Incentive Travel Council Honors GROWMARK's Dana Weaver as Advocate of the Year

October 10, 2011 – Naperville, IL – The Incentive Travel Council (ITC) has named Dana Weaver, marketing services manager of GROWMARK, as its 2011 Advocate of the Year. GROWMARK is a regional agricultural cooperative based in Bloomington, Ill.

This marks the third Advocate of the Year Award presented by the ITC, which is a strategic industry group under the Incentive Marketing Association (IMA). It recognizes an individual, business, or organization that demonstrates outstanding leadership in enhancing, educating, and/or promoting incentive travel as a value driver for achieving organizational performance.

At the ITC awards ceremony, held Tues., Oct. 4, 2011 in conjunction with the Motivation Show, Jim Ruszala of Maritz Travel, who nominated Weaver, said, “Dana has become a significant asset to the Incentive Travel Council and the industry as a whole. From various speaking engagements, and panel discussions, to the sharing of best practices and further perspectives, Dana has been a true leader in helping our industry understand and further tap into the fuller potential value of incentive travel.”

ITC President Carol Wain said, “Our industry is indeed fortunate to have individuals like Dana Weaver, who, as an incentive travel adopter and buyer, has made a significant impact in clearly articulating the value that incentive travel provides both to the companies and the travelers alike.”

“I am honored to be recognized by the ITC,” Weaver said. “At our company, it’s a privilege to recognize our top achievers with rewards that are meaningful, motivational and memorable. I truly believe travel incentive programs provide the most trophy value for our participants.”

Weaver joins both Dahlton Bennington of the SFN Group and G.J. Hart of the Texas Roadhouse restaurant chain (who is now with California Pizza Kitchen), as Advocate of the Year winners. “Together, these individuals have and continue to help shed stronger light onto the significance of incentive travel, both at the organizational and participant level,” Wain said.

Why Your Participants Should Design Your Next Incentive Travel Program

Reposted from Meetings & Incentive Travel - click here for link

True or False? Asking participants to help design an incentive travel program will only drive up costs and make it more difficult to appease all their wishes.

Answer: False. Instinct, past experience, managerial judgment, beliefs and budgets are simply not enough to effectively drive participant engagement and business performance. Planners need the participants’ insights.

Times, and probably the people involved in your incentive travel program, have significantly changed. Incentive travel strategies aimed to effectively motivate the behavior of program participants must change as well. Generational, ethnic, family structure, and the plethora of social and economic forces impacting your participant base is having a profound effect on what people want from your incentive travel program.

Considering this, incentive travel participants need to be viewed as and treated more like a stakeholder. In our opinion, they are the key stakeholder. Why? Your success hinges on whether these individuals commit to achieving your goals and targets. Given the importance of personal commitment, it just makes sense for your employees and channel partners to have a voice regarding program design. At the end of the day, these individuals will weigh the experience against the required level of investment of both their and their families’ time and effort.

Authors James Gilmore and Joseph Pine first coined the words “Experience Economy” in a 1998 Harvard Business Review article Welcome to the Experience Economy. Paraphrasing a bit for the purposes of our industry, people seek unique and personally meaningful experiences. Travel programs represent some of the best opportunities to create these very meaningful and highly motivating experiences. Getting the most from your incentive program requires a more complete understanding of the motivations of these individuals. This understanding translates into better program design and a better experience.

Organizations that view incentive travel programs as part of a broader strategy of creating “places of engagement” for their people can achieve great results. It all starts with placing a seat at the stakeholder table for the participant to help better inform incentive travel design decisions. After all, it’s the people who create the business results. It makes practical business sense to include them in the conversation.