Crowdsourcing

I am sure many of you receive Convene Magazine, the monthly magazine from PCMA. I wanted to mention it here for no better reason than there is a great article in it by Barbara Palmer, senior editor of Convene, and that I was interviewed for it. Here is the link:

The article is called Are We Thinking What I am Thinking? and it is about crowdsourcing.

The Hug Drug & Event Design

Now that I have your attention...

Two great posts caught my eye this week. The first was from Jeff Hurt, a much re-tweeted and Facebook-posted blog on Thinking About How Conference Meeting Design Impacts the Brain. In this post, Jeff argues that people go to conferences for two main things: education and networking. To positively impact attendee experiences, he proposes 3 things:

1. Get beyond the perception that meeting professionals don't know about the brain and how to create learning experiences. His theory is that we need to pay more attention to what works, how to engage people, what stimulates their emotions and their minds. You only have had to go to one boring conference too many to realize that this is true.
2. Realize that the meetings industry needs to reach out beyond its own borders to see improved results. I completely agree with this one; the meetings industry is extremely incestuous. Sometimes its like trying to have an argument with people who all agree intensely with each other.
3. Need to translate biological thought into conference design. Again, I am a big proponent of this, and am designing a conference for an industry association in 2011 that uses some of these premises...along with some others, including gaming..stay tuned!

I had just read this blog and was probably still nodding my head in agreement when another article crossed my virtual desk, this one from Fast Company, called Social Networking Affects Brains Like Falling in Love. For those of you wondering, this is where the drugs come in; the article explored the ability of social networking to produce oxytocin and the subsequent effects on the person generating it. TO BE CLEAR, oxytocin is the "cuddle hormone" (the "hug drug" is my term, given the natural propensities of the events world) not oxycontin, which is the painkiller.

Social networking apparently produces a lot of oxytocin. In fact, in this (it should be pointed out) very unscientific study, it produced the same amount of hormone as is produced by face-to-face interaction. This makes people feel good. Going back to Jeff Hurt's blog, social media may then have a greater impact on conference design than just marketing; it creates a real sense of "family", or network, one of the major reasons people go to conferences. The question for event professionals is how to design an event that uses this ability of social networking to create emotional connection to the event. Emotional connection then builds trust, and trust enables the creation of what my MBA professor Daphne Taras (now the Dean of the Business School at The University of Saskatchewan) calls social capital. (I think of this like a bank account for personal interaction; as more people trust you, the more personal integrity you display, your account balance goes up.)

Interestingly for event professionals, not only social networking creates oxytocin to be produced. So does massage...making a "whole person" concept at conferences even more important to develop (once again..stay tuned for this industry conference in 2011 I am helping to design. Again, more later). This fits in nicely with the concept of sustainable events and corporate social responsibility.

To Jeff Hurt's point, the process of designing conferences needs to take a giant step forward to incorporate fields like biology and psychology. While many event professionals are exceedingly good at what they do, what they do needs to change to become more effective. Perhaps in the future conference programs will have sessions on Using Biology to Create Effective Experiences and not just Networking 101.

Someone Else's Problem?

There is an article today from Deloitte called Hotels Beware: Do Not Check In Corruption. I think it's a good read, because corruption is something, like human rights, that the meeting industry never talks about and should. The classic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy called this Someone Else's Problem, or SEP, and was defined as "an effect that causes people to ignore matters which are generally important to a group but may not seem specifically important to the individual".

Deloitte suggests that hospitality companies do background checks and surveys as part of a compliance program, as well as implement policy and training on anti-corruption. Perhaps hotel companies do this type of training in-house, but it has never hit the educational programming of any meetings industry associations I can think of. Perhaps some of these associations should create an SEP track at their annual conferences to raise awareness of these kinds of issues. Logically, this would be part of any CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility tracks, which too often focus on the trendy environmental sustainability issues (important, but only part of the puzzle).

Measuring Social Performance

A paper by Ebrahim and Rangan came across my virtual desktop today -- my virdesk? my virdetop?...I pointlessly digress -- on measuring social performance in non-profits. For-profit corporations can use measurements such as profit margins, return on assets or equity, price to earnings or earnings per share, supported by key performance metrics (KPIs). The difference is that for non-profits, "financial performance is often a means rather than an end to social sector activity". A complicating factor is that the diversity of non-profit missions and scope means it isn't "feasible or desirable" for all organizations to have metrics at all levels. This blog attempts to summarize the main ideas of the paper and apply them to sustainable events.

Integrating social performance measures into your organization through activation of sustainable meetings and events should therefore include an assessment of your organization's mission and scope and attempt to align them.

Impact can be measured through three things:

1. Clarity of goals
2. Specific measurements
3. Milestones

Of course, some things are easier to measure than others. Inputs are often easy to measure: volunteer or staff hours, for example. Outputs are sometimes not as easy to measure; alleviation of hunger in the community, for example, through the donation of left-over meals.

A key recommendation is that measurement needs to be supported by a culture of self-evaluation, and by skilled practitioners, which makes training mandatory for success.

The paper recommends that organizations ask three questions:

1. What can we measure? (for example, time and other inputs)
2. What do we need to measure to satisfy our stakeholders?
3. How can we use measurement to help us achieve our mission?

They also note that small organizations are better off measuring inputs and outputs rather than impact; outcomes and impacts are measurable only on very large scales. For events, unless you are measuring impact across a large number of events, for very large organizations (multi-nationals, for example) or a mega-event like the Olympics, it is probably more logical to measure inputs and outputs and ensure they are aligned with organizational mission and strategy.

I recently wrote an article for ONE+ magazine on the integration of sustainable event standards. One commentator noted that none of the standards was able to help measure "prosperity", one of the key pillars of the triple bottom line. This is possibly because of the same issues the authors of this article have noted, those of scale and diversity of organizations. Expectations and possibilities differ organization by organization.

Prosperity of for-profits can be measured by traditional assessments (earnings per share, for example); it is however difficult to measure the prosperity impact of community service events. How does this impact the bottom line of the sponsoring organization? How do you measure in dollar terms the benefits of generating social capital and an enhanced reputation? Another issue is that the whole idea of "prosperity" is tied up not only in the bottom line of an organization but on community prosperity and environmental integrity; organizations use and contribute to the health of social capital and "natural capital".

Comments Wanted: Draft GRI Event Sector Supplement

GRI Event Organizers Sector Supplement: First Public Comment: A draft set of indicators is now available for public comment at: http://www.globalreporting.org/ReportingFramework/SectorSupplements/Events/

All contributions are welcome, so please forward this link to anyone potentially interested. The survey will close on August 3, 2010.

Following public consultation, the working group will review the feedback received and further develop the supplement and indicator protocols. There will be a second opportunity for providing feedback on the final full draft supplement in early 2011.

From Children to Fathers: The Grand Standard

My inspiration for this post is an article on the CSRWire by Warren Levy, called We Need a Grandchildren Standard. In it, he mentions that CSR is a leading measure, whereas sustainability is a lagging measure. It occurs to me that some people may not know exactly what this means.

I did some work for an organization on developing sustainability KPIs (key performance indicators). Some of the KPIs involved reporting on leading and lagging edge indicators to measure the success of actions taken. For example, "satisfaction" is a leading edge indicator; the satisfaction level of partners, customers, members, volunteers can be viewed as a predictive indicator of possible revenue streams.

Actual revenue streams are an example of a lagging edge indicator. It is lagging edge since it is measured in absolute terms (money), and is likely a product of activities that you and the organization have already engaged in.

So, back to Warren Levy and The Grandchildren Standard. His premise is simple: CSR is a leading edge indicator, as it represents the things an organization does to reach a long term target of sustainability. Sustainability itself is the lagging indicator. You don't have it until you have it. Levy argues for a change in how business views itself: "Sustainability requires changing business and political decision-making to the 'grandchildren standard' from today's pervasive 'no tomorrow' standard".

If you read this blog, you will know I am enrolled in an MBA program. Last night, a graduate of the program happened to drop by: Brett Wilson, a member of the wildly popular Canadian TV show Dragon's Den and self-made billionaire (yes, that is BILLIONS). He spoke about his business successes and how they have shaped his current priorities. One of his yardsticks when evaluating new projects happens to be "what would my children think of that"? This strikes me as an actual business application of The Grandchildren Standard. Its very similar to Seventh Generation's creed, the Great Law of the Iroquois Federation: "In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations".

My own application of this could be called The Grandfather Standard. In fact, my father, but grandfather to four. We were talking about the roots of this recession. His opinion is that it is all about greed. He lived through the Great Depression, and he believes that businesses used to know what they were there for. To make a profit, yes, but to support the community too.

The point? Develop leading edge programs through your events that have sustainable, lagging edge results: another great reason to embrace new sustainable event measurement (APEX), management (BS8901) and reporting standards (GRI).

Event Measurement Tool

Ever since I wrote the specifications, a few years ago, for a tool that would measure the environmental, economic, and social impact of an event, there have been several tools that have landed in the market. A couple of these have been around for a while, including the MeetGreen tool and the EventSustainability Tool. Another is from Credit360, which isn't specifically for events but could be modified.

There are even some proprietary tools in the industry, such as Hilton's HER (Hilton Environmental Reporting) which focuses on environmental impact.

In May, a new tool sprang up specifically for events and purporting to measure the triple bottom line of people, planet and prosperity (environment, economic and community impact). You can see if at http://www.eventimpacts.com/. It has been tested in the UK market on several events.

Anyone familiar with more? Has anyone used these ones?