The 2020 Event Budget Guide

Vicky, a VP of Sales Enablement for a multi-national financial services company, organized and executed hundreds of events geared towards high net worth investors every year. Keeping these events on budget was critical to Vicky’s MBOs. To manage the costs, she conducted a quarterly review of all expenses to understand where there were leverage points and savings opportunities.

There were 5 typical items that she reviewed: 

• Hotel room costs
• Food and beverage costs
• Meeting room rentals
• Concessions
• Attrition clauses

Quantify the Value from Your Hotel Negations

Without constant monitoring, it was hard to ensure Vicky was getting the best room rates for guests. The volume of attendees at these investor meetings can fluctuate, and ensuring the right discounts based on volume was time consuming.

To solve for this, Vicky employed a venue sourcing tool that allows her to take in multiple proposals, negotiate room rates effectively and show the cost savings on hotels room blocks. In the end, Vicky saves between 5-15% on rooms in various cities.

Take Control of No-Show F&B Costs

Food and beverage costs are often the greatest offender of misused spend, and rarely are event teams looking for F&B savings in the right place. Poor registration processes, which hinder visibility and accountability for the sales team, lead to high no show rates.

Using an end-to-end event management software to organize all the marketing and communication efforts around events, Vicky is able to track her event outreach with integrated reporting features on each personalized email sent. By personalizing and tracking all communication around events, you can drive down no show rates by 75%, and recover hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on plated meals.

Leverage Benchmarks to Drive Meeting Room Savings

As a large organization, Vicky did not have direct insight into every event that other internal meeting planners were organizing. She believed that across meetings, the planners were not enabled to negotiate the best rates on meeting room rentals because they lacked benchmarks and comparisons.

With the sourcing tool that Vicky implemented and putting an eRFP process in place, planners now had insight into what venues had been booked in the past and the value of each. Overall, this process has helped to save thousands of dollars a year on the multitude of events Vicky’s organization plans.

Drive Concession Value

An often-overlooked aspect of controlling events costs are concessions. Vicky found that simply asking for concessions on Wi-Fi and A/V in meeting spaces often produced savings.

Through her sourcing tool, she set specific concessions to auto populate on every eRFP that was sent through the system. Saving between 5-10% on every event booked, Vicky made it possible for everyone to contribute to savings – even employees with no experience in venue negotiations.

Mitigating your Event Risk Across the Company

Some attrition is inevitable. Paying for that attrition is not. Vicky’s team creates standard company contract clauses that auto-populate on every eRFP. This helps them avoid stiff penalties by setting reasonable fees, such as 25% attrition up to the day of arrival. For additional safeguards, they lock in no walk and resell clauses into all eRFPs. When Vicky reviews registrations vs. attendees and calculates what she would have paid without these clauses, she typically finds 10-15% savings on each event.

Vicky’s strategy required simple invitation and registration systems that were easy to understand for thousands of decentralized financial consultants. It had to be repeatable and scalable for a growing planner team. It had to drive a more sophisticated approach to negotiation that could save millions of dollars a year. In short, Vicky needed an event management platform to manage and monitor all of these moving pieces in order to realize the savings.

Recommended Resource: Did you know for many companies, meetings and events comprise one of the biggest categories of unmanaged spend? Learn how to maximize savings, minimize risk and improve service to attendees with our guide on how to Gain Control of Unmanaged Meetings Spend.

Heidi referred to the software systems across campus as the “spaghetti plate,” as in almost every school on campus was using a different platform or process for managing their events.

• Event websites were either on individual school pages or the main university page
• Registration for events were collected through various point solutions or the proprietary system
• A few schools were dabbling in mobile apps and engagement solutions
• Budgeting for events was completed through manual processes

The entire campus was all over the place with the technology they used for events and a unified process needed to happen. With different contracts in place across campus, and different event processes working out of different budgets, bringing them all together seemed an impossible task.

Along with a singular event management platform, Heidi took the opportunity to create standard event planning and execution processes across campus. She hosted numerous trainings on the new processes for the hundreds of planners working at her university to further guarantee success. The university gave all event planners 12 months to migrate to the new event platform. This saved the school 25% of its event technology costs.