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 I’ve been pinching pennies hard enough to make my fingers bleed. Yet management still wants me to trim the fat from our corporate events, which include everything from one-time media events to annual user-group conferences. Sure, I could completely eliminate some events or whack off entire program components. But doing so would likely have a negative impact on attendees’ impression of our brand, and it might even make them question our products and overall financial stability. So how do I make small but effective budget cuts across some or all of our events without cheapening our brand and propelling attendees into the hands of our competitors?
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CONSIDER VENUE VARIATIONS
Over the last couple of years, my agency and clients have developed several venue-related strategies that have cut expenses while maintaining program effectiveness. One of our outdoor-apparel industry clients, for example, faced major budget cuts for its national sales meetings. So rather than putting up each events’ 400 attendees at fancy resorts and renting meeting rooms within these expensive locales, the company hosted a hands-on four-day camping experience outfitted with its products.
Held in Squaw Valley in Lake Tahoe, CA, the event featured product presentations, and during the night, salespeople experienced the company’s products firsthand.
While the out-of-the-norm, outdoor tactic saved the company roughly $120,000 in hotel-room costs, meeting-space rental, and on-site catering compared to the previous year’s event, it also improved salespeople’s effectiveness. During sales calls after the event, reps could provide prospects with been-there-done-that product feedback, rather than merely canned sales pitches.
Similarly, one of our other clients is planning to leverage the power of a single venue across three previously separate events. This footwear-industry client is part of a larger group of three companies, each of which holds its own annual partner conference.
To cut costs across the board, the companies are working together to plan their conferences in conjunction with one another, selecting a single city in which to host three separate events simultaneously. The trio plans to select three different conference hotels in close proximity, where brand-specific events and conference activities will take place. However, they will book a shared venue for all entertainment, and stagger each group’s use of the space to provide a sense of exclusivity for each, while also leveraging the same creative, thematic, and entertainment elements.
Thus, the three separate events will remain, and the attendee experience will be nearly identical to that of years past. But by sharing the entertainment venue and all of its costs among three companies, the trio looks to cut costs by roughly $80,000 compared to the cost of hosting three independent events.
 Katja Asaro,
managing director of sales,
Henry V Events, Portland, OR
DREDGE NEW REVENUE STREAMS
Instead of slashing event elements, consider adding new revenue streams. We have developed several revenue-generating packages for our clients that are generally inexpensive to execute.
One such package deals with keynote sessions. Many companies only want celebrities or their own execs to host the keynote at their events, and the thought of sharing the limelight with another company is out of the question.
But what if you opened the walk-in or walk-out times before and after the session to sponsorships? You could sell the opportunity to show 60-second video clips or PowerPoint slides, giving noncompeting sponsors exposure to almost all of your attendees without blurring the spotlight on your company.
We’ve also had a great deal of success selling customer case-study sessions that are built into the client’s conference agenda. For example, you could sell one of your conference’s educational slots to ABC Widgets, which would then pair up with one of its customers to offer a customer case study that’s educational and relevant to your attendees. To keep this type of session from becoming a shameless plug, outline the type of content that is appropriate and evaluate the proposed content prior to your event.
Yet another opportunity deals with social networking. If your company has leveraged the benefits of social networking and has developed large networks, you might consider selling limited access to your fans, followers, friends, etc.
You could tweet links to pertinent content on sponsor’s blogs, sell sponsorships to special on-site activities and promotions for social-networking groups, etc. Price points for these sponsorships vary, but with the right combination of audience and sponsor, this could be a smashing success.
All of the aforementioned options are relatively inexpensive to execute; plus, they’re nonintrusive to your attendees. What’s more, rather than cutting costs and eliminating elements from your program, these tactics can generate revenue and actually enhance the attendee experience at your event.
 John Tatusko,
space and sponsorship strategist, Nth Degree Inc.,
Duluth, GA
GO LEAN BEHIND THE SCENES
I’m the director of conferences and exhibits for both the Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics as well as the Health Care Compliance Association, two Minneapolis-based organizations dedicated to improving the quality of corporate governance, compliance, and ethics. As such, my staff and I manage roughly 45 educational conferences each year, which provide our members with the resources they require to maintain their certifications.
Needless to say, educational offerings are key to our event attendees. So when challenged to reduce our event spending, our hatchet first fell to three behind-the-scenes expenses rather than anything that would cheapen attendees’ educational experience.
1. Literature. Prior to 2009, we provided attendees with a different binder every day of the event. Sometimes measuring 2 or 3 inches thick, the binders contained each day’s session handouts. Comparing the binders’ cost to their impact on attendees’ educational experience, we decided to eliminate them — or charge for them.
Prior to the show, we told attendees that they wouldn’t be receiving a binder at the event, but we offered them the opportunity to download session handouts online prior to the event or to pick up a free CD containing the same information on site. Plus, attendees that still wanted a hard-copy binder could purchase one online prior to the event for $45 to $75 each (depending on the event) and then pick it up on site. By eliminating the binders, we saved roughly $100,000 in 2009.
2. Food and Beverage. F&B doesn’t have anything to do with attendees’ educational experiences, so we snipped our F&B budget with a vengeance. We began by communicating our cost-savings challenges to our caterers and asking chefs and event planners to cut our per-person daily meal charges by $10 or $20 across the board. In the end, we didn’t eliminate entire meals or meal components, but made almost invisible changes. For example, rather than offering six kinds of bagels, we only offered two.
3. Speakers and Audiovisual. Our speakers are critical to the success of our events, but in looking at our presentation- and AV-related costs, we found a couple of line items that could be eliminated without affecting the
attendee experience.
First, we reduced the amount we spent on speaker-reimbursement fees by decreasing the number of speakers and asking each of them to cover multiple topics on the session calendar. That way, attendees got the same amount of content as in previous years, but we saved $40,000 in per-diem costs.
Second, rather than renting LCD projectors and computers for sessions, we purchased this equipment and now bring it with us to events. Buying once rather than renting over and over again saved us roughly $50,000 in 2009.
While our cost-cutting tactics are merely simple, logical cutbacks, event attendance has remained strong, and very few attendees have even noticed these behind-the-scene snips.
 Darin Dvorak, director of
conferences and exhibits, Society of Corporate Compliance & Ethics, Health Care Compliance Association, Minneapolis
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