About a month ago, we started recruiting providers to eventRFP, and now we have a database of DMCs around the world who have made themselves available to receive the RFPs that meeting planners prepare. Last week, we launched eventRFP to the general public, and now we’re doing everything we can to spread the word and bring meeting planners to the platform. But the eventRFP of today is just the beginning. Continue reading →

Today is the culmination of many months of hard work from the entire VIPER team, and a major step forward in our quest to bring powerful automation tools to the meetings and events industry. We launch eventRFP!

Just over a month ago, we did our “provider launch,” opening eventRFP up for DMCs to enroll, in order to make sure that the service was useful from day one. We were asking providers to take a bit of a leap of faith, to join into a movement that wasn’t moving yet. To our great relief and excitement, we had many providers, large and small, join up during the pre-launch period, including some large global DMCs such as Ovation and Kuoni. If you go to eventRFP and browse the destinations, you’ll see that many providers have joined, and new ones are joining every day. Continue reading →

Working on eventRFP has made me very interested in what other companies are doing in the online meeting planning space. The current 800 pound gorilla in the industry, Cvent, has made a big push into trying to corner the market for self-service online venue/hotel booking with the Cvent Supplier Network, but as I did a little more research into what’s going on there, I was shocked to find out how many challengers there are to that throne. Continue reading →

Destination Management is an obscure industry. The entire meetings and events segment isn’t exactly high in the minds of the general public, though when you explain to people that there are firms that facilitate corporate meetings and other large group events, people tend to nod their heads in a “you learn something new every day” sort of way. I’ve come to believe, however, that this obscurity is actually a huge problem for DMCs.

We’ve explained VIPER’s market and business model to many venture capitalists, and we’ve generally asked them about their experience with meetings and events. So many times, they’ve recounted how the planning and execution of their yearly partners meeting has been a fiasco, and that it was generally a harried office manager that organized it all. I spoken to many other people in the business world (usually smaller businesses) who could have used the services of a DMC, but either didn’t know that such a thing existed, or just assumed that it would have been a costly extravagance that would have made their event unaffordable.

What really sent my thinking over the edge was the recent scandal here in the US wherein the General Services Administration (one of the largest bureaucracies in the world, and essentially the agency responsible for the mundane everyday business of keeping the US government running) squandered tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours “planning” a routine conference. I hadn’t really thought about the implications of the scandal until I read Padraic Gilligan’s excellent analysis, which focuses on how the backlash will damage the industry, and that the real scandal isn’t that bureaucrats are wasting taxpayer money having meetings, but that, if they had used the tools and service providers at their disposal, they would have been able to plan and hold the exact same meeting with less waste and no scandal.

As Padraic points out, if the planning and operation of the entire event had been outsourced to one or more appropriate professionals, it wouldn’t have been necessary for GSA staff to spend 115 man-days and $130,000 for travel and expenses over eight site inspections. As another DMC professional pointed out to me, if this event had been planned correctly and a competent DMC had been involved, it might have been only necessary to have one site inspection, and the tab for it would have been substantially picked up by the hotel.

Now maybe this wasn’t an example of the GSA being ignorant of what a DMC could have done for them. Perhaps they just saw the opportunity to jet back and forth to Vegas as a prime boondoggle opportunity, in which case this scandal is 100% warranted. But I have a feeling that there are many, many organizations out there, large and small, that fall into one of these categories:

• They don’t know that there are professionals out there that could be helping with their events at all.
• They don’t think that it would make sense to engage the services of these professionals, because it would be too much money, their event isn’t complex enough, etc.
• They have engaged professionals in the past, but they did in fact pay an inflated price because of are layers of low-value intermediaries that caused the price to be inflated (for example, someone helped them find a hotel, and the hotel paid a 10% commission, then recommended  a DMC, but they’re paying a 12% commission to the hotel)

We’ve been spending the past months building eventRFP to try to make life easier for corporate and association meeting planners, but a secondary opportunity is that we have the opportunity to introduce our service providers to a whole segment of the population that can use and afford the services, but for whatever reason is still trying to go it alone.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to try to gather some of the horror stories that events industry people are familiar with, where, like the GSA story, organizations have wasted time and money trying to plan and execute events without professional help. Please feel free to share any stories you might have here in the comments.

Today we sent out another eventRFP-related email announcement, and one of the things we talked about was this dawning realization we’ve had that a lot of dominant and up-and-coming industry players don’t have DMCs’ best interests at heart. It’s not so much that they’re trying to put them out of business, but they’re content to squeeze them and squeeze them until they’re put in a purely subservient position.  And to add insult to injury, they’re often made out to be the bad guy.

DMCs are out there doing the heavy lifting, and in a lot of cases, taking on much of the risk. But with the commissions and “overrides” and preferred pricing, DMCs have to jack up their prices to be able to make any money, and then, while all the intermediaries are pocketing their share, DMCs are branded as being “too expensive.”

We think that technology is enabling us to shift the balance of power, and that along with that, DMCs are in a irreplaceable position, so their influence is destined to ascend. With eventRFP, we’re placing a big bet on that happening. The roulette wheel is spinning, and it’s going to spin for a couple of years as technologies and markets work themselves out. We’ve taken all our chips and put them on the DMC space. If you’re wondering why we’ve placed such a big bet, take a closer look at eventRFP.

As part of our eventRFP release, we’ve been sending out announcements to current and potential customers via email, and we hit some roadblocks on the evening of our big rollout. We’ve been using a tool called Mailchimp for our email campaigns, which is pretty popular, largely because its free level is very generous. (If you send fewer than 10,000 messages per month, there’s no cost). It’s also very feature-rich, which is one of its downsides. It’s hard to use, and particularly it’s hard to design a simple-yet-elegant template. Some of the challenges are Mailchimp-centric, and others are inherent in email marketing, but this morning I embarked on a little bit of research on various tools and methods, and I thought I’d share my findings with you.

Mailchimp is just one of dozens of email marketing platforms, including Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, YMLP, MadMimi, and Aweber. Pricing is all over the place, but if you have 1000 subscribers, most fall between $10-30 per month. I haven’t had time to evaluate them all yet, but striking a balance between ease of use, aesthetic concerns, and feature-richness is going to be key.

One of the problems we were having with our campaign this week was that it’s very difficult to design a nice-looking email template that’s going to display consistently on various email clients. Someone receiving the email on Gmail viewed on Firefox on Windows 7 is going to see something different than the person looking on Outlook on Windows XP or on an iPhone, etc. I found, but haven’t yet tested, a service called Litmus that lets you test how your email will look on a bunch of different email programs. Its pricing is high enough ($49/mo) that probably only serious email marketers would subscribe, but there is a free trial. In general, though, a simpler email template is going to display more consistently.

In addition to needing to send announcement email, our eventRFP product also sends a lot of automatic email notifications, so while I’ve been researching email on the marketing side, I’m also keeping an eye out on the travails that Software-as-a-Service applications have with getting email notifications delivered. This may not be applicable to you, but I thought you might like to know how complicated it can be. Here’s a good overview of some of the basic steps you need to take to try to make sure your email gets through (and the comments on that blog post have some great information on email services in general). There are several email services that specialize specifically on helping you deal with your automatic email delivery, such as SendGrid and Postmark.

We know that Destination Management Companies face unique challenges when it comes to marketing, because aggressive outbound marketing is going to have a lot of misses for each hit, considering that you have to convince any potential customer to come to your destination first. But keeping in touch with past customers should definitely be low-hanging fruit, and some good email marketing tools ought to be on your radar screen. So let eventRFP bring in some new customers, while you try to cultivate long-term relationships with past ones.