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What are event professionals prioritizing?
- What’s in store for event budgets?
- How do my peers determine if event goals were met?
- What are the most popular engagement tools?
- What technologies are event professionals excited to try?
Empower your event planning strategies. Don’t miss peer insights on optimizing your budget, evaluating success, enhancing engagement and more!
Download the Planner Pulse & Infographic for full insights
What’s in store for the events industry
Meeting and event professionals are heading into the summer months feeling positive about the strength of the industry. According to the Encore latest Planner Pulse report, 74 percent are actively planning, sourcing or rescheduling events — a five percent increase over the Fall 2022 Planner Pulse report.
Budgets also appear to be holding firm. Only nine percent of respondents expect their budgets to decrease this year. Seventy-seven percent say that budgets will increase or remain flat. Meeting and event professionals also shared information about budget items they consider ‘nice to haves’ rather than ‘must haves.’
Another key finding shed light on attitudes about event professional continuing education. According to the Encore Planner Pulse report, 56 percent of event professionals attend educational sessions, with 25 percent attending educational sessions regularly. Individuals with more than 20 years of industry experience were more likely to value education and attend sessions often or very often than those with less experience.
Want a snapshot of these results? Download an infographic of the Encore Spring 2023 Planner Pulse report.
Every year, Encore surveys thousands of meeting and event professionals about meeting/event patterns and formats, how they spend their money and their biggest concerns. Individually, these quarterly Planner Pulse reports form snapshots of current industry trends. But taken collectively, we can begin to forecast where the industry is headed. Looking at the big picture painted by results from our four 2022 surveys, here are the Top 3 event trends for 2023.
Trend No. 1: Immersive and interactive experiences to engage participants and enhance organizational culture
According to McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey, 58 percent of the employed respondents in the U.S. have the option of working from home for all or part of the week. With a dispersed workforce, in-person engagement is more important than ever for creating and reinforcing an organization’s culture, training employees and fostering a sense of belonging. Companies aren’t the only ones seeing the need for in-person meetings. Encore Planner Pulse respondents report that, compared to 2019, participants value the in-person experience more and are more engaged with and ‘leaning into’ the entire face-to-face experience (Winter 2022 Pulse).
Planners know participants derive the greatest value from networking/relationship building, education/training and organizational culture-building/enhancing activities (Winter 2022 Pulse). Meeting and event professionals are creating more immersive and interactive experiences to maximize the event return-on experience.
How are meeting and event professionals doing this? Designing events with the end in mind, investing in engaging technology, and collaborating with presenters to rethink how content is delivered.
Reverse-engineering the event design leads organizers to rethink how rooms are set to maximize connection and collaboration, bake more opportunities for networking into the agenda and think about how they can create sensory experiences. Technology, like LED walls and 3D projection mapping, is the easiest way to transform rooms and sets quickly. Event technology platforms that enable live polling and Q&A, can be used to educate and entertain. Challenging presenters to respond to questions about how they intend to engage the audience in the call for proposals is a fantastic starting point for conversations about designing and delivering the most meaningful and relevant content for event participants.
Trend No. 2: More attendees for in-person meetings
In-person events continue to gain momentum. Meeting and event professionals expect in-person attendance to increase by as much as 25 percent in 2023. This is a reversal of a downsizing trend seen last spring (Spring 2022 and Winter 2022 Pulse).
The most popular venues remain hotels (Spring 2022 and Fall 2022 Pulse). Sixty-one percent of planners expect to pay slightly to significantly more on hotel room rates (Fall 2022 Pulse). Sixty-two percent expect to pay more for food and beverage, and 57 percent report they will pay more for transportation (Winter 2022, Summer 2022 and Fall 2022 Pulse). Not coincidentally, these also are the Top 3 areas Planners Pulse respondents expect to see their 2023 budgets increase. Of the planners who say their 2023 budgets are increasing, 80 percent expect an increase of more than 25 percent (Winter 2022 Pulse).
According to Summer 2022 and Fall 2022 Pulse reports, the top technology products and services being sourced this year are standard projection/audiovisual equipment (50+ percent) and streaming technology (44 percent). Top attributes driving the selection of event technology partners are value, technical expertise and service excellence (Summer 2022 Pulse).
Trend No. 3: Inclusive and supportive environments to enhance participant wellness and sense of belonging
Health and safety had the greatest impact on participant comfort levels (Spring 2022 Pulse). For that reason, hybrid meetings comprised up to 30 percent of the meetings held in the first half of last year. (Winter 2022 and Spring 2022 Pulse). Now that people are more comfortable traveling, the number of hybrid meetings represents fewer than 20 percent of the meetings planned for 2023 (Summer 2022 and Fall 2022 Pulse).
It’s not just participants’ physical wellness that’s a focus for planners. They also want to support mental and emotional wellness by fostering a sense of attendee belonging, enhanced by face-to-face meeting. One of the ways planners are incorporating this trend into event design include education and conversational groups modeled on the ‘business resource groups’ present at most major organizations, where participants gather with like-minded community members. They’re also using technology, like AI-powered simultaneous translation and captioning tools, to ensure people with neurodiversity or disabilities have an easier time connecting to the content and enjoying it. And for those who don’t want to travel, hybrid event technology allows everyone to participate in the event, no matter where they’re located.
Technology can also help people connect to each other on a more human level by capturing images and stories and sharing them with participants before, during or after the event. Consider setting up on-site interviews or photography booths to capture this user-generated content. Remember: everyone wants to feel special and included. If you can deliver experiences that deliver both to your participants, they’ll want to come back next year.
Those are the Top 3 trends we’re seeing. How are you planning to make your meetings more engaging, supportive of ESG or inclusive? We’d love to hear about your 2023 events and the challenges and solutions you discover as you move through the year. Click here to download the Winter 2022 Planners Pulse Report and opt-in to future communications to have your opinion included.
Discover what’s in store for the
events industry
- 80% of events taking place in the next 12 months will have an in-person audience
- 6 of 10 event planners expect their budgets to increase in 2023
- Meeting space layout and technology are the top 2 drivers of venue selection beyond table stakes criteria of available dates, space, and budget
- 80% of events taking place in the next 12 months will have an in-person audience
Download the Planner Pulse & Infographic for full insights
More meeting and event professionals are actively booking or sourcing new events now than any time since 2020. According to the Encore Summer Planner Pulse 2022 report, that number represents 71 percent of 461 survey respondents, who represent a diverse swath of corporate, association, administrative, marketing, third-party, independent and special event producers and organizers.
More than half of the meeting and event professionals surveyed say they are booking new events. And only five percent are currently rescheduling or re-booking events — the lowest number since the pandemic began.
Despite rising costs, in-person events are expected to increase in the second half of 2022.
Key survey findings:
- 80 percent of events will have an in-person audience
- 20 percent of events will be hybrid, with both in-person and remote audiences
The demands of keeping these dual hybrid event audiences engaged and planning two parallel events are a major stressor, the report finds. Perhaps that’s why the participant experience is becoming a greater factor in event design, with professionals layering technology over the in-person experience to create events that feel like they are in-person+ — with or without hybrid participants.
When asked how future in-person events will compare to pre-pandemic in-person events:
- 45 percent of respondents said better attendee engagement
- 38 percent of respondents said more networking
- 37 percent of respondents said more attendee personalization
This trend drove Encore to create a free guide to help meeting and event professionals meet shifting audience expectations: Boundless Possibilities for Engagement. The Encore team also offers free consultations on how to enhance the in-person and remote attendee experience.
Other challenges meeting and event professionals say they face include lead times, specifically for large events. Event professionals report that a third of their events for more than 250 people (34 percent) must be organized within a three-to-six month window. Only half of these sized events are planned more than six months out. Most small meetings with one to 50 participants (43 percent) are being organized within one to two months out. Most mid-sized events with 51 to 250 participants (43 percent) are being organized three to six months out.
Want to read the full report? Download it here.
Discover what’s in store for the
events industry
The industry and in-person are bouncing back in a big way. Although we are sure to experience ups and downs as we get back to normal, keeping up with changing event trends can help all industry professionals stay ahead of the game. In the Summer Encore Planner Pulse report, we take a deep dive into what to expect from in-person, hybrid, and virtual events in 2022.
- Industry optimism has increased since summer 2021
- Most planners predict full industry recovery by 2023
- Outlook indicates 75 percent of 2022 events to be in-person
or hybrid - And much more!
Get your complimentary digital copy of the Summer 2022 Encore Planner Pulse today.
Discover what’s in store for the
events industry
Want to stay in-the-know with industry trends? Encore knows knowledge is power, which is why we continuously report on how our industry is evolving to help set you up for success. We poll meeting and event professionals across the globe to deliver the latest findings on everything from popular meeting formats and expectations to budgets, planner priorities and more.
Key insights from the Winter 2022 Planner Pulse report include:
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- The need to meet face-to-face will propel in-person events further in 2023
- 62% of planners expect attendee size to grow up to 25%
- Human connection and engagement are the most impactful values for in-person events
- The industry growth we experienced last year will continue despite rising costs
- Six of ten planners will see budget increases this year, driven by food and beverage costs, room rates and transportation needs
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Download your free copy of the full report and infographic for insights that can help give you confidence in planning transformative meeting or events that resonate with today’s audiences.