Strategic Meetings Management glossary

Terminology matters here more than it usually does, because meetings sit at the junction of three professions that each brought their own language. Procurement talks about spend under management. Finance talks about committed cost. An events team talks about DDRs, room release and attrition. All three describe the same activity.

The result is conversations where everyone agrees and nobody has agreed. A Head of Events saying “we have visibility of our events” usually means the events they run. A Head of Procurement hearing it assumes it covers all meetings spend, including the training day a regional office booked directly. That gap is where most programme problems begin.

The practice of managing an organisation’s meetings and events as one coordinated programme rather than a series of unrelated purchases. Instead of each department briefing, sourcing, negotiating and contracting separately, requirements travel a consistent route with shared process, shared supplier arrangements and a shared view of spend.

SMM is a management discipline, not software and not a booking service. It covers commissioning, buying, contracting and what procurement and finance can see afterwards. The full explanation is here.

The documented, operating version of the discipline inside a specific organisation. Where SMM is the idea, an SMMP is the set of things you could point at: a briefing route, a meetings policy, approval thresholds, preferred supplier arrangements, a data standard and a reporting cycle.

An organisation can practise parts of SMM informally. It has an SMMP when those parts are written down, owned by someone named, and applied consistently enough that an exception stands out. What an SMMP contains.

The internal document setting out how meetings and events are commissioned, approved, booked and expensed. A workable one covers scope, the route in, approval thresholds, who may sign a venue contract, standards for hospitality and travel, and what happens when someone books outside it.

Policies fail predictably: written for the exceptional event rather than the ordinary one, thresholds nobody can apply without asking, or no consequence at all. Writing one people actually follow.

Influencing whether a meeting should happen at all, and in what form, rather than only buying it well once someone has decided. It asks whether a two-day residential is the right answer, whether three regional sessions could be one, and whether a long-running event still earns its place.

It is the most powerful commercial lever available and the hardest to use, because it touches other people’s decisions. It becomes possible only once a programme can show the pattern.

Activity that should have gone through the programme and did not — a department booking a venue directly, a team using a corporate card, an agency engaged outside the agreed arrangements. Leakage is the practical limit on what a programme can deliver: a route half the organisation bypasses produces half a picture.

It is worth diagnosing rather than policing: most leakage is the programme being slower or less obvious than the alternative. The remedy is usually a faster lane for simple bookings, not a firmer memo.

The application of procurement discipline to meetings and events: defining the requirement, approaching the market in a structured way, comparing offers like for like, negotiating terms, and contracting on the organisation’s terms rather than the venue’s standard ones.

It differs from general procurement in tempo and fragmentation. Meetings arrive in small pieces, urgently, from people whose job is not buying, and each transaction is too small to justify a full sourcing exercise — which is why the category escapes governance. More on meetings procurement.

The discipline of sourcing, comparing, negotiating and contracting venues: hotels, conference centres, training suites, unusual spaces. It covers the brief, the shortlist, rate and inclusion negotiation, and the contract terms that carry the commercial risk — attrition, minimum spend, cancellation, room release.

Venue procurement is a subset of meetings procurement, not a synonym. A programme can buy venues well and still have no view of the AV, catering or transport bought alongside them. More on venue procurement.

The buying of everything an event consumes: venue, AV and production, catering, accommodation, transport, staffing, print, speakers and agency services. Event procurement is transaction-facing and deep — it is about getting the individual purchase right.

The distinction matters when deciding what to fix. Event procurement makes each event better bought; Strategic Meetings Management changes what happens across all of them. Organisations often need both and buy only one. The distinction set out properly.

A venue or supplier with an agreed commercial arrangement in place — negotiated rates, inclusions, terms, or simply an agreed way of working — that the organisation directs volume towards. The point is not the discount by itself; it is that terms, contracting position and service standard are settled in advance instead of renegotiated every time.

Preferred arrangements need review, or they quietly become habit. Preferred venue programmes and supplier management.

A structured document issued to a shortlist of venues or suppliers setting out the requirement and asking them to propose how they would meet it and at what price. In meetings it is most often a venue RFP: dates, delegate numbers, space, catering, accommodation, AV and the commercial terms expected.

An RFP is not always right. For a twelve-person meeting room it is overkill, and issuing one to fifteen venues wastes everyone’s time. When to run one, and how it differs from an RFI.

The ability to see what is being spent on meetings and events — how much, with whom, by which part of the organisation, on what. Visibility is descriptive: it tells you what happened, ideally close enough to the event that something could still be done about it.

Most organisations overestimate what they have. Finance can produce a figure for anything coded to a meetings cost centre, which misses what was booked on a card or buried in a training budget. Getting to a defensible number.

The proportion of meetings spend that actually passes through the programme — sourced, negotiated and contracted under the agreed process — as distinct from spend you can merely see.

The difference is the whole argument. You can have complete visibility of spend that is entirely outside your control: a report showing forty venues used last year is visibility, not management. Spend under management is where negotiating position, consistent terms, duty-of-care coverage and commitment tracking come from, because each depends on the commitment passing through a route where someone can act on it.

An attempt to express what a meeting returned against what it cost. The cost side is straightforward once spend is visible. The return side ranges from the measurable — pipeline from a client event, qualifications completed at a training day — to the genuinely hard, and pretending otherwise produces numbers nobody trusts.

The useful version is narrower: agree in advance what a meeting is for, decide what evidence would indicate it worked, and collect that. How to approach it without inventing a figure.

A day delegate rate is a per-person, per-day package price quoted by UK hotels and conference venues. It typically bundles the meeting room, refreshments, breaks, lunch and basic AV — though inclusions vary enough between venues that comparing two DDRs without reading both lists is a common and expensive mistake.

A 24-hour rate, or residential rate, extends that to an overnight stay: the day package plus dinner, bedroom and breakfast. Both are quoted per delegate and usually carry a minimum-numbers condition.

A contractual floor: the venue holds space on the basis that the organisation will spend at least a stated amount, and if actual spend falls short the difference becomes payable anyway. It is common where a venue gives up space it could sell elsewhere.

Minimum spend is negotiable in both directions — the level itself, and what counts towards it. Whether accommodation, AV or third-party charges are included in the calculation can change the real exposure substantially.

The contractual consequence of booking more than you use. Where a contract commits to a number of bedrooms or delegates, an attrition clause sets out how far that number may fall before charges apply, and what those charges are — typically a percentage band that tightens as the event approaches.

On one event it is an operational detail. Across a programme it is aggregate financial exposure that frequently nobody has added up. Attrition and cancellation clauses in detail.

The date by which unbooked bedrooms held in an allocation return to the venue to sell, without penalty to the organisation. It lets you hold a block for delegates who have not yet confirmed, and it is the natural counterweight to attrition: rooms released before the cut-off do not count against the commitment; rooms still held after it usually do.

Managing release dates is unglamorous and materially valuable: missing one converts a flexible allocation into a liability the same afternoon.

A contract clause excusing one or both parties from performing when defined events outside their control make performance impossible or impracticable. In venue contracts it determines who bears the cost when an event cannot proceed, and the drafting varies widely — what triggers it, whether it suspends or terminates, and what happens to deposits.

This is one of the clauses where wording does all the work. Force majeure, cancellation and liability terms should be reviewed by your organisation’s own legal advisers rather than relying on a general description.

Everything involved in getting the right people to an event and looking after them once they are there: registration, joining instructions, dietary and accessibility requirements, travel and accommodation coordination, badging, onsite check-in and post-event follow-up.

At programme level it is also a data question, because delegate information is personal data and often includes details that need handling with care. What delegate management covers, and where it stops.

An organisation’s responsibility for the safety and wellbeing of people it asks to travel to and attend its meetings and events. In practice it turns on one uncomfortable question: if something happened at an event tonight, could you say within the hour who is there, where they are staying and how to reach them?

Decentralised booking makes that almost unanswerable, because the information sits in individual inboxes. Organisations should take their own legal advice here. More on duty of care.