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We don't usually run guest columns when people submit them. (Frankly, they're usually not that interesting.) But this one seemed especially timely and relevant. With events and marketing budgets on the chopping block this season, making the case for holiday parties is tougher than ever. Here, Howard Givner, C.E.O. of New York-based event planning firm Paint the Town Red, a subsidiary of Global Events Group, suggests that corporate planners document the traditional corporate gathering's return on investment in order to save their parties (and, ultimately, their jobs).

Spotted owls. Whales. Company holiday parties. Meet the latest member of the endangered species list. OK, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but not by much. In the past few months in-house planners have fallen into two categories: people who have been asked to cut back or cancel their holiday parties, or people who are afraid of being asked to do so at any moment. It's like sitting through the movie Jaws and hearing that eerie music; you may not see the fin yet, but there's blood in the water and you know the shark is out there.

Although holiday parties are not the only events coming under budget scrutiny these days, they are among the hardest to defend, because most have little or no ostensible business purpose that planners can clearly articulate. Deep in our bones we know they're valuable in terms of morale, productivity, building relationships, rewarding workers for a tough year, etc. But we have a hard time putting that into words. Business executives know that if they cancel a sales meeting or a client conference or a product launch, there's a consequence, a risk of an unmotivated sales force not hitting its numbers, or clients more susceptible to poaching from rivals. But it's hard for them to see the consequences of nixing a holiday party. Planners need to make a case for keeping this event, and quick. Don't look to management to do this for you. Identify the purpose of the event and the perceived benefits and outcomes, and compare those to the amount of money your firm spends. This is your R.O.I.: return on investment.

Yes, R.O.I. That over-used and under-implemented exercise that was a philosophical luxury a year ago has now become a survival mechanism for defending the holiday party, and every other meeting and event you manage. Because it's not a far leap for someone to say, "Gee, with so many fewer events to plan (or none at all), do we really need all these planners?" MORE >>

Corporate Holiday Parties, Measuring ROI

NEWS 07.23.08 11:19 AM

Sound Bites From CEMA: What People Were Talking About at the Group's Summit

CEMA attendees at a poolside dinner Monday night
Photo: BizBash

FROM LAS VEGAS After three days of events, the Corporate Event Marketing Association’s annual conference wrapped on Tuesday evening. We sat in on the summit’s sessions on Monday and Tuesday at the Red Rock resort; here are some snippets from the discussions that got the crowd buzzing.

“It’s great to do [environmentally friendly] things, but it’s even better to show what you did in the numbers that matter to people... It’s a myth that green meetings necessarily cost more.”
—Mary Peters, exhibits manager, Meeting Strategies Worldwide, during “The Business Case for Green Meetings"

“A few years ago, meeting planners were very focused on logistics, not measurement. Now we are well on our way, well on our path to measurement. [As an industry,] we’ve made a lot of headway.”
—Phyllis Mac Isaac, vice president for strategy and measurement, Nth Degree Events, during “How to Use Measurement as a Tool to Improve Performance" MORE >>

CEMA, Going Green, Measuring ROI

ASK AN EXPERT 10.10.05 12:00 AM

Ask an Expert: Auditing Event ROI

FROM NEW YORK Glenn Hansen is the president of BPA Worldwide, which audits the circulation of a variety of media, including many magazines and newspapers. BPA’s event auditing division provides marketers with hard data on the outcomes of their events.

What made BPA want to get into event auditing?
More publishers are now content management companies, in that their content is going out through various platforms. We see the opportunity for a content management company to look at its brand and say, “Our brand has many touch points, we need to measure each of those touch points so that we’ll have an audit of our integrated media solution.” MORE >>

Measuring ROI

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