Game Changers in Incentive Travel - Interview

In a recent interview with Te Revesz, who runs a fantastic internet radio weekly talk show - Global Reach from VoiceAmerica, I had the opportunity to talk about how organizations are enhancing employee, customer and channel partner relationships through business events.  Take a listen...



Here's the synopsis:

It’s an exciting time in the incentive travel industry. Companies that abandoned meetings, events and incentives (ME&I) in the economic meltdown have seen those savings outweighed by eroding customer, channel partner and employee engagement. Now they are coming back, but to a new paradigm. My guest, Jim Ruszala of Maritz Travel, is a recognized thought leader and innovator in incentives, loyalty and engagement. He’ll talk about the essentials of building a better ME&I strategy. Innovations in program design that can boost the returns – tangible and intangible – for your incentive investment. How to measure the performance of that investment. Why companies need to include both stakeholders and attendees (guests) when creating ME&I programs. How including families and adding corporate social responsibility elements can both be powerful motivators without busting the budget.

Interested on learning more about Te Revesz and her Global Reach program - click here

Five Tips to Ensure a Successful Incentive Program

Reposted from Meetings & Incentive Travel - click here for link

As organizations look to reinvest in their incentive travel strategies, the question of how to ensure a program will help achieve the best value for the investment is typically a major topic of discussion. To fuel those discussions, consider how your organization and strategy goes about identifying and understanding the program elements that generate the strongest appeal, interests and participant engagement. In years past, this discussion primarily focused on destination and activities. While these are important components, successful planners will expand their framework, and do so while keeping in mind business objectives and budgets.

Sounds like a big challenge, but it doesn’t have to be. Achieving more effective incentive travel design hinges on addressing five fundamental points in your planning process. While any one item can add tremendous value, look towards incorporating each in concert based upon your organizational and program participants’ unique needs, interests and preferences. Doing so will help make for a much more meaningful, motivational and measurable set of performance outcomes.

The experience - The travel experience must be compelling enough to the individual participant to get them excited to improve their performance efforts. Based on extensive participant research, experience elements that drive the highest levels of excitement include:

• Sun and fun destinations
• Expanded guest policies
• Unscheduled time for leisure activities
• Meaningful reward and recognition activities

Today’s participants are more savvy and particular about the type of experience they have the opportunity to earn. The true measurement of today’s incentive travel program is based upon engagement. Before, during and even after a program, participant engagement is something that has to be earned, retained and nurtured. Focusing on the experience throughout the lifecycle of the program lends the best approach towards more effectively incenting participants and effectively achieving business objectives.

The qualification or rule structure - Above all, the qualification guidelines must be perceived as fair and attainable. For this reason, we recommend companies evaluate their program structures to entertain opportunities of what design enhancements might afford; such as, a more individually based performance structure or going beyond historical glass ceilings where only the top one to three percent of participants qualify as earners. One program design where the same people earn year-after-year can inhibit the meaningful and motivational interests of non-earners.

 

Communications and management buy-in - Client studies continually show that as many as one in four participants in an incentive travel program are unaware they are even eligible or that there is a program present at all. Promotional communications represent a truly performance critical area in establishing and maintaining strong participant engagement throughout the lifecycle of the program. From kick-off announcements, regularly scheduled updates on performance and standings to maintaining continued buzz and excitement, promotional communications can greatly help avoid your program from “being kept a secret” so that you can better ensure broad and steady participant engagement. In addition, encouraging leadership and management to communicate and reinforce program goals by incorporating reminders and updates in formal team meetings and one-on-one engagements helps inform and advise participants on progress and towards ways of stepping up their level of effort.  

 

Measure for effectiveness- Let’s say that an incentive travel program is based upon helping to successfully achieve some prescribed sales target. With that, we believe it is a good idea to leverage sales leaders to model exceptional sales skills by enlisting them in promoting brand values and further equipping participants to become more effective business objective ambassadors. Conducting pre-to-post and additional post-post (30, 60, 90 days after the onsite experience) surveys can provide you further insight and a deeper understanding into the important contribution these people play before, during and well beyond the travel experience. By doing so, you go beyond traditional ROI approaches and gain deeper insights on the intangible values of how your program helped improve the attitudes, behaviors and intentions of program participants.

 

Invite participants into the design process- Design decisions on such program attributes as trip length, location, guest policy, and activities can greatly be informed by surveys, direct inputs from sales advisory councils and past program participants (earners and non-earners). Leveraging these “voice of the participant” insights can really help better align and fine tune your program design to create a much more meaningful, motivational and memorable experience while better supporting core business objectives. Today’s incentive participant places more weight on the type of experience offered before they make engagement choices based upon the added time and effort they need to put forth to earn the reward. Without participant insights, organizations can run great risk with hit and miss outcomes that drive unnecessary costs and simply fall short of providing for a more ideal, overall experience.

 

There are varied types and levels of available practices available to consider in today’s incentive travel strategies. Following these five tips will help design an approach and incentive travel experience that provides for more meaningful and motivational value to program participants. Further aligning to participant interests, needs and preferences creates for more exceptional opportunities to meet, achieve and exceed business performance outcomes that create short and long-term value for both the organization and program participants.

 

 

 

Three Simple Steps to Create Better Meeting Experiences

Reposted from Elite Meetings Blog - click here for link

Designing for a more engaging experience for your meetings can significantly improve performance from both a business and attendee vantage point. Yet, this is more difficult to do in today’s world due to a host of challenges, including budgeting constraints and increased risks for attendee distractions. From the moment an attendee walks into a general or breakout session, the need to immediately capture attention is just as important as maintaining engagement during the entire experience. So, how can a meeting planner create better engaging meeting, event or incentive experiences? Here are three areas to consider:

1.)  Deliver the Right Content
Ever run into a situation where you have a content-rich agenda but aren’t quite sure how to deliver it effectively? This happens a lot. While the core objective of your program involves communicating and connecting key messages with your audience, the challenge is to ensure you do so using the best possible approach. To be more effective, consider the audience.  For instance, a lack of engagement during a meeting can occur in situations when content is not delivered effectively or simply doesn’t strike audience interests. Testing and gaining audience member insights during the design stage of your program can prove highly valuable in creating and delivering on your key objectives in more meaningful ways for attendees.

For organizations that are on strict budgets, gaining audience insight and feedback is even more important. Lisa Marie Collins, a producer with Freeman – a Maritz Travel partner, also suggests that, “When designing your program, consider going beyond just surveying the audience to find out what topics they’re interested in. This is also an opportunity to engage attendees leading up to the event. Asking attendees to submit questions in advance, for instance, can help create buzz and excitement earlier and assist in better connecting with speakers on content and delivery.”

2.)  Set the Stage
Maritz Travel recently co-produced an event with its partner, Destinations by Design. Tami Hance, vice president for Destinations by Design, really helped create impact the instant an attendee entered the room. According to Tami, everything counts when you’re setting the stage for a truly engaging meeting. And, creating a conversational atmosphere can help spark strong, sustainable engagement from beginning to end. This requires a need for instantly capturing and retaining the audience members’ attention throughout the experience. The use of lighting, colors, and alternative seating arrangements such as lounge settings, table inlays, stage footprints that are just slightly higher than seating levels and go into the audience are examples planners can leverage to better connect with and engage attendees. It’s through these types of efforts that you’re able to instantly capture the audience members by surprise and captivate their attention throughout the experience. Attendees, in turn, experience an at-home atmosphere while being better immersed and connected to your meeting through a much more memorable engagement.

Is this something that is possible from large, general sessions to smaller breakout sessions? Of course it is. As Tami puts it, “It’s all about creating continuity through the theming and presentation of each room. There’s also the opportunity to divide larger general sessions into diverse seating options. You don’t have to be uniform throughout the room. The front, mid and back portions of the room can have diverse options, leave it up to the audience to determine where they want to participate from and engage you.”

As you can see, there are a number of options available when setting the stage, it just requires thinking differently about what you can do that best positions your program for achieving and exceeding expectations – even if it’s a breakaway from past traditional practices.

3.)  Incorporate Distractions
Audience multi-tasking during presentations can be a performance killer. While it’s a situation that’s always presented itself, it’s been amplified these past few years mainly by increased mobile device capabilities. Email, texting, social media and various apps provide audience members temptation, convenience and discretion. Attempting to limit distractions by asking attendees to “Please silence all cell phones!” really doesn’t work. So, why not embrace it instead? Consider ways by which you can incorporate mobile to further create engagement. Polling the audience, texting questions and creating a social following before, during and after presentations can create richer experiences that help further inform, excite and engage audience members.

If performance expectations must continue being met, if not exceeded, meeting professionals need to think more about the experience they’re creating for the audience. Whether a meeting or event attendee, or an incentive travel participant, creating a more aligned, engaging and interactive experience can greatly benefit from these approaches. If you’re looking for even better impact, consider integrating all three into your next program for outcomes that are more meaningful and memorable for your business and your audience.

The Evolution of Meeting and Event Communications through New Technologies

Reposted from Elite Meetings Blog - click here for link

Successful meeting and event programs are built on the foundations of effective communication efforts with audience members. Communicating well and communicating often is a proven way to keep your audience engaged, informed and motivated. Today, companies have more communication options to choose from based upon their meeting or event needs, as well as the preferences of their audience. But, this wasn’t always the case.

Historically, meeting and event planners were limited in terms of what communication options they had available. Creating and supporting levels of engagement during a program period was one thing, but leading up to and creating an afterglow experience post program involved a number of challenges that required new, more interactive tools and approaches. Through the course of the last several years, communication options have vastly evolved, leading towards much broader opportunities to further excite, engage and extend the overall attendee experience.

Think of it this way, today’s communications have shifted from just supporting one-way informational exchanges to helping better create more engaging, two-way dialogues between hosts, speakers, sponsors and attendees. Consider the following periods of meeting and event communications, from where we were to where we are now:

• Event Communications 1.0 - In the early years, meeting and event communications mainly involved traditional hard copy mailings, outbound calling and fax transmissions. These one-way communication exchanges may have helped logistically, but were highly limiting when it came to one-to-one promotional relevance or communicating real-time shifts, changes or program updates.
• Event Communications 2.0 - The dawn and mass market adoption of the Internet brought an immense improvement to meeting and event communications. Websites were created as a central linking point for program attendees to reference and register. In addition, emailing was integrated into communication strategies, providing a new and more effective mix for marketing efforts; it also could be used to provide ongoing announcements leading up to and following meeting and event programs. We’d have to wait just a bit longer for technologies to evolve and enable us to create more effective, two-way and interactive communication experiences.
• Event Communications 3.0 - New technologies and new uses of existing technologies have impacted and created significant shifts in how people manage, operate and socially interact with one another. Face-to-face meeting and event interactions now are more informed and greatly influenced by social networking, virtual engagements and the use of mobile applications.

• Social Networking  - Whether you like it or not, social networking is occurring already with regards to your meeting and event efforts. Ignoring it would place your program and organizational objectives at a disadvantage. Embracing social networking involves a number of considerations and can range in its level of adoption, but its inclusion can greatly enhance your ability to inform, motivate and extend your program’s communication reach.
• Virtual Engagements - The term “virtual” is often defined differently based upon who you ask. There are a number of technology advancements that have created different engagement options. For instance, the use of virtual worlds or Virtual Engagement Platforms (VEP), regional satellite broadcasting, web casting and collaboration as well as telepresence are all primary industry formats available and in use today. However, each type has its strengths and weaknesses, but the right combination with specific face-to-face meeting and event types and audiences can substantially improve levels of reach, engagement and program performance.
• Mobile Applications - A growing number of attendees are demanding more integration of mobile applications into the meeting and event programs they participate. Mobile platforms have become today’s intersection point of the physical meeting or event, virtual experiences and social networking interests. Put simply, program attendees want experiences that are more convenient, interactive and integrated with their mobile devices. Making appointments, noting calendar commitments, sharing contact details and having access to interact with other attendees, sponsors and speakers 24/7 are among a variety or inclusions they’re looking for in today’s meeting and event programs.

These types of communication options can be deployed as tools to extend the overall attendee reach and experience throughout the lifecycle of a program – before, during and after your meeting or event.

Organizations have greater opportunities today, over programs of the past, to create better business outcomes with the right integration of two-way, interactive communication options thanks to new technology advancements. Such opportunities enhance the value of meetings and events by further engaging an organization’s people – employees, channel partners and customers. While situations vary, so should the strategy. Otherwise, organizations run the risk of an ineffective, one-size-fits-all approach. Planners need to consider what the right mix of communication options can best help extend their program’s content, expand the audience reach and create enhanced ways for program attendees to interact and engage others.

The future of meeting and event communications isn’t coming, it’s here. What have you found that works better for your program, organization and attendees?