Meetings & Conventions (M&C) magazine recently surveyed 161 meeting professionals about their views on venues and green efforts. Let’s check out some of the questions and results.

Are green certifications a factor in your venue selection?

• Yes, to a great extent (4 percent)
• Yes, somewhat (24 percent)
• To a minimal extent (33 percent)
• Not at all (39 percent)

How important are green policies and procedures?

Convention Center

• Very important (14 percent)
• Somewhat important (41 percent)
• Not too important (25 percent)
• Not at all important (20 percent)

Event Venue

• Very important (10 percent)
• Somewhat important (33 percent)
• Not too important (33 percent)
• Not at all important (24 percent)

Let’s consider how venue managers answered similar questions in the “2012 IAVM Sustainability Survey.”

When asked how important that a facility be environmentally friendly or green, 96 percent of venues who have implemented sustainable programs say it’s very important or somewhat important. That number drops to 42 percent for venues that have not implemented a sustainable program.

Furthermore, 62 percent of those surveyed say that implementation of an environmental strategy is valuable to customers or suppliers. Compare that to the 58 percent of planners in the M&C survey who believe that sustainable efforts are very or somewhat important to their meeting attendees.

If sustainable efforts are viewed as important by both sides, then why isn’t the effort practiced more often? That’s easy. It comes down to a different type of green.

For meeting professionals, 74 percent rarely or never implement green meeting procedures that require added costs. For venues, 84 percent cite costs as the deterrent to implementing sustainable practices at a facility.

No matter how much we talk about sustainability, until we can find ways to reduce costs, it’ll never be easy being green.

(Image of the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh via Flickr: Roy Luck/Creative Commons)

Christy (left) meeting with the team from Southern Aluminum during the trade show at VenueConnect 2013 in New Orleans.

We are thrilled to announce that the fine people at The Expo Group have named Christy Jacobs, Director of Marketplace Sales at IAVM, 2013 Show Manager of the Year! Christy works tirelessly to provide the best marketplace possible for the IAVM community, whether through her execution of the trade show and other marketplace programs or through her investment and care toward each and every client relationship.

Christy’s most recent success was IAVM’s new pilot project, DirectConnect. The soft-launched appointment program connected qualified buyers with participating exhibitors in targeted meetings as a supplement to the conference trade show. Implementing this new program took months of planning and immense leadership from Christy, and the unanimous responses from our early adopters confirmed that she had not only delivered a good program, but that she had crafted a new experience that resonated with the unique needs and dynamics of the evolving IAVM marketplace.

Christopher Kucsma, National Service Sales Manager at Hussey Seating and an Allied member, had warm praise for Christy’s work.

“From an allied perspective, I see Christy continuously bridging the gap and working to ensure that the meetings and trade shows have that unique synergy for the entire membership,” he said. “Christy’s way of doing things is extremely valuable in today’s world where you have to get the most value from, every dollar spent.”

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We all need an advisor, a guide, a sounding board – a mentor involved in our professional lives. IAVM’s Mentoring Task Force is dedicated to helping venue managers build their support systems. We spoke with Terry Genovese, CFE, chair of the mentoring  task force and Joe Durr, Event Services Manager at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts and a mentoring task force member about the program. “We want members to first and foremost recognize that there are no stereotypes in mentoring. Mentors are not always old and wise and mentees are not always young and inexperienced. We all need mentors. We all can benefit,” said Genovese. IAVM members join the Mentor Connector program for a variety of reasons. all participants find mentoring to be beneficial. Terry shared some of the most common factors for seeking a mentor:

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Securing the Olympic Games is a dream of many cities, but after the thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat are over, what then? For Rio de Janeiro, the Olympic fever will turn into civic pride.

“More than half of the buildings erected for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro will be temporary venues that will be ‘recycled’ into schools and smaller scale sporting facilities after the games,” Liz Tay wrote for Business Insider Australia. “Of the seven new sporting venues to be constructed for Rio2016 (in addition to two existing venues), three will be permanent and four—including aquatics, handball, and two tennis arenas—will be temporary.”

Tay spoke with Melbourne-based AECOM associate director Adam Williams, who says it’s 20 percent to 30 percent cheaper to build recyclable venues than permanent ones.

One interesting item from the story involves turning the venues into schools.

“For a venue that becomes a school, you basically start with the design of the school and work backwards to design the handball venue,” Williams told Tay. “What we have done is effectively break the design down into a ‘kit of parts’ and study how things can fit back together. It’s not more difficult, but can require a little extra time.”

The 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London is another example of recycling materials and venues.

“The real test of the stadiums now will be what happens to them after the games are over, ensuring that both the temporary and permanent structures continue to set the bar for sustainability,” Tierney Smith wrote for Responding to Climate Change.

Well, if you must know, the swimming arena’s stage could now be garden hoses.

(Image via AECOM)

The crew started the conversion at 9:31 p.m. and were finished by 3 p.m. the next day. They relocated the pitching mound. They installed 6,679 seats. They removed foul poles and replaced them with goal posts. It took 17 hours, but when it was done, the reconfigured O.co Coliseum was ready for an Oakland Raiders home game.

O.co Coliseum is the only remaining U.S. stadium home to Major League Baseball and National Football League teams, and more than 400 workers helped take it from baseball ready to football friendly. It was the 13th conversion since 2011.

“This weekend’s transformation included the work of hundreds of employees and I am truly grateful for the hard work and dedication put into this project by our full time staff, the O.co Coliseum grounds crew, sub-contractor Biggie Crane and all of the AEG Facilities Employees who are members of IATSE Local 107 and SEIU,” said Chris Wright, vice president of AEG Facilities and general manager of Oracle Arena and O.co Coliseum. “This was truly a team effort from both our local staff and other AEG facilities employees who brought their support and expertise and I couldn’t be happier with their performance this weekend.”

View the time-lapse video below from O.co Coliseum to get sense of the reconfiguration and all the work that went into it.

(Image via Flickr: Kwong Yee Cheng/Creative Commons)