Pop quiz: What does VenueDataSource (VDS) provide IAVM members?

Answer: Resources, membership value, empowerment, and information.

IAVM represents more than 2,000 venues around the world. We are stronger together, and the key to moving our facilities forward is information and community. The association provides its members educational opportunities unlike any other. It provides its members opportunities to grow in the industry, ensuring long-term success for public venues for generations to come.

VDS is just one more asset for IAVM members, and its guiding Research Advisory Council is reigniting our efforts in providing you—our IAVM peers, partners, and key stakeholders—more and better tools, information, and data.

VDS provides the place where members go in search of working knowledge of the association—available on demand. VDS provides members an opportunity to benchmark yourself, your career, your venue, and more. VDS captures and maintains the pulse of the industry.

Do you know where your salary stands compared to your industry peers? Do you know where your peers are saving money or spending money in annual expenses? Do you know where your facility rates in terms of its use of 21st-century technology?

VDS knows and can share that information with you instantly. The best part of how VDS does what it does? Trust. The information we collect is 100 percent confidential. Even the top brass in IAVM doesn’t have access to the information provided BY our members—just the overall end results of the anonymous totals.

Our goal is collect as much information as we can from members, for members. Information that can influence and direct your career, your decision-making ability, and how your facility performs.

We need your help to continue our efforts. We need your responses to our quarterly surveys. We need your ideas of what you need to help you move forward with your facility. We need you to be our partners in this quest to continue being the keeper of our best practices.

We provide reports AT NO COST to those who participate in the surveys. But anyone can receive the reports at little cost. Should you need a custom report, VDS can create one for you at little or no cost.

VDS leverages our association’s collective skills and dedication and provides a home for living documents and information for addressing any issues that could negatively affect the way we do business.

VDS is your resource of choice to help you manage better and smarter with the tools of our association.

VDS will continue to capture IAVM’s living best practices and will continue to make them available to its members, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year—FREE.

You can find us on this monthly blog; on Twitter @VenueDataFrank; in weekly newsletters discussing trends, facts, and asking poll questions; at the sector conference and VenueConnect—everywhere you VDS, you’ll find us. No matter where you go, there we are.

Curious about what a meetings industry mover-and-shaker thinks about the future of conferences? Skift has you covered.

In a thorough interview, Skift reporter Dennis Schaal sits down with Cvent founder and CEO Reggie Aggarwal to talk about travel, trends, and technology. Here’s a taste of the interview.

Skift: What about the debate about virtual meetings versus live events?

Aggarwal: I went on the road show when we were doing an IPO last year. The first thing a lot of Wall Street people did was attack live meetings. They said, “Hey listen, virtual meetings, WebEx, Go-to-Meetings. WebEx, for example, we started using that in 2000, right? It’s 12, 13, 14 years. But the point is, it’s not like the future is here. With webcams, just everything was moving towards virtual.

What we saw happen is the opposite of what you might have thought. The more technology there was like that, the more people wanted to meet face to face. That’s what we call the event effect or the experience economy. People want experience. Nothing beats coming to this conference and meeting face to face, breaking bread and shaking hands.

Please visit Skift to read the rest of the interview.

(Image: Cvent’s Facebook page)

November 14 is Loosen Up Lighten Up Day. It’s a real day. The Internet doesn’t lie. On this day, you’re encouraged to takes things a little slower, relax, unwind, and find some balance. And if you’re a manager, you may want to urge employees to seriously take a mental break, because stress has a way of showing up later as counterproductive work behaviors.

“People don’t just respond immediately with these deviant behaviors,” said Kevin Eschlemen, an assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University. “They may also have a delayed response that isn’t caught by the organization. That means the organization is not taking into account long-term costs associated with these delayed behaviors.”

Eschelman and his colleagues wanted to know how and when employees handled workplace stress, so they surveyed workers in a variety of fields three times over six months. They asked them about stress at work and if they engaged in counterproductive behaviors. As believed, increases in stress caused immediate negative behaviors. However, employees who didn’t exhibit immediate negative behaviors did so weeks or months later.

“Maybe you don’t have the opportunity to engage in these deviant behaviors right away, and you want to wait until no one is around,” Eschleman said. “Or maybe you think you can cope right away, but then down the road you end up engaging in these behaviors.”

The researchers found that the delayed reactions were more pronounced in employees considered more agreeable or conscientious by their employers and co-workers. Eschleman suggests that these employees have more resources available at first to help them cope with increased stress, such as supportive friends, money, or benefits. However, even these employees submit to stress.

“Your personality might influence how you try to cope initially, but if things are bad for a really long time, it doesn’t matter what your personality is,” Eschleman said. “At the end of the day, you’re going to do these deviant things.”

Knowing that, you may as well take time today to unwind. Your future self will thank you.

(photo credit: HikingArtist.com via photopin cc)

ConventionCalendar.com is the first official Convention Center Calendar of Events. It was announced “Live” in Vancouver, British Columbia, during the International Convention Center Conference (ICCC) in October.

The beta program is now online and features several notable launch partners, including the world’s second largest convention center—Orange County Convention Center. Also on the site are the Spokane Convention Center, the Santa Clara Convention Center, the St. Charles Convention Center, and the Buffalo Niagara Convention Center. Several other convention centers have signed on and are uploading to the website.

“We are seeing an increase in the number of customers that desire to work directly with our venues, and the Convention Calendar program addresses this critical need,” said IAVM President and CEO Vicki Hawarden, CMP, during the ICCC panel discussion “Adapting To and Overcoming New Challenges.”

ConventionCalendar.com is being broadcast around the world to subscribing event planners, local stakeholders, convention sales staff, and exhibitors.

The holidays are full of cheer, joy, family, and trash. Yes, tons of trash. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, Americans throw away 25 percent more trash during the Thanksgiving to New Year’s holiday period than any other time of year. The extra waste amounts to 25 million tons of garbage, or about one million extra tons per week. This trash includes wrapping paper, food waste, packaging, decorations, and old “toys” that are dumped for new ones every year.

The holiday season is a great way for venues to take action and save the holidays by making them greener. Instead of using a real tree, use a fake one that can be stored and reused each year. Also, find decorations that can have multiple purposes and reused in different fashions for a new look from year to year. Facility managers can even encourage employees to bring in unused items from home that they can use to help decorate the facility.

When using holiday lights, remember to use LED and energy efficient lights. LED lights consume 80 percent to 90 percent less energy and last up to 100,000 hours versus 3,000 hours for incandescent. Also, if you set them on a timer, you can save energy when the facility is vacant. And remember to be gentle when the season is finally over so you can pack them away to be used over and over again.

Another way to be more green this holiday season is to send electronic cards to vendors, sponsors, co-workers, and all your important business contacts, instead of mailing cards that get tossed in the trash.

Finally, encourage holiday party clients to be more environmentally friendly by donating leftover food from parties, recycling wrapping paper, and reusing decorations.

For more tips on going green this holiday, visit: http://www.epa.gov/epahome/hi-winter.htm or http://money.cnn.com/2010/12/16/news/economy/holiday_trash/. So instead of a “Blue Christmas,” how about making it a Green one?!

(photo credit: tkamenick via photopin cc)