Meetings Matter Chatter
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Meetings Matter Chatter
Measuring What Matters in Meetings
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How do you know if a meeting was truly successful? Clients and planners are under growing pressure to measure impact, prove value, and show whether key messages really landed. In this episode, Leilani Heaven, Senior Strategist at BCD Meetings & Events, shares the findings from the latest Client Insights report on Engagement and Measurement. She’ll cover what organizations can measure today, where the gaps still exist, and how this space is likely to evolve in the future.
Hi there and welcome back to Meetings Matter Chatter. My name is Jenna Baker, and I'm the Vice President of Account Management at BCD Meetings and Events, and I am your host. Now you may remember that we've modified our format for the podcast into a quarterly rotation of topics. This is our fourth episode in this new format. So once again, we are talking about our client insights report. And I couldn't do that without the architect of this report, Leilani Heaven. Lailani, welcome. Hi, Jana. Thank you for having me back.
SPEAKER_01I'm excited to dig into this quarter's findings.
SPEAKER_00I'm excited to talk about it. So for anyone that's a new listener, can you talk about the department you're in and your role at BCD? Absolutely.
SPEAKER_01I'm Leilani Heaven, a senior strategist in BCD M ⁇ E Advisory Services, which is a part of performance optimization. My role is focused on helping clients better understand the value of their meetings and events programs, not just from an execution standpoint, but from a strategic perspective as well, and turning client insights into practical actions.
SPEAKER_00Then you are the perfect person to talk to us about this report. And now I want to hear all about it. But the first thing I want to ask you is about the clients themselves that are giving these insights. So can you just talk a little bit about who completes this survey?
SPEAKER_01So the findings come from the BCD M ⁇ E client research panel, and the respondents are primarily meetings and events program owners. They represent a broad mix of companies by size, spend, reporting structure, and industry. But this panel largely reflects global high spend, high complexity programs. So what's also interesting is where these respondents sit in the organization. 20% report into finance, 20% report into procurement, and 17% into marketing, and seven into travel, and 36% from other cross-functional lines of businesses like customer excellence, events, HR, real estate and facilities, sales, and supply chain services. And that matters because one of our big themes in the report is that the way value gets defined and reported often depends on who the program reports into.
SPEAKER_00So this latest report focuses on engagement and measurement. So let's start with a really basic question. What is engagement? Yes.
SPEAKER_01In this report, engagement is really about how meetings and events create meaningful connection and influence across the attendee journey. So it's not just whether someone showed up or liked the event, it's whether that meeting helped build relationships, transfer knowledge, strengthen brand perception, support internal engagement, or drive commercial outcomes. The report shows that clients increasingly see meetings as a strategic engagement channel, not just an event delivery function.
SPEAKER_00So there's lots of different business terms about engagement and measurement. We've heard ROI, we've heard ROE. Your report references something called ROV. Can you talk a little bit about what those terms mean and what the difference is? Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_01The simplest way to think about it is this ROI is usually about financial return. What did we spend and what did we get back financially? ROE, if we're using it in the common meeting sense of return on objectives, is about whether the event achieved its intended goals. And ROV or return on value is broader. So it looks beyond just money or objectives and asks, what overall value did this meeting create for the organization? And that's exactly where this report goes. It shows that clients are increasingly thinking about value across four dimensions: there's strategy, financial, governance, and experience. So ROV is more of a complete story.
SPEAKER_00Got it. You mentioned before that the role of meetings is changing, it's evolving from an execution function, which is making sure that all the details are perfect, which is still, of course, really important. But in addition to that, it's also a strategic channel. Can you talk about what that looks like?
SPEAKER_01Sure. So the new role looks much more connected to the business. Instead of meetings being seen mainly as logistics or delivery, they're increasingly expected to support with that relationship building, employee engagement, commercial outcomes, leadership visibility, and business strategy. In fact, 55% of our respondents said that meetings and events are strongly or fully integrated into their strategic portfolio. So the expectation now is that ME doesn't just execute events, it helps move that business forward.
SPEAKER_00Okay. So if meetings are intended to be a strategic channel, then what measurements are clients using today to determine if they're delivering on that strategy?
SPEAKER_01So today, most companies still measure delivery through a fairly narrow lens. The report shows that 64% of our respondents responded that financial drivers are the most important part of their leadership reporting. But that is really only one piece of that value story. What the research shows is that many organizations do not have a holistic way to measure the full value of their program across financial, strategic, governance, and experienced drivers. In fact, only 18% say that return on value is measured consistently today. And only 18% say that they are very confident in demonstrating that value to leadership. So measurement is happening, but for companies, it's still fragmented and not yet broad enough to reflect that full role ME is now expected to play.
SPEAKER_00So finance is important, and I get it that stakeholders are going to default to that because if they can demonstrate that their meeting made money, maybe directly, maybe they had fees for their meeting, or indirectly, maybe their meeting resulted in sales or customers started using their products. That information is certainly going to impress the stakeholders' manager, maybe their senior leader, to say that this meeting was a success. So I get that. But there's also other categories that they're looking to measure. And you mentioned them. So finance is one of them, but otherwise we have experience, strategic return, and governance.
SPEAKER_01So I do want to get back to finance because we know how important it is. It is still the most familiar and the most leadership ready measurement. But the report shows that clients are increasingly trying to tell that broader value story beyond just cost savings or revenue impact alone. So for strategic value, it's really about how the meeting supports the broader business goals. Governance value, we like to look at things like compliance, visibility, and control. And experience value includes how the meeting influences engagement, relationships, and the perception of their company. And this connects directly back to the measurement gap that we just talked about. While organizations want to measure across all of these dimensions, you know, only 18% say that return on value is consistent and that they are very confident in demonstrating that to leadership. There's very good intent to capture all of those metrics and measurements, but the model still hasn't quite caught up yet.
SPEAKER_00I have to say, Lailani, this is a little bit validating to hear what you're saying. Because when we receive questions, maybe we've got an RFP that we're answering to a new client. There's always questions on there about how do you measure ROI, how do you measure ROV? And the answer is, it sounds from your report, that everybody's struggling in this area, right? There's not a magic formula for how to do it. At BCD, we support all different types of customers, right? Sometimes maybe we just do one big meeting a year for a customer. Sometimes maybe we do 100 meetings a year. Sometimes maybe we do all the meetings that they have every year. But if I think about those meeting owners that are individually planning meetings, they're really doing it in a bit of a silo because for most of them, it's probably not their day job. They got assigned to be in charge of this meeting, and so they've got to work with their wonderful BCD meeting planner to figure out how to get everything perfect. But it's not something that they do every day. So they might be coming up with their own measurements. They might not even be thinking about engagement. And even if they are coming up with some measurements, they're probably doing it in a silo. They're probably not connecting to some bigger organizational goal or making sure that their colleague that's planning on meeting simultaneously is looking at those same objectives. So it's definitely a challenge for our customers because they're all working in silos.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. The value of the program really depends on that stakeholder. And the report shows that financial return on value ranks the highest for leadership reporting at 64%, followed by experience and strategy, which are right around 50%, and governance at 36%. One of the clearest findings in the report is that the same ME program has to tell different value stories to different stakeholders. Finance and procurement leaders may want to focus more on spend savings and control. Marketing or sales may care more about strategy and the commercial impact. HR or operations may place more of that value on the experience and the engagement and the internal outcomes. And so there isn't really one dashboard that works for everyone.
SPEAKER_00You're right. It's much more nuanced and case by case. So if I think about a practical example here at BCD, let's say that our president, Bruce Morgan, wants to change the vision for BCD. We want to focus on, well, we can say we're focusing on simplicity, which is a focus area. We want to focus on that. Okay, so you know, we've got a series of meetings where that message gets conveyed to the BCD audience. Everyone, okay, simplicity, simplicity in everything you do, but how do we know that they're actually incorporating it? Maybe anecdotally we hear someone saying, Oh, I've simplified this, but there's really not a way to measure if that message really resonated. And that's sort of the point, right? Absolutely. So on that same idea, then, what are some of the things that clients want to report out on, but they can't?
SPEAKER_01So the reports show that our clients want to report on engagement and value in a way that is much more complete, you know, than most programs can do today. And this includes things like the networking and relationship building, ease of the end-to-end journey, brand perception, and knowledge transfer, all of which clients increasingly see as meaningful outcomes of meetings. The challenge is that a lot of the organizations are still trying to rely on post-event surveys as their main way to measure these things. And 73% of the respondents say that surveys are how they measure experience today. But surveys often have low response rates, so that creates a pretty limited view. On top of that, fewer than half of our respondents are using more behavioral and digital signals consistently. For example, 41% are using event app engagement as an experience measure, and 45% are using attendance and participation metrics, you know, within sessions or going on to the trade show floor, really trying to follow that attendee throughout that conference or meeting and event. And so clients want a richer and more reliable engagement story than we're really able to report today.
SPEAKER_00That is a tough one because surveys are great. We can ask whatever questions we want on them, but the problem is that they typically will have a low response rate, maybe 20%. And if your meeting was 20 people, that's really not going to give you a good view of the engagement overall for a meeting. Now, apps are great. Technology provides us with the opportunity to determine if people are interested in a session. Maybe they're clicking on something particularly a lot, or they're engaging in the networking through the app. That's super and that's a good indicator. However, we also do a lot of small meetings. And if you have a meeting with 20 people or less than 20 people, you don't want to have an app. I mean, that's just weird. You're trying to get people around the table to talk, not be like clicking on buttons and their phone. That would be kind of the opposite of what you want. So it really creates a challenge. But apps aside, is there some sort of tech that can solve this issue for us?
SPEAKER_01The report makes that very clear. So event technology capabilities is ahead of enterprise measurement maturity. In other words, organizations may have the tools, they may have the support, but they still struggle with that operating model around the tools. And this report lists the top barriers that our respondents came back as. And the top ones are no agreed-upon KPI or measurement framework, difficulty linking businesses to or meetings to those business outcomes. There's a lack of end-to-end journey data, and there's just disconnected systems. And these numbers in the report really reinforce that gap. 86% of our respondents have dedicated event technology, and 73% have dedicated reporting and data insight report. But only 27% use engagement data consistently to drive action. And only 27% say that their ecosystem is well integrated. So the problem isn't just technology, it's the alignment, the integration, and the consistency.
SPEAKER_00Okay, Leilani, I'm getting it. You're painting the picture. It is becoming clear to me. It's like that example we talked about before, where we've got two stakeholders at one company measuring things in totally different ways. Now, for those listening that are data people, we've got lots of people at BCD that either work in data or love data or hate data. But anyway, if you're in data, you know that the only way for us to truly get a good measurement is if we're consistently measuring the same thing. So things have to have the same name, the same values, et cetera, in order for us to marry it all up. So what I'm hearing is that if organizations could set, let's say, three KPIs for engagement, okay, we want to have X percent engagement on the app, we want to have Y percent surveys responded to, we want to have Z percent of some other measurement, then they could actually look at their program holistically and determine are we meeting our engagement goals at our meetings? That would be the way to do it. But if people are operating in silos, it just creates that challenge that everyone's looking at. It's an apples and oranges type of scenario. Now, I want to talk about where engagement is headed. Leilani, did the customers talk at all in their responses about where they think measurement will go in the future?
SPEAKER_01Yes, absolutely. One of the questions that we asked our respondents in this report and in the survey is where what are the capabilities of technology that they believe are going to be most important to measure over the next three years? And uh the measurement is headed toward being more connected, more real-time, and more actionable. So trying to really address all those gaps that we've talked about. And the report points to a shift away from just post-event and toward an in-journey insights view of the programs and the meetings and events, meaning using data while activity is still happening, not only after the fact. And then it also shows that clients see that the future news is in AI-driven personalization, real-time audience insights, and a more connected system across CRM, finance, procurement, and HR. And so measurement is moving from reporting what happened to helping shape what will happen next.
SPEAKER_00That makes sense. So, for example, if you had a three-day meeting and you're using some of these tools, our favorite apps, or I've heard about the facial recognition technology, maybe your information tells you that your audience is falling asleep during the presentations. If you're doing a meeting that's multiple days, you could look at that information and evaluate it and say, okay, this session really hit, you know, the audience was really engaged here. This one was really boring. This one nobody seemed to understand because there was a lot of questions on it. And then you can refine your agenda in real time and make sure that your attendees are getting the most value out of the program. So that is the right direction. Is there anything else that the clients talked about in the survey results?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I do want to make sure that we discuss the main takeaway of this report and what insight we really pulled out of it. And the main takeaway is that meetings and events are clearly evolving into a value-creating business channel. And we we see that the measurement model is still catching up with that. And so clients really want a stronger proof of value, better connected data, and reporting that speaks to the different stakeholder priorities that they are reporting to. And so the opportunity now is to really move from ambition to activation, capturing the right data, connecting it across the enterprise, and communicating value in a way that leadership can act on.
SPEAKER_00I love it, Lailani. Very, very interesting stuff. Our clients have given us great information, and I think they're right on about the direction of engagement in the future. Now, if anyone is interested in reading your full report, can you let us know where they should go?
SPEAKER_01The report is shared with anyone who has access to the GAM Teams channel, and it's also emailed to SLT to distribute with their teams. If anybody would like the full Q3 Global Insights report, they can also reach out to BCD ME Advisory Services or connect with me directly through email or Teams.
SPEAKER_00All right, Leilani. Well, excellent work once again. I always look forward to these reports, they're so insightful. I get a little bit of a sneak preview because of this podcast. So I'm lucky there I get to hear the good stuff before everybody else. But I love what you're doing. Every quarter when these come out, we're sure to share these with our clients. And we also discuss them at a lot of our business reviews because it's just really good stuff. So congrats on another terrific report and thank you for keeping them going. Now we are going to be curious about your next report. Do you know what the topic will be for next quarter?
SPEAKER_01Yes, our next report is going to be centered around operations and process automation.
SPEAKER_00Okay, well, that's another hot topic. Our customers and our employees love automation, so we look forward to that. Thank you so much, Laylani. Thank you, Jenna. That's all the time we have for today. If you liked what you heard, please like and subscribe. I'm Jenna Baker, and this is Meetings Matter Chatter.