The Power of Data for a Meeting Professional

Post written by Missy Johnson, Principal, MJMeetings, LLC | Meetings Consultant | Gourmet Food & Wine Enthusiast | Sports Fan

Quality data in the hands of an experienced meeting professional is quite powerful. Qualitative data about any particular meeting allows leaders and meeting professionals to make strategic decisions and proactive choices.

Meaningful data can turn a CEO’s head when presented in the right way and with the right tools. Conversely, when you’re planning a meeting or event in the absence of reliable data, things can go very wrong. Here are a few of my favorite and most powerful types of meeting data I use to track from year to year.

Room Block History and Overall Meeting Spend

This tracks meaningful data about the contracted room block and compares it to the actual night-by-night pick-up of the block. This is important because when contracting for the next open year, hotels want to know what your pick-up history has been for the same meeting before they agree to give you hotel room inventory. Additionally, it arms you with useful information about how much room revenue your meeting generated for the hotel and how much you spent on food and beverage.

AV Expense/Budget Comparison Report

Every meeting professional knows that audio-visual elements are a critical part of any meeting budget. This line item can also be one of the most expensive, so tracking the spend while also comparing it to the budget is extremely valuable for negotiations from year to year.

Registration Attendance Report

Tracking your attendee data year over year and again comparing that to your budgeted attendee estimates is just common sense. This data becomes very powerful after you’ve collected several years of data and can start to show trends that you otherwise wouldn’t notice.

Finally, of course, there’s my favorite data tracking report of all time. I call it the ROI Report because it tracks all the savings that I’ve negotiated throughout the contracting and planning stages of the meeting…thus showing executives the ‘return on investment’ of my expertise. I believe this report is invaluable. So much so, that I wrote an entire blog post about it.

Do you have a favorite data tracking report? How has the power of data tracking helped you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Interested in learning how I can save both time and money on your meetings and events? I’d love to chat. You can reach me at 913-645-6649 or missy@mjmeetings.com.