Executive Director's Blog
14th November 2006
I hope you’ve had a chance to read our new business briefing sent out today. There is an absolute digest of information that should keep you reading well in to the night…. I’m very thankful to the team that put this report together, it literally takes hours of research and writing to prepare and takes a particular skill to translate it into plain English for the rest of us to more easily digest!
There were a few issues that really sparked my interest - the first of which is corporate manslaughter, an incredibly scary thought that as a company director you can end up in prison through negligence. And this is reality, it happened here in the UK about five years ago. It sounds to me that as long as you know your stuff when it comes to health and safety you will be protected, but how do you make sure that you are completely up to date? It’s hard enough for the larger agencies that have access to legal advice and can afford to have specialists on hand in these matters, but what about the smaller agencies, the new start-ups and one man bands, how do you keep on top of all this information?
Well that’s where Eventia comes in. We retain an MP for the purposes of lobbying government and to keep us up to date with these issues, so I hope in some way we can help you by continuing to provide you with information and updates. We will also be running some further seminars in the first quarter next year and this item is top of the list.
The other article that specifically drew my attention was the Foreign Secretary’s address on foreign policy and climate change. We are seeing this move up the agenda on the political front and we will see more of this over the coming year. In our industry I’ve heard some people say recently they are tired of hearing about sustainability, it’s in every newspaper and surely everyone’s bored of hearing about it by now, haven’t we done it to death? Well I say no, that isn’t the case, the politicians are certainly not bored of it, the EU is not bored of it in fact if anything it is becoming even more important as we strive to come up with solutions. One thing that people don’t seem to want to hear are short term surface solutions that don’t really address the problem, they want real long term hard hitting action. So if you are not yet considering this in your business then it’s time to ‘get with the programme!’ And if you fail to act then don’t be surprised when your competitors sneak up behind you and end up winning pitches over you. I’ve met up with a few of these agencies in the past month who are really working hard at putting together their information in to some very useful ‘how to’ manuals. I’ve managed to convince a few of them to speak at our upcoming seminars so stay plugged-in and you might pick up a few tips yourself. The first seminar is at EIBTM and there are still a few places left so why not join us?
My final point today is around strategy. I attended a focus group this month examining the measurement and evaluation of events. The group included a mix of corporate planners, procurement and senior agency bods. The purpose of the focus group was to discuss a piece of research that had been undertaken around this issue and to analyse the findings and figure out ‘where next’. Two thoughts really struck me during the discussions, the first being, here we are talking about measuring events and how important it is, but has anyone spoken to the end users about what they need? Secondly, measurement is really just a small step towards taking a strategic view of events. And how many corporates really do view events as a key component of their overall strategy? And if not many then how can we as an industry raise it to the top of their boardroom agendas? This is a challenge that I plan to investigate through my ‘Corporate Advisory Board’ meetings next year and through continuing to work with this focus group. Well done Mark Budge and Peter Haigh for getting this off the ground and I hope we can see it continue to develop over the coming months.
All of the reports and information from the business briefing are contained within the member’s only area of the website and as a sneak treat I haven’t locked this part of the website up yet, there are a few days left before you will be denied access without your login and password. So for those of you who are still considering the benefits of joining Eventia, if access to this information is of use to your business then it’s a ‘no brainer’. And if it’s not then ‘what business are you in?’
Environmentally yours,
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