The Meetology® Group’s Meeting Audit helps businesses, venues and organisers design dynamic, potent and productive meetings through the psychological measurement of attendee behaviour, experience, performance and productivity.
The Meeting Audit is the latest product launched by the Meetology® Group as it continues to expand its portfolio based on the psychology and behavioural science behind effective meetings. The product is already being used by venues, corporates and associations.
The Meeting Audit, which is available in three versions to suit Businesses, Venues and Organisers, has been created by the Meetology® Group’s team of leading psychologists from the University of the West of England. Using their expertise in environmental psychology, as well as the measurement of creativity, innovation, information retention and learning, they have created a four step audit process:
MEASURING: Attendee experience and attendee performance
REPORTING: Attendee experience and performance to the client
RECOMMENDING: Psychologically validated changes to various aspects of the meeting
EVALUATING: The impact of recommendations post-implementation using the same measurement process
Jon Bradshaw, the Meetology® Group’s CEO commented,: “Psychology and behavioural science can lend so much to helping create a benchmark for what works when designing an effective meeting. It can help businesses understand the impact of office design on staff performance, can help international congress centres and venues do the same and help organisers evaluate what works at a conference. When it comes to congress evaluation – instead of a 15 page report which nobody knows what to do with, we have used psychology to create a post event evaluation questionnaire designed to plot the attendee performance against their experience. Organisers can use science to know what aspects of their event worked particularly well or badly and then we can help them make changes to improve aspects such as interaction, motivation, learning and creativity. A well designed audit provides all this and more.”
The Meeting Audit is already in use across the three groups:
Business – A nutritional company (Reflex Nutrition – £11m turnover) is using the audit to quantify how much they invest in meetings and what value they get from them.
Venue – the audit is now live for events at the Barbican, Europe’s largest combined Arts and Conference Centre.
Congress – September’s 700-delegate WYSTC youth travel association event in Sydney, Australia is currently undergoing an audit.
Dr Paul Redford who leads the group’s psychology team commented: “Customer satisfaction surveys are not a new concept, but they’re often not precise. We wanted to look at two key elements: experiential – how do they feel emotionally, what are their thoughts; and performance – how well they do.”
The outcome is a survey “that is quick and not too onerous or imposing – less than five minutes, 25 questions or less” rating impressions, expectations and feelings (excited, frustrated, inspired, nervous, hostile) against the success of the visit based on the objectives (whether they were there to learn, sell, buy, network, be inspired, connect etc.). The importance of and satisfaction with external elements, including location, F&B, access, staff, service and technology, are also measured.
“This way we can see what the drivers are, not just follow our gut instincts,” Redford says. “If they felt excited and performed well, how can we increase the level of excitement/creativity at the event? What elements contributed to that?”
Bradshaw concludes: “Ultimately our Audit provides the chance to benchmark and track the improvement (or otherwise) of meetings productivity based on the advice our consultants give clients. We can plot success against external factors, this allows us for example to understand the impact of event design on attendees, develop a best practice model for on-going improvement of the event’s design and give the organiser the ability to measure, track and quantify their success. For example for an event one year it might score a 6.7 on a scale of 10 and then following evaluation and recommendations, it could be a 7.3.”
Further information is available via www.meetology.com