We’ve come to accept the acronyms of our industry with winks among friends and conspiratorial grins. They comprise our club’s secret handshake, and we’re reticent to give it up. But the recent tide of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainable meetings lingo is so overwhelming, it almost demands to be shelved for a later date. We pack green meetings away for another time, when life is less hectic, which turns out to be never at all.
There are a lot of green standards (and acronyms) out there—many of which were explained by Elizabeth Henderson in last month’s cover story—but the truth is that the totality of content could take months to understand and even longer to implement. Which is why a new event tool has the industry’s leaders buzzing and its everyday practitioners reconsidering their position that sustainable meetings are just a little too complicated to organize.
The tool comes courtesy of IHG, which contributed US$500,000 to the MPI Foundation expressly for an ongoing CSR initiative. The Sustainable Event Measurement Tool pilots planners and suppliers through the green event process—from energy-efficient audiovisual to water use and transportation—presenting a system that reports carbon emissions, tracks ongoing improvements over time and reduces overall environmental footprints. Basically, the new application provides a consistent way to measure sustainable results—something the industry has been lacking to this point.
The tool’s history traces back to the U.S.-based Convention Industry Council, which tasked MPI with the creation of a sustainable event application in 2008. MPI commissioned the job to the Triple Bottom Line Alliance—a team comprised of leaders from MCI, the Carbon Consultancy and Meeting Strategies Worldwide.
Triple Bottom Line designed the tool to comply with and tie to a bevy of industry standards including the Accepted Practices Exchange’s Green Meetings and Events Standards, British Standard 8901, the Global Reporting Initiative and the upcoming International Organization for Standardization 20121—all of which address the industry’s growing interest in sustainable meetings.
"We are experiencing a major shift in expectations around sustainability and CSR, increasing regulation and scrutiny and stakeholder influence. If these are not visible in supplier RFPs currently, then it’s a matter of when, not if," says Roger Simons, CMP, CSR and sustainable events manager for MPI. "We have a duty to ensure our members—and the industry itself—are prepared and equipped for these developments."
Like it or not, sustainability is here to stay. More than three-quarters of meeting planners (76 percent) in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) say their organizations will focus on CSR this year, according to MPI’s FutureWatch 2010, along with 63 percent in the U.S. and 60 percent in Canada. Nearly three quarters of corporate planners (73 percent) and 48 percent of association planners say CSR will remain important over the next year. Among suppliers, sustainability is key for 67 percent of respondents in EMEA and 61 percent in North America.
"When it comes to measuring sustainable efforts, many people just don’t know where to start or aren’t even sure what exactly to measure," says Gina Broel, chief marketing officer for Microsoft. "Having a tool guides them through the process and helps them better understand the areas of impact. With the emerging sustainable event standards, it will be even more important to have a tool that can support the consistent tracking and measurement of those efforts."
Broel says companies can use the application as a more robust way to report on data, identify areas for improvement and communicate the results in a context that is easy for stakeholders to understand. "It’s not quite enough to say, ’We’ve reduced the environmental impact of our events.’ We need to be able to show the data that actually supports this claim."
As IHG’s David Michael Jerome says, measurement is essential to management, and management is what the industry demands and what the Sustainable Event Measurement Tool offers. The next time your boss asks about your event’s complete footprint, you need to know the answer. One+
