What is the value of producing an event? A new tool puts the answers in planners’ hands.
At the Freeman annual meeting in August, there were a number of burning issues for the 500 Freeman executives in attendance to discuss, among them a new acquisition and a major change in marketing strategy. While management knew these changes needed to be reviewed at the meeting to ensure that team members were on the same page, they had no idea how much discussion would be required.
However, thanks to the use of Meeting Metrics, a new meeting management tool, organizers learned in advance that most attendees’ views differed completely from those of management. Armed with this knowledge, the event could be planned with specific goals in mind — and the level of change in attendees’ attitudes after the meeting could be easily measured. “Before the meeting, 75 percent of attendees believed that the current brand strategy was good,” said Tony Lorenz, president of Proactive Inc., a recently acquired Freeman company. “But it had already been decided that it was going to change; AVW-TELAV [a Freeman-owned audiovisual company] would be re-branded as Freeman. So that was a mountain to climb.”
