Meeting Policy/Meeting Operations Learning Center

Best Practices: Introducing a Strategic Meetings Management Program

For over two decades, Strategic Meetings Management (SMM) has been the foundation of successful meetings programs. The core principles of policy, centralization, and governance remain relevant today. A meetings policy aligns events with organizational objectives, while centralization and automation minimize errors and ensure compliance. Governance enhances the attendee experience and achieves better ROI.

Explore meeting policy/meeting operations resources

Getting started

Maturity Levels for Meeting Policy and Meeting Operations
Strategic Meetings Management Overview
Meetings Management Simplified
Meeting & Event Management Program Starter Kit
Cvent Meetings Technology and SMM
SMM Implementation Timetable Template
Making the Case for Meetings Management

Top three tips

1. Obtain leadership support for your Meeting Policy, start small, and expand it within the organization. Collaborate with other departments such as finance, card, and procurement to identify outliers.
2. Standardize your Meeting Centralization by implementing procedures for all planning aspects, so all event types, regions, and businesses can follow the same guidelines.
3. Establish Governance by creating a change management process for requests and decisions to meet evolving business needs.

Additional resources

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Evolving SMM

SMM for Dummies
SMM in a Next-Gen World
Evolving Roles
Meetings Management Success

Policies & programs

Deploy a Global Program
Create Meetings Policy
Meeting Policy Template
Gain Control of Program

Governance

Change Management
Strong Governance
Governance Group
Executive Stakeholders

Case studies

Medtronic
Metlife
Teradata
W.L. Gore & Associates

Customer stories

Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits

To support their meetings processes, they adopted new Spend & Workflow tools, namely Cvent’s Strategic Meetings Management solution. This allowed the small team to manage their internal and external meetings processes with ease, as stakeholders leveraged the meeting request form to help plan their meetings within scope.

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Lincoln Financial Group

Like many organizations, Lincoln Financial Group implemented a Strategic Meetings Management Program (SMMP) seeking to gain more control and visibility into the budgets, reports and sourcing associated with their meetings program.

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