In today’s economic climate, planners are facing more accountability for overall success of their events. According to American Express Meetings and Events survey, 80 percent of the planners, buyers and hotel suppliers polled expect to increase or maintain the number of meeting they’ll plan in 2012 and beyond. In order to achieve the most success, planners would greatly benefit from focusing on driving down meeting costs while improving return.

However, how many are actually implementing an ROI analysis? Two primary reasons for hesitation are misperceptions coupled with fear and thinking there is only one right way. Unfortunately, the lack of knowledge about how to successfully implement and apply measurement remains an obstacle.

To learn more about driving down meeting costs & improving return, download our new whitepaper.

By Mark Hubrich, VP Client & Industry Relations

Last week in Vegas, Collinson Media hosted the second annual Collaborate conference and I have to say, it was a tremendous success. They created this conference last year for Corporate meeting planners and this year was double the size in attendance with great educational sessions. It provides a different type of tradeshow for suppliers. Rather than a typical booth and exhibit, suppliers have the opportunity to set appointments with planners at various locations around the floor with a matching process for planners who best fit their services. SignUp4 received a positive response with many of the planners. In addition to the appointments, we visited with a number of our current clients and had positive discussions on our service and technology.

The opening reception was a surprising new experience for me. It was held at the Red Rock Resort and Casino which is about 14 miles off the strip in Vegas. It was perfect weather for an outdoor event by the pool and they surprised everyone with a flash mob of people jumping into the pool with a sort of dance routine. After a short while, it was evident that it was a planned routine but it kept everyone wondering, what would be next with this conference.

The educational sessions I attended were particularly valuable. They had 2 sessions on Strategic Meetings Management with a knowledgeable speaker Michelle Wierzgac. Other sessions I attended were on selecting meetings technology, the future of social media, and a meetings industry panel. The speaker s of Lisa Ling, Steve Forbes, and Biz Stone were each very different and provided unique insight into business in their own way. The networking functions led to new contacts and potential clients. I look forward to future Collinson events and seeing what next year’s Collaborate will bring.

by Christine DeFazio, Interactive Marketing Specialist

Tuesday, April 24th the annual Spring Baseball Classic for Kids with the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets & the University Of Georgia Bulldogs was played at Turner Field. This is the tenth year for this event and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s largest fundraising event benefiting the Children’s Neurosciences Program. SignUp4 was proud to be associated with the event and Clint Bailey of Hunter Technical who hosted an awesome tailgate before the game. Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta was presented with a check for over $2,000,000 to support further pediatric research – a real home run! It was a successful night for all who participated, including the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets who won the game in the ninth inning. Go Jackets!

by Mel Tipton, Senior Sales Executive

After two years on the sales team at SignUp4, one of the reasons event planners tell me they are unable to proceed with an online event registration program is because they had chosen to build their own internal system rather than purchasing an ASP model.

We find many companies that have built internal systems in the hopes of saving money, wind up with major headaches. More often than not, no money was saved, and important features were lacking.

Here are some crucial things to consider in your Total Cost of Ownership when implementing a home-grown internal system:

• Design and development of the solution, how much in company resources are we taking on?Client support is vital! How is this system going to be supported on an ongoing basis? Do you have a help line established? How is training going to work?
• Feature updates and enhancements must be constantly performed. What appears to be a good solution today might be an antique tomorrow if you are not constantly updating the system with the latest features.
• Unforeseen delays resulting in additional spend

What I often hear from the planner are things like, “My system is out of date!” Or “I wish my system had those features!” And, “Your system would have saved us so much time and money.”

Now ask yourself this, would you rather run the risk of investing a large amount of money and corporate resources into something you will in all likelihood consider scrapping in the near future?

If you were the decision maker, be it procurement, management or legal, how will that decision ultimately reflect on you if it doesn’t work out. Cost savings and efficiency was your goal in the first place, right? Create a business case for your decision-makers to help them understand the value add of adopting new meetings technology. Then avoid those problems by letting the people who write SMM solutions for a living be your resource for future meetings and events.

by Christine DeFazio, Interactive Marketing Specialist
As you may have noticed, SignUp4 is venturing into various communication channels to provide valuable industry content via whitepapers, podcasts, blogs, focus groups and webinars. Our most recent webinars focus on spend, savings and procurement, as the current economic state is slightly more demanding of planners. At the beginning of each of our webinars we try to take general meeting & event industry specific polls not only to give us a better understanding of our audience but to also gather statistics to share with our readers.

A standard question we ask is “Are you currently using meetings technology?” This is necessary to gauge our group of viewers however as a meetings technology provider we also have a better scope of where organizations are with the acceptance/procurement of implementing new tools.

From our most recent webinar, Driving Down Meeting Costs & Improving Return, we found that 51 percent of attendees are using technology, 38 percent are not and 11 percent are considering it. This is great news for the meetings industry. It’s telling us that meeting professionals are not only accepting the value technology brings but are open to new methods to drive performance while improving attendee experience.

Of the respondents, the largest group currently implementing meetings technology are organizations hosting 0-25 meetings annually followed by those hosting 50-100, then 25-50 and 100 plus. These statistics are just a small example of how valuable feedback is in driving the development of future meetings technology.

Just last week we also co-sponsored the 2012 Business Travel Trends & Forecasts conference which allowed us to bring customers to the SignUp4 offices for a small focus group event. The feedback was phenomenal (as were the guests). The leadership team hosted interactive needs assessments where clients were encouraged to share ideas, comment on current technology, offer suggestions for improved resources and interact with other meetings industry experts. The feedback gathered from this group will be reviewed and prioritized by all departments of SignUp4 to significantly influence our future direction. Our main objective has always been to grow and improve based on the needs of our customers.

By Mark Hubrich, Founder & VP Client and Industry Relations

As we are wrapping up a successful first quarter to the year, SignUp4 is looking forward to our first customer user group at our offices in Atlanta in conjunction with the BTN Travel and Trends conference. BTN is hosting a series of conferences around the country to bring together corporate buyers of travel to share experiences and engage in dialog on best practices and strategies. SignUp4 is a primary sponsor of the conference which will be hosted at the Westin Buckhead on April 5th. This conference will have industry leaders from technology, manufacturing, and the financial industry to discuss their insights into the upcoming challenges and opportunities for 2012 and beyond. If you wish to register for the conference, you can visit the website by clicking here.
As a precursor to this conference, SignUp4 is bringing a number of our clients into our headquarters to have a client focus group to discuss the roadmap of our technology and learn from our clients how we may better serve them and their technology and service needs. We are extremely excited to meet many of our clients from around the country for this face to face gathering. SignUp4 has always been an innovation leader especially in the travel industry by creating technology to bring efficiency to the planning and operational processes around meetings. Our travel management module with integration to all GDS’s and booking tools is leading the industry in addition to our innovative flat rate pricing as compared to the transactional models of other vendors in the industry. We continue to expand and enhance our travel technology with recent releases for integration into FlightStats for real-time updates to attendees’ travel itineraries and giving meeting planners this data at their fingertips. SignUp4’s Meeting Cost Estimator with flight and hotel estimators is leading the industry with providing predictive budgets on seasonality of locations and accurate estimations based on GDS data as well as our proprietary sourcing and hotel data history. This Meeting Cost Estimator enhances Strategic Meetings Management Programs with providing more accurate information for budgeting and better business intelligence for decisions.
Listening to our clients and quickly building and deploying technology to meet their needs is what we excel at with SignUp4. Coupling that with excellent support has provided a successful equation to a growing company with a global reach of clients. We look forward to these upcoming events next week to continue to listen to the industry and be thought leaders and innovators to further the travel and meetings industry.

Before the sun was up, volunteers from SignUp4 were hitting the pavement setting up tables and stacking hundreds of cups of water three tiers high and all for a great cause! This past Sunday, was the Georgia Publix Marathon and Half Marathon where over 13,000 participants woke up bright and early to take over the streets of Atlanta.

SignUp4 volunteered at the Team In Training (TNT) hydration station by handing out water and cheering on the runners and walkers as they reached the top of the hill in Little 5 Points, which was their 5 mile mark. Of the 13,000 participants 200 were TNT team members who raised over $220,000 for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

As the last group of participants made their way up the hill, the music was blasting, the volunteers still cheering and the sun was starting to warm the bustling city streets. Volunteers cleared the cup filled streets –a sign of runners long gone, broke down tables and had the street opened within minutes. We couldn’t have asked for a more rewarding experience.

On a special note, SignUp4 is very proud of its own Kiley Reynolds, Senior DBA/Software Engineer who successfully accomplished the half marathon. Way to go Kiley!

PS – Be sure to check out the marathon photos on SU4’s Facebook page.

By Michael Sabani (Client Services)

SignUp4 has recently announced its partnership with FlightStats, an industry leader in flight information. This partnership opens up a whole new way to integrate flight information into event planning, providing event planners with new tools and reports previously unavailable, most specifically the Flight Exception Report.
The Flight Exception Report is a TMS (Travel Management System) report that integrates directly with FlightStats to provide up-to-the-minute flight information for your registered attendees. By synchronizing the PNRs for attendees and the flight information from FlightStats for their scheduled travel, event planners can have a comprehensive view of the real time status of air travel for their attendees, every time they run the report. Event planners can filter by delayed, on time, and cancelled flight status, enabling them to track in detail when attendees will arrive.
The question that event planners might be asking is “great, but how will this make my job easier?”
This puts a number of options at an event planners disposal!

Transportation Scheduling

Using the Flight Exception Report, event planners can see exactly what time their attendees will arrive and schedule transportation accordingly. Do you have five attendees arriving around 11am? Now you know to send a van. Thirty? Better send a bus! Now you have the ability to know and plan accordingly, saving time and money.

Check In Staffing

Want to know how many employees to staff at your event’s check in desk? Run a Flight Exception Report. Now you know that forty five attendees will be arriving soon! The five people at the welcome desk might get overwhelmed; it might be time to add more staff. Did the report show that there are only six people arriving from 1pm to 4pm? You probably won’t need those fifteen people at the desk. Save your staff and your attendee’s some unneeded frustration.

Rearrange Travel

Running a Flight Exception Report filtered by a “Cancelled” status will show you any last minute flight cancellations. Contact your stranded attendees and rearrange their travel! Be an event planning hero!
These are just a few of the things that the Flight Exception Report will allow you to do. Let us know how you have used the Flight Exception Report!

By Mark Hubrich, Founder & VP Client and Industry Relations

I attended the Meetings Exploration Conference last week hosted by the Georgia Chapter of MPI and was glad I attended. It was fruitful for business development with 2 companies about to sign contracts, some new meeting planner connections who did not know about SignUp4, and networking with new suppliers. I think that is one area that is overlooked when suppliers attend a conference. It was a lunch discussion I had with a planner and 2 suppliers on Thursday of the conference. This planner, Laura, was telling the table that one of the first things she does when she is contracting for a new service is to ask her close supplier friends for their recommendations or advice. Cultivating connections with other suppliers who are not a direct competitor can be key to getting and winning new business. The other point that I’ve noticed in this industry in my experience over the past decade is that people change jobs every few years and one day a friend may be at a hotel and the next year that person may be a planner at a different company.

The educational sessions I attended were insightful and cutting edge. Being on the technology side of the industry, I was most interested in the sessions by Patrick O’Malley and Corbin Ball. Patrick, whom I’ve heard twice before and have always learned new material which I could immediately apply to my job, had a lot of new insights and examples from his session on advanced social media for meeting planners. He especially emphasized the value of video testimonials and its power in Google with search rankings. Corbin had 2 sessions both of which were packed rooms and full of information. I thought the session on mobile apps for the meetings industry was the most helpful. I feel that I’m fairly knowledgeable on this topic and he was able to introduce me to new companies and products I had not seen before. His presentations can be found at http://www.corbinball.com/assets/mobile-gampi.pdf and http://www.corbinball.com/assets/trends-gampi.pdf for anyone who wasn’t able to attend the sessions. The material on near field communications was especially new to me. There are definitely some new apps that I downloaded to my iPhone after his session. Wordlens(www.questvisual.com) especially will be beneficial to me next time I am traveling abroad. Overall, I learned a lot with the education sessions, made some new connections, and was able to see many old friends. For all of the years I’ve attended the MEC, I’ve always found it to be one of the most valuable regional MPI conferences.