Open Forum

Hi Cvent Community!

For our fourth "Tip of the Week" series post, we are excited to share a great outline of how you can improve the first step of your event lifecycle. That's right, we mean your RFP's and sourcing.

We have been facing unprecedented times the past months, and we understand it is affecting your events and leading to changes. Through the Cvent Supplier Network, you are able to source for your venues and submit/award your RFP's, but how do you handle it when your event is cancelled or you need to track these changes with your venues?

• First, we would like to outline several new "reasons" for cancelling an RFP, created by our Product Team in the past weeks. You may have been familiar with how to cancel an RFP, however there are now cancellation reasons for Epidemic or pandemic, Natural disaster, Political or civil unrest, and Medical emergency. Whether just one or many events of yours have been affected, this should help for tracking purposes when analyzing this in the future.
• For our hoteliers, there has also been an update for the turn-down reason including Hotel Closed Temporarily and Hotel Closed Permanently. Although this action is taken by the supplier, this is another informative way to track how your venues are being affected.
• If your venue has offered you credit due to your event cancellation, there is a helpful way to track it. We don't want that credit to get lost when you are rescheduling or planning your next event and searching for your venue, therefore you can add the credit through the Cancelled Space option associated with the venue. Next time you are searching through the Supplier Network, there will be a label "Cancelled Space" reminding you there is credit to be used.
• Even if you are not yet searching through the Supplier Network, you will see your credit on the Overview page in your account.
• Don't forget to track if this credit has been used! Once you have used this credit through another booking, you can open the record and change the status to "Used." From there, you can fill in additional details in the Rebooked Space Information section and associate it the new RFP. This status will allow you to see the full story behind the credit.
• As an additional note, if you haven't awarded the business and already have the new dates, you can update the RFP and resend to the venues. The venues can then update their bids.

Have you noticed the new Cancellation Reasons yet? If so, do you find it helpful for your reporting and tracking of venue changes? Are there any other steps you are taking when managing your affected events and looking to the future for rebooking? Please feel free to share by replying to this post so others can learn and discuss from here.

If you have any questions, let us know!#CventTip