How planners can make their events more environmentally friendly

BCD meetings and events Guide helps events become more sustainable

BCD Travel released its Meetings and Events Sustainability Guide earlier this year, providing planners with global sustainability trends and best practices.

Smart Meetings spoke with Ben Hoeksma, Senior Director, Global Program Lead, to better understand what the guide has to offer planners.

Smart meeting How has your BCD M&E Sustainability Guidelines evolved over the years?

Ben Hoeksma What people want to ask their suppliers is becoming increasingly complex.

SM Your guide covers a variety of topics at conferences like DEI. How and why are they connected?

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Hepatitis B Attendee expectations have changed dramatically. People talk about different generations of participants, namely generations X, Y and Z, who are attending events now.

There are certain minimum things that they expect or don’t expect to see at an event. Neurodiversity, for example, is a conversation that has grown more and more in recent years. Going into events more receptive to different people’s needs and how to meet their needs; these are very simple changes that can happen.

There is no direct link between meetings becoming more environmentally friendly. It’s more about a sense of wanting our activities to have more power for good.

Whether it’s asking “How will you get to the event?” on your delegate invitation route, you can start capturing emissions data.

Also, “Do you have any specific needs that we need to consider for this event?” Or, you can ask this question to get people to be honest and say, “I have ADHD.” There are things we can do and let the organizers do respond. Actual individual actions still vary greatly. But overall, this is part of a broader conversation about how to improve these activities.

Read more: Sustainability tools to simplify green planning

SM When you dig into it, how do you figure out what works, what doesn’t work, and how people should view events through that lens?

Hepatitis B Given the size of our business, we have nearly 2,000 employees worldwide working with all of these different clients. You see all the other people in the various regions getting involved. So it’s not just an expert sitting down and saying, “I know what’s good.”

We engage as much as possible across the industry. We host customer focus groups. We will assist a small group of clients who have sustainability as their core goal.

We also asked them what their current priorities were. “How can we help you more? What does that look like? What else can we do for you?” This helps us understand what the priorities are at the time and where things are going.

SM When you think about things like gas or food waste, how do these factors play into that? How do you develop solutions to these challenges?

Hepatitis B (You have to ask) what are the expectations and what are achievable goals.

I first started thinking about this in 2018 or 2019 for a specific client. We want to start comparing the hotels that this customer is using.

We’ve created a standard set of questions we want to ask hotels, and we’ll give them a ranking score.

We start by engaging with suppliers and asking: “What can be achieved? What is fair to ask of you?” Once we complete the venue scorecard, we get an A to Z list of how to make your event more environmentally friendly, The list starts with activity concept and continues through debriefing again.

We visited hotel suppliers and DMCs and asked: “Look, what’s your feedback? Are these initiatives achievable? Should we require suppliers to comply with this, or is there something that’s getting in the way that we need to adapt to?”

We don’t have all the answers, and I don’t know that anyone has all the answers because their solutions are constantly changing, right? While people talk about sustainability and making their events greener, the point of an event is to create an experience, whatever that experience may be.

You have to always weigh what’s more important because you can reduce the meeting time if you want. You look at emissions; you talk about gas prices there. You can look at the emissions of people driving, flying and taking public transport and decide, it would be better if we just did it as a virtual meeting, but if you’re not achieving what you want by having a meeting in fact , then you might as well not bother doing it. So you always have to weigh those conflicts of interest, right?

Read more: Your Complete Guide to Sustainability

SM How far are we from a completely green conference world?

Hepatitis B Defining it is so difficult. That’s the problem. Are green meetings zero waste? Has it had a positive impact on the communities it leaves behind? We are further along than before. The industry is regulating itself. We are putting forward initiatives and we are putting forward these initiatives without being told that we have to do it because there is this race and if you care to see, especially from the supplier side, everyone is acutely aware To, at some point in the future, depending on the region and your country, some people are already doing that.

I was at an industry event last year and they asked the same question. As the speaker said, “Where are we now compared to 12 months ago?” Everyone is like, “Well, we’re a little bit ahead, but we still need to push the boundaries.”

Our customers are saying, “This is what we want from you. We need this, not the government saying you have to do this.” Take France for example. France has very ambitious targets in terms of emissions, so customers have to respond to them. But your customers will be in France, but they’ll be doing something different in Germany or the UK or Italy, because generally speaking, people are bringing in the same practices.

Read more: Sustainability Practices

SM Tell us more about your scorecard. How does this work?

Hepatitis B We have a list. We have a maximum of 40 questions. These are all legitimate questions you can ask your hotel.

You choose five to ten key things for your business. What is most important to you? Is it single-use plastic? Does the hotel have green certification? Is it food?

Whatever it is, you can choose these criteria. Every time we send out an RFP, we ask all the hotels these questions, and you get responses from four hotels.

Of those responses, you could say, seven out of ten. That’s six out of ten, ten out of ten. It helps shape people’s minds, depending on their priorities.

Most people choose the greener options and hotels they see. Now, other factors come into play like cost, availability, and all the other fun things that come with that, but at least it’s visible. At least that’s one of the marks they can use.

Read more: Earth Day is a call to action

SM Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

Hepatitis B People are very willing to do things, but they are also looking for direction. But in the same way, they also keep going, doing something no matter what.

Let’s briefly introduce it. Start doing something that makes a difference today and it might become the norm.

If people know why something happened, they are more likely to accept it. When things change, you’ll encounter resistance because a lot of people don’t like change. It’s not a change that they understand, and they don’t necessarily support it because it’s not the same experience they’re used to.