more levels of staff and have a more worthwhile meeting experience. A win all around.
The Value of Virtual
As the costs for putting on meetings and events keep rising, it’s more important than ever to maximize how budgets are spent. The good news is that planners are no longer limited to in-person meetings and events. Whether it’s just a small component or a full hybrid experience, the value of virtual is too hard to ignore.