Tag Archives: Government Meetings

Federal Government Seeks Public Solution to Spending Less on Travel

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Originally posted on Government Executive by Eric Katz.

The federal government is offering $90,000 to people who can help reduce its travel costs.

Uncle Sam spends about $9 billion annually on travel, and the General Services Administration is turning to its own crowdsourcing website for help reducing that tab. GSA's Office of Governmentwide Policy opened its Travel Data Challenge on Challenge.gov last week, asking the public to create a "digital interactive tool" that highlights the shortcomings and inefficiencies of current government travel policy.

GSA is "looking to bring a quantitative approach to the data the federal government collects in order to help agencies make smarter business decisions, and to allow them to drive greater saving and efficiencies," according to the posting. The grand prize winner will receive $35,000, the runner up $30,000 and the honorable mention recipient $25,000.

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Lemonade from Lemons: Learning from Managing Reduced Budgets

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IBM conducted a study interviewing California state officials to see what that group had learned managing their state's complicated budget shortfall. The resulting report examined what happened to local California government revenues during this period, which services have been adjusted, how employee benefits have been treated, and what innovations have been introduced.

The authors were able to pull out three key recommendations based on the subjects' real-world experiences.

  • Identify and address structural deficits in a finely grained manner, leaving no major budget category unexamined.
  • Foster citizen engagement to encourage widespread dissemination of fiscal information in order to enhance the legitimacy of public policy choices.
  • Improve the state/local relationship to reduce episodic, convulsive impacts on local public finance.

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Are Government Attendees an Endangered Species?

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Originally posted on Meetings & Conventions by Cheryl-Anne Sturken

How the meeting industry is pushing back against general travel restrictions

It has been a rough two years for government meeting planners. Following several high-profile cases of lavish conference spending, and with economic recovery from the Great Recession remaining in fragile mode, Congress has turned up its scrutiny of federal travel and conference spend and pushed for legislation that would restrict and regulate meetings outlay. Determined to avoid potential accusations of excess, federal agencies responded last year by taking an ax to meeting budgets, canceling multiple conferences and shunning resort destinations such as Hawaii, Las Vegas and Orlando, concerned that even the location alone could raise eyebrows.

The slash-and-burn reaction resulted in a 30 percent drop in government meetings in most of the top-tier markets in 2013. It also set off a heated debate on the importance of face-to-face meetings and spawned a flurry of white papers and studies from various groups anxious to reaffirm the power of in-person gatherings.

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Applying Instameets to Your Event

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Federal Computer Week recently highlighted the growing use of the practice of instameets in government. Most recently, Instagram users were invited to submit photos or videos (via Instagram) to show why they should be invited to a sneak peek of DC's cuddliest new resident, Bao Bao the baby panda. The National Zoo picked the winners and gave them exclusive access to photograph the cub before he went on public display.

The article goes on to detail how agencies with less than cuddly reputations could use the same concept. This got us thinking - how could our event organizer members better use Instagram to attract attention for their events? A couple ideas:

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“New Culture of Restraint” In U.S. Government Spending

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Originally posted by International Meetings Review

At a Senate hearing on government conference and travel spending this past week, top administration officials and three inspectors general described "a new culture of restraint" in federal spending on events, triggered by both bad publicity and sharp spending cuts, the Washington Post has reported.

In the wake of the Internal Revenue Service and the General Services Administration conference scandals, Washington has unveiled safeguards to prevent abuses--but some of these were deemed restrictive by industry professionals. At PCMA's Convening Leaders conference, David Peckinpaugh, president of Maritz Travel and co-chair of the recently launched Meetings Mean Business coalition, noted the general spending limit of $500,000 for government conferences, calling it "onerous." The cost of a conference, he said, depends on its size and the number of attendees. Under these restrictions, he added, some federal events were canceled.

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