These are working documents. Each one exists because somebody, somewhere, has been asked to sort out how their organisation buys meetings and events, and has been given no template, no budget for consultants and a fortnight to come back with something sensible.
They are not blog posts. Nothing here is tied to a conference, a season or a piece of industry news, and none of it is written to be topical. They are maintained and updated rather than published and abandoned, which is why each carries a review date rather than a publication date.
None of them sits behind a form, and none of them ends with a request to download something. The page is the resource.
Who each guide is for
The audience is usually one of three people. A category manager or procurement lead who has just acquired meetings and events as a category and cannot yet see what is in it. An events, workplace or executive support lead who can see the activity perfectly well but has no authority to change how it is bought. Or a finance business partner who has noticed that a great deal of money is leaving the organisation in small pieces that nobody is aggregating.
The guides assume you are commercially literate and short of time. They assume you have no clean data, no existing policy and no mandate — because that is the normal starting position, not an unusual one.
They do not assume you have bought any technology. A meetings programme can start in a spreadsheet and run that way for a considerable time. Enterprise SMM platforms exist as a category and are worth looking at eventually, but that is a later decision and a separate one.
A sensible reading order
There is no required sequence and each guide stands alone. But if this is new to you, the order below reflects how the work usually unfolds.
- 01Start with how to measure meetings spend if nobody can currently answer what the organisation spends. Almost every other conversation stalls without a number, however approximate.
- 02Read reducing fragmented event spend if you already know roughly what is being spent and the problem is that it is spread across too many hands.
- 03Move to centralising meetings and events when you know what you want to change and the obstacle is people rather than data.
- 04Use building the business case when you need to argue for this upwards, before anything gets funded or staffed.
- 05Work through how to build an SMM programme once you have approval and need to construct the thing itself.
- 06Pick up creating a corporate meetings policy and meetings procurement best practice as the specific pieces come due.
- 07Return to the Strategic Meetings Management checklist periodically. It is the one designed to be re-read rather than worked through once.
- GuideThe business caseWritten for the person who has to sell this internally — to a finance director who will test the numbers, and an executive who has heard a centralisation pitch before.Read guide
- GuideCentralising meetingsCentralisation fails when it is imposed as a control and succeeds when it is offered as a service that is faster than the alternative. Everything else in this guide follows from that.Read guide
- GuideHow to build an SMM programmeWhat you actually make, in what order, and what each piece contains. This is the construction manual rather than the change-management plan.Read guide
- GuideCreating a meetings policyThe drafting manual. How to scope it, where to set thresholds, what each section should say, how to consult before publishing, and how to write something people will actually read.Read guide
- GuideMeasuring meetings spendA working method for producing a meetings and events spend figure that holds up when someone senior disagrees with it. No benchmarks, no assumed percentages — just the procedure.Read guide
- GuideProcurement best practiceThe practices that separate a sourcing exercise producing a real commercial outcome from one producing three quotes nobody can compare. Written for procurement working inside a managed meetings programme.Read guide
- GuideReducing fragmented spendThe commercial mechanics of consolidation: what fragmentation costs you, how to find it in your own data, what is worth pulling together, and the point at which consolidating further starts doing harm.Read guide
- GuideSMM checklistEight sections, each with what “good” actually looks like and why the item matters. Use it to work out where your programme is thin rather than to confirm that it exists.Read guide
How these relate to the rest of the site
The guides are the how. The explanatory pages are the what: what Strategic Meetings Management is, what an SMM programme is made of, and how organisations implement one in practice.
If you are not yet sure this applies to you, is SMM right for your business is ten questions and a couple of minutes, and it includes the cases where the honest answer is no. The maturity model does the same job descriptively.
For vocabulary — attrition, spend under management, delegate management and the rest — the glossary is the quicker route. For the broader reference material, including sector-specific notes, see resources and industries.