Do You Know if Your Meetings are Positively Impacting the Economy?

Unless you live in a cave, and these days even then I would have a hard time believing you haven’t heard, you’ve heard about the Convention Industry Council’s release of The Economic Significance of Meetings to the U.S. Economy study.

No doubt the results of this study, conducted by PWC, are significant with numbers that are almost mind boggling …unless you are in the industry.

1.8 M corporate and business meetings, trade shows, conventions, congresses, incentive events and other meetings take place in the U.S., resulting in:
• $263B in spending
• 1.7M U.S. jobs
• $106B contribution to GDP
• $14.3B in tax revenue
• $11.3B in state and local tax revenue
• $60B in U.S. labor income

We know the study looked at direct economic contribution ($263B) as well as total economic contribution which included direct and indirect ($907B).

It’s that indirect economic contribution, $644B, that is so interesting to me. When the meetings industry was battered and large corporations were leading the charge for not holding meetings that might be misconstrued as ‘parties’ did they really think about the impact not having meetings would have on the U.S. economy? I think not.

Just stick with me for a minute and think about the downstream jobs.

A U.S. corporation decides to hold a 5 day education conference in …let’s pick Las Vegas. One of the components of the conference will be food and beverage. Aside from the obvious work of the employees of the hotel in the convention food and beverage department (chefs, servers, cleaners, laundry workers, banquet captains, table bus people, convention services manager, food and beverage manager, etc., etc.) the food must get to the hotel. It is transported probably by truck from the distributor. So you have the trucker, the truck manufacturer, the provider of the diesel, the people who loaded the truck. At the distributor you have a warehouse, which had to be built by laborers, planned by an architect, required materials such as: lumber, bricks, cement blocks, windows, paint, etc. We could obviously get much more granular on each item here but we haven’t even gotten to the actual food! A farmer had to decide to grow the crops, more than likely employ workers to plant and maintain the crops; harvest the crops and transport them to the distributor. There are so many levels it would take hours to get down to the bottom.

The point has been made. Meetings create a plethora of jobs and contribute an enormous amount of tax revenue and income for real people to spend.

So, how do you know if your meetings are positively impacting the U.S. Economy? Are they positively impacting your company’s bottom line?

Do you know?

Do you have a strategic plan, including spend and revenue tracking?

Here are 6 questions to help you decide if you need a strategic plan:
1. Do you know many meetings you conduct or participate in each year? By spend? By type? By venue?
2. Are policies/guidelines in place along with compliance tracking to give you built in risk management?
3. Have you reduced your costs with suppliers by using standard contracts and formal negotiations?
4. Would you like to reduce the number of suppliers by creating a preferred supplier program?
5. Is your staff duplicating efforts? Would aligning teams and/or formalizing an outsource relationship help?
6. What’s happening to the leads you gather are events? Do they get fed into your CRM tool?

If you have questions or would like more information on putting together a strategic meetings program please enter your comments/questions below.

To read all the results of the CIC study, The Economic Significance of Meetings on the U.S. Economy, please visit this link http://meetingsmeanbusiness.com/

And, Congratulations on being in the event industry and positively impacting job and revenue growth in the U.S. There are a lot of happy people because of you!