‘Temp agency for event planners’ anxiously looks toward late-October start
A Boston-based conference planning company is set to launch a first-of-its-kind nationwide network of event planners.
The PMP Event Partners network, scheduled to launch in late October, will be accessible by an 800-telephone number which businesses and organizations can call to find an event planner in their area.
The network will operate as a kind of “temp agency for event planning,” said Lori Kershaw, owner of Stoneham, Mass.-based Professional Meeting Planners, which is launching the national network. The individual event planners in the PMP Event Partners will be paid by the hour on a temporary basis to help organizations plan and stage meetings, conferences and other events. The event planners can either work from home, or can work out of an organization’s office, said Gershaw.
“We have a database of meeting planners across the country. Organizations needing a meeting planner in their local area will call us, and we’ll do a match,” said Gershaw.
Organizations can find a meeting planner in their area by calling Event Partners at (800) 378-6857. Clients of the service will be billed directly by Professional Meeting Planners, which will then pay the individually-contracted meeting planner, said Gershaw.
The network currently has more than 200 meeting planners in its database, in virtually every part of the United States, said Gershaw. To become a member of the network, the meeting planners needed to show prior experience in the field, said Gershaw. Each one was also required to provide two client references and two references from vendors in the industry.
“We are screening them to make sure they are quality,” she said. “It might get smaller if we start weeding out the ones that aren’t so good, and end up with a smaller, more experienced network. We don’t want just anybody.”
Gershaw founded Professional Meeting Planners in 1989. The company is prominent in New England as a planner of events that range from board meetings of a few people to academic conferences with more than 1,000 attendees. Clients of PMP include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Columbia University and Harvard Medical School. In April, PMP staged a professional conference in Rhode Island for the women’s advocacy group Broken Boundaries.
“A good meeting planner is essential, said Gershaw. “Our expertise helps organizations stage a successful meeting and save a lot of money.”
A good meeting planner will find an appropriate facility for an organization, then negotiate a contract that best meets the organization’s needs. As part of the negotiation, a good meeting planner will inspect the meeting space, guest rooms, level of service, property condition, layout, and any other amenities or items that may influence the success of a meeting, said Gershaw.
Negotiating a beneficial contract requires time, industry knowledge, and experience, she said.
“We know how to negotiate certain things that many of our clients wouldn’t think of adding or taking out of a hotel contract that could save them thousands,” said Gershaw.
The national event planning business is being launched during a down time for the industry. In a recent survey by Special Events, a trade magazine, only half of the companies surveyed said they are scheduling the same size and caliber of events in 2002 as in 2001. Special event budgets per guest are higher in 2002 than 2001, according to half of respondents. Thirty percent are spending more per guest in 2002; 20 percent are spending less.
Despite the low numbers, members of Meeting Professionals International, in Dallas, Texas, overwhelmingly believe the $96.4 billion meeting industry will fully recover the robust business it did before last year’s Sept. 11 terrorist attack. According to a cyber poll of 820 attendees during MPI’s 2002 World Education Conference, 90 percent said they believed that the industry would recover quickly.
Another 78 percent said the industry will grow slowly back to normal, pre-9 -11 levels, while 12 percent took an even more positive outlook, saying growth will be faster than predicted.
Even the recent bout of corporate scandal hasn’t dampened meeting planners’ outlook. Although a majority of respondents – 72 percent – said the scandals have affected their confidence levels in executive-level leadership, investing in the stock market, and the overall economy, only 3 percent said they were less confident in their own company or job, according to Special Events Magazine’s Web site.
Gershaw said a PMP Event Partners Web site is currently being developed, and is expected to go online in October. Gershaw said the network is the first of its kind, to the best of her knowledge.
“We’re kind of hoping that this is a niche,” she said.
