Governmental (UN, EU) meetings
Problem
Could ICCA add frequently held Governmental (UN, EU) meetings in the ICCA Association Database?
Solution
UN and EU meetings aren't included in the ICCA Association Database. Essentially, it's to do with the decision-making process, and the fact that meeting professionals aren't able to bid for future editions of meetings to come to specific countries except in exceptional circumstances.
The meetings can be divided into three sorts:
- ones which are located in a very specific location or locations (which is why Brussels and Geneva receive so many, for example)
- ones which are part of a cycle of such meetings (eg all the many meetings which take place in a country because of the rotating 6-month EU Presidency)
- ones where individual governments decide to offer to host it, where decisions on country are decided in closed rooms by the politicians and officials.
Tracking the past business rotation therefore doesn't enable members to anticipate future business; the best way to do this is by keeping close to the politicians and officials who are involved, and to compete at the national level once a country is selected or comes up in its usual rotation pattern.
Note: Political reasons are also one important element in association decision-making, a fact that we highlight in the "ICCA Intelligence" publication on this subject, but this is very different from the political hosting which is used to determine where UN and EU meetings take place - the detailed decision-making within the country is a different story of course (price, capacity, availability, professionalism all play a part here, usually through a strict government-stipulated procurement process), but not the decision on which country.
It's such a fundamentally different process that we cannot simply add in these meetings to the current database without causing enormous confusion - it would have to be structured totally differently to provide members with meaningful business data that could assist them in winning more of these meetings: in effect a totally new database and set of information on national and institutional procurement processes.
Because this is so fundamentally different from association meetings, this is why we don't include the data on the ICCA Association Database. However, we recognise that the issue is a very important one for many members, which is why we try to regularly include it in the education programme of the ICCA Congress and other events, and why we will continue to do this in future, so that members understand clearly the differences in these types of meetings.
A final reason for not including such meetings is that if we did then there would be pressure to include them in the statistics, which would disproportionately benefit those locations which are home to institutional meetings on a regular basis, and would favour each country which hosts the EU Presidency in turn.
Related articles