“Annuit Coeptis” or “He approves our undertakings” are the words surrounding the Eye of Providence on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States and on the US dollar bill. The pyramids of course, were early massive structures designed to house royal tombs and religious temples. The design called for the bulk of the weight to be in the lower part of the structure and for the capstone to push down the lesser weight of the middle structure. The result was a distribution of weight that allowed early civilizations to create stable monumental structures.
The events management software industry has built powerful capabilities to manage the logistics associated with events. Many vendors have matured their solutions to handle the most complex events that meeting professionals design. Certain has been one of those vendors and routinely provides software to manage challenging corporate, association and major sporting events with flexible, dependable software to take on all permutations and combination of event variables.
Meeting professionals are master logisticians who tackle the complexity of events with the same attention to detailed planning and execution that supply chain managers or transportation managers bring to their profession.
However, the events industry is rapidly moving beyond logistics and embracing change driven by the cloud, mobile, social and virtual technologies. The ability to engage attendees and “digitally” understand their needs and desires is opening up a whole new role for the meeting professional. Now, rather than be viewed only as an expert in meeting planning, the professional conference organizer is a true business partner that helps marketers, sales executives, CEO’s and other executive stakeholders to extract measurable business value from their investment in events.
If fundamental meeting planner software capabilities, such as attendee management, are the base of the pyramid, giving it the weight it needs for substance and dependability, then mobile and social is the middle layer with the “capstone” of events business intelligence solidifying the entire structure.
The “Eye of Providence” is an apt metaphor for seeing business results clearly. Business intelligence provides the visibility into an event’s (or multiple events’) contribution to business goals. Did we increase sales? Has market share increased? Were the new products understood? What was the relationship between attendee preferences and the demographics?
Delivering events business value requires all three layers. A capstone by itself is useless. A rich set of meetings software helps the meeting professional execute but can limit the contribution to logistics. The middle layer of mobile and social is interesting and fun but only adds value when integrated with the core attendee management layer and is capped by business intelligence tools that produce the analysis.
Like the ancients discovered, building lasting, substantial contributions requires multiple layers working together in unison to produce a desired, measurable result. Events business value is dependent on a seamless layering of attendee management, mobile and social, integrated with tools to turn data into information.
“Annuit Coeptis” or “He (or she) approves our undertakings” could be your event sponsor pleased with the business value generated from the investment in your event planning!
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