Welcome to this issue of the Daily Plan-It, a publication designed to inform and inspire your meetings and conferences to higher levels of success! Read on for ideas and tips to expand the strategic importance of your meetings, enhance your delegates’ satisfaction, reduce costs and help the planet. Further ideas and information can be found at www.meetingstrategiesworldwide.com. If you prefer not to receive future issues of the Daily Plan-It, please contact editor@meetingstrategiesworldwide.com.

In the News & Announcements

We are pleased to share with you our efforts in greening the Giants Stadium location of the Live Earth concert. You can read more about our adventures at the concert here. Download a copy of the Green Event Guidelines, co-authored by Meeting Strategies Worldwide, from the Live Earth website. http://liveearth.org/docs/LEGreen_Guidelines_First_edition_final.pdf

Check out the new demo of the MeetGreen^SM Calculator. You can explore one section of the calculator, enter data and see sample reports. https://www.meetgreen.com/calcdemo/demo.php

Green Communications & Marketing - Spread the Word
By Susan Elshire

As the demand for green meetings grows, the communications and marketing of the events becomes more and more important. Communications and marketing are not just about the paper, ink, and electronic methods used - they are about spreading the word and building understanding. They are about sharing with the media, employees, attendees, stakeholders, and the world the difference meeting managers are making by planning events in an environmentally and socially responsible way.

Share your policies and initiatives with stakeholders. Expectations for your meeting can only happen when there is clear communication, especially if greening practices are new. Be sure your communications are consistent with all parties involved. The best way to enroll stakeholders, vendors and organizers is to educate them about what environmental practices are being put into place, why it's important and how you're planning to implement them. The better they understand, the more likely they will be to implement your requests.

Engage attendees in the process. Do not forget to inform your attendees. Attendees will get involved in what you're doing if you communicate why you're doing it differently and why it's important. What attendees do not respond well to are surprises.

Here are communication and marketing ideas that engage and involve attendees:

Encourage use of responsible travel options and carbon offset programs. Provide walking and public transportation maps so attendees can visit the city without renting a car.
Suggest attendees stay in hotels that are certified green, take full advantage of the hotel's commitment to reuse linens, turn off lights, and participate in their recycling programs.
Appoint recycling advisors to assist attendees in using the recycling bins and minimize their waste; give attendees a prize when caught participating in the greening efforts.
Ask attendees to bring their favorite water bottle or coffee cup from home.
Provide a list of suggestions for attendees to continue the effort back home.
Include questions in the formal evaluation about the event's environmental stewardship and attendees' suggestions on how to build on the success.

Demonstrate your commitment through your communications and marketing materials. The event's communication materials should also demonstrate the organization's commitment to environmental responsibility. For the more formal communication involved with a conference, the following green practices are recommended:

Reduce paper usage by using the web and email to promote events and conduct correspondence. Send media and sponsorship packets electronically.
If materials need to be printed or mailed, use post-consumer content, chlorine-free paper printed on both sides with vegetable-based inks.
Encourage on-line registration and send confirmation emails to attendees.
Use name badges made of recycled material; collect and reuse them after the conference.
Reuse/recycle conference signage.
Consider not providing a conference bag.
Limit sponsor handouts for the bags or print all sponsor information in a newsletter format that is produced in an eco-friendly way.

Spread the word. Submit a press release or write an article for your organizational newsletter, industry trade publication, or local media. Publishing the green practices of meetings in a case study with quantifiable results is an excellent marketing piece for the conference and sponsoring organization. Post it on the conference website for all to review. Meeting managers should share data with professional associates. They will be interested in what efforts were done, how it was done, and the outcomes. Networking with other meeting managers who employ green meeting practices is important as well.

Apply for an award. There are award programs for green management in the environmental and social arenas as well as from meeting management organizations. These awards showcase the exciting, new innovations in green meeting practices.

Case Study - Our Clients Are Our Partners
By Nancy J. Wilson, CMP

We have a great client (actually we have lots of them) but this one in particular pushes our technical expertise to find solutions to make our lives better. He inspires us to develop technology to enhance the attendee experience, his experience, our experience, and save the environment all at the same time. His name is Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Conference Chair of EclipseCon.

Our first year with EclipseCon, Bjorn required a registration system that was web-based, easy to use and would generate electronic confirmations and receipts. It also needed to generate customized, electronic management reports on demand at a time when this technology was in its early stages. Monitoring these reports, he was able to swiftly react to registration and marketing trends. Invaluable for a new conference. Onsite, the system allows us to automatically check in attendees and know how many per hour have arrived. This tool allows us to provide accurate food and beverage numbers and chart the flow of the conference.

I guess I should start from the beginning though. When I first met Bjorn Freeman-Benson it was 1994. He was on a conference committee that required me to use email for the planning process instead of phone, fax, or face-to-face meetings. In 1994, this was unheard of in the meeting planning industry. I soon realized that planning a conference "virtually" with the committee scattered around the world was not only quite possible but also fun. No travel, no paper, no long distance charges and from the comfort of my office with my fuzzy slippers on.

When I first began the business, all academic paper submission and review processes were managed by hand. Lots of time, LOTS of paper, and lots of visits to the post office. Bjorn and I knew there must be a better way. Thanks to the development team led by Ken Bauer, the online submission and review system was designed for EclipseCon using Eclipsezilla. Now those tasks are things of the past. It is all done via the web. And are we glad…in 2007, 760 papers were submitted. There were 4022 reviews. 325 were accepted. Not one tree was cut for this effort.

Once accepted, the sessions are automatically populated into the online conference program schedule on the website. Authors/presenters upload their own photos, bios, and presentations. Attendees can go on the website and design their own tracks and share them with other attendees. Before the conference, the presentations are downloaded onto USB keys for the attendees instead of the paper handouts. Saving an average of 24,000 pieces of paper and 3 trees each year!

This system was also engineered to download all of the session information into the Meeting Strategies Worldwide production/staging guide. We estimate a savings of 60-80 hours of data entry time and the ability to provide the most accurate information possible to the convention center, hotels, AV supplier and caterer.

Bjorn's friend, Ward Cunningham, is the inventor of the WIKI. When Bjorn saw the applications as a conference planning tool, we were introduced to the technology. All of our timelines, budgets, committee items, etc. have been on the conference WIKIs for years. It is a convenient, time-saving and paper saving way to keep all conference planning information in a central location. It can be accessed by anyone on the committee day or night, in Europe or Japan. They don't need to contact us to get current information.

Fast forward to 2007, Meeting Strategies Worldwide is on the cutting edge of technology and recognized leaders in green meeting practices. Do they go hand-in-hand? Absolutely! Did Bjorn Freeman-Benson play a role in both of these? Without a doubt! He is a creative, intuitive, brilliant individual who cares about the Earth.

Our thanks to Bjorn for your continued support of the work we do, for being our partner in building better mousetraps, and for having fun along the way. Now, if you could just get technology to "beam" us to a conference site instead of using commercial airlines we would be forever grateful.

Upcoming Events!

Local/Community Events:

Oregon Food Bank, SAVE THE DATE: October, 2007, 1-4pm
Dishing it out...again. Those of you in Portland are invited to join us again (and bring a friend) on Friday, October 5, from 1-4pm for our quarterly volunteer time at the Oregon Food Bank. You'll have another chance to see the entire Meeting Strategies Worldwide team in hairnets, gloves and plastic aprons and hard at work. All you have to do is RSVP to nancy@meetingstrategiesworldwide.com and show up. Nothing else is required! We hope you can join us and spend a few hours with other folks in our industry volunteering for this very worthy cause.

In our previous outting this May, we repackaged 12,033 pounds of apples and onions (equivalent of 9,256 meals).

Client Conferences & Events:

Agile 2007 — August 13-17, 2007, Washington DC
Agile 2007 will be an exciting conference about techniques and technologies, attitudes and policies, research and experience, and the management and development sides of agile software development. The agile approach focuses on delivering business value early in the project lifetime and being able to incorporate emergent requirements. It accentuates the use of rich, informal communication channels and frequent delivery of running, tested systems, while attending to the human component of software development.

Eclipse Summit — October 9-11, 2007, Stuttgart, Germany
Eclipse Summit Europe is the Foundation's premier event designed to create opportunities for the European Eclipse community to explore, share, and collaborate on the latest ideas and information about Eclipse and its members. The conference will consist of one day of symposia followed by two days of technical and business track sessions, selected keynotes, demos, and networking gatherings.

OOPSLA — October 21-25, 2007, Montreal, Canada
OOPSLA is the premier gathering of professionals from industry and academia--practitioners, researchers, students, educators, managers, and more--all sharing their experiences with today's object technologies and its offshoots. Whether you are new to OOPSLA or a veteran, you will find a wealth of information and people with whom to share experiences and knowledge.

Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) — October 23 - 26, 2007, San Francisco, California
The BSR Annual Conference reflects exciting examples of sustainability in practice, and also serves as a catalyst for new ideas and initiatives that will shape a more sustainable future. Three days of rich dialogue and debate focusing both on "Practical Steps" and "New Insights" make the BSR Conference an essential forum in which we can begin to design a sustainable future.

Fall 2007 VON — October 29 - November 1, 2007, Boston, Massachusetts
In the world of Internet Protocol (IP) communications, VON is the conference for must-know industry insight and education on the what is now, the what is new, and the who's making it happen. VON brings the critical food chain of services together to compete, partner, and procure. VON is about building communities to network and share strategies that result in invention, implementation and distribution of technology.

Recommended Resources

Environmental Defense Paper Calculator
Use the calculator to determine environmental savings of using post-consumer recycled paper for printed marketing materials.
http://www.environmentaldefense.org/papercalculator/

Federal Trade Commission
Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/grnrule/guides980427.htm

Greenbiz.com
Several resources and tools on green marketing.
http://www.greenbiz.com/resources/marketing/

Green Lodging News
This section covers several examples of hotels incorporating green into their sales and marketing
http://www.greenlodgingnews.com/SalesAndMarketing.aspx

Good Magazine - "Green is the color of money"
Article discussing greenwashing with several corporate examples.
http://www.goodmagazine.com/section/Features/green_is_the_color_of_money

J. Ottman Consulting Inc
Several articles from basic to in-depth exploring topics on marketing green businesses.
http://www.greenmarketing.com/articles_and_report.html

Joel Makower - "Green Consumers and the Mushiness Index"
Article looking at the current state of consumer trends for environmental purchasing and how it affects green marketing.
http://makower.typepad.com/joel_makower/green_marketing/index.html

Contact Us

Meeting Strategies Worldwide
6220 NE Glisan
Portland, Oregon 97213
U.S.A.
Phone: (503) 252-5458
FAX: (503) 261-0964
operations@meetingstrategiesworldwide.com
www.meetingstrategiesworldwide.com