Kim Kennedy

Regional Field Marketing Enablement, SAP Global Events

In 2022, Kim Kennedy will celebrate 22 years at SAP. She first joined CEMA 14 years ago! Kim began her SAP career as a project manager, planning press and analyst programs at major conferences across the globe. She then moved on to support hundreds of North America events including 3rd party trade shows, road shows, charity and networking events, c-suite programs, and more. She found her groove when she began managing operations and logistics for SAP signature events like SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP TechEd and the company’s annual field kickoff meeting. She left operations after a decade and transitioned to her current role as the liaison between global events and North America field marketing. She is now focused on informing, enabling and engaging the marketing and sales teams on all large scale SAP events.

While not planning events, Kim is busy with her teenagers who play ice hockey, baseball and college rugby. In her rare spare time, she enjoys the beach, hiking and yoga. She has a passion for lifelong learning and professional and personal development. She supports colleagues with their professional development through the SAP mentorship program. She lives in Avondale, Pennsylvania with her husband, sons and furry co-worker. If you ever wish to discuss challenges, successes or ideas, connect with her at linkedin.com/in/kimberlyannkennedy (no solicitations please).

Executive of the Month

Kimberly Leary

Sales Director In-market West Coast USA
Destination Toronto

Kimberly Leary is Sales Director In-market West Coast USA for Destination Toronto with more than 20 years in hospitality and destination sales, having spent time with the Monarch Beach Resort, Omni La Costa Resort & Spa, and Visit Salt Lake.

A catalyst for her client’s decision making, Kimberly loves to influence groups in innovative ways. In fact, she is no stranger to the power of influence and yields her natural talents to drive success. “I’m a very innovative thinker. I’ve been called a spark plug, told that I’m a disrupter. It’s just that my brain exists in a different arena sometimes. I like to think independently, and I love to get people on board with things, whatever it is.”

Kimberly’s enthusiasm for innovation intuitively matches Toronto’s sophisticated tech industry, and groundbreaking creative culture. “What I appreciate about working so closely with the tech industry is the forward-thinking driving that industry and that they don’t do things the same, ever. It challenges you to stay quick on your feet and constantly be reinventing yourself – I love that.”

Kimberly is thrilled to be aligned with an organization like Destination Toronto, that gives her the freedom to grow and respects who she is. Representing Toronto, one of the most LGBTQ-friendly cities in the world is perfectly aligned with her advocacy for the LGBTQ community. She is a proud mother to 9-year-old Duran, with her partner, Amber.

Contact Kimberly @ kleary@destinationtoronto.com to benefit from Toronto’s visionary and progressive culture.

CEMA CONNECTS

Thank you, Stacey Kashubeck for leading our first CEMA Connects in December about Dreamforce 2021, and how learnings from virtual event strategies played out in a hybrid setting, in expected and unexpected ways. CEMA members joined this first Connects conversation and were able to participate in the dialog with Stacey. Thank you, Storycraft Labs for capturing the highlights. Click here to review all the insights.

Thriving in the Omicron Events World — Webinar Recap

Panelists

Jill Leithner, Executive Event Production Intel Corp.

Jeff Dixon, Co-founder and CEO Bellwether

Marybeth Hall, Brown Pelican WiFi

Drew Hagen, Co-founder, Chief Culture Officer, InVision

Moderator, Richard Steinau, Senior Vice President Bellwether (formerly with WorldStage)

Watch the webinar

Key takeaways

• Integrate health safety into every event plan and include all stakeholders early in the planning process. Dedicate a team member or small team to focus exclusively on health safety. Take a long-term view of health safety and plan for a variety of scenarios. Consider all of the consequences of your safety measures and plan/budget accordingly.
• 2022 budgets are flat/decreasing while costs are rising. Event execs must create new financial models that reflect these cost pressures. Keep baseline budgets flexible with buffers to address unexpected shifts. Safeguard budget reserves to enable change and innovation. Be willing to front funding to vendors to help them out and keep them loyal. Check venue contracts for opportunities to negotiate service levels and/or bring in third-party providers.
• Manage compressed timelines by being prepared, and always be resourcing (ABR). Consider pre-designed event packages that can be quickly configured to a particular event. Have a two-minute drill protocol in place to handle last-minute shifts.
• Redefine partner relationship to be more collaborative, with flexibility, balance, patience, kindness, and above all, trust. Leverage partner expertise to fill talent gaps. Work to build your partner’s understanding of your business. Help partners manage cash flow by fronting some funding. Design event plans in stages to allow for change and new approaches

Webinar Recap

Last December CEMA industry partner WorldStage hosted an expert panel discussion on what event industry leaders should be doing to thrive in the current, evolving climate with Omicron as the latest challenge. The panel comprised thought and technology leaders from WorldStage, Intel, Bellwether, InVision, and Brown Pelican who shared their experiences (good and bad) and learnings that ultimately resulted in success.

The pane moderator, Richard Steinau set the stage with three seminal insights from a recent MPI survey of event leaders: 50 percent don’t believe we’ll get back to pre-covid until 2023-2024; 59 percent said budgets are flat or going down in 2022 over 2021; and costs are going up dramatically – five to 200 percent across key event cost centers, with labor, seeing the biggest costs.

With these insights as a backdrop, the panel weighed in on four key issues: safety, cost increases, compressed timelines, and changing partner relationships.

On the safety front – health safety will be the dominant concern as long as COVID continues to emerge and impacts the industry.  It is important to integrate health safety into every event plan to ensure that it is part of the attendee experience. All stakeholders – event staff, partners and clients should be part of the health safety discussion and implementation.  It is also wise to have a team member or small team in charge of safety processes and monitoring. Event execs need to take a long-range approach to health safety that assumes new COVID variants or other health risks will emerge.

The panel also noted that safety precautions require time, space, and money, so it’s important to consider all of the consequences of your safety measures, such as time to turn rooms to ensure distancing or how you plan to handle quarantining an attendee should they test positive on site.

In terms of cost pressures, there was general agreement that event budgets are flat and, in many cases, decreasing. At the same time, costs are rising, especially labor and talent costs. Further, continual shifts in hybrid and omnichannel events create “expense surprises.”

• Don’t dust off 2019 budgets: build new financial models based on today’s realities.
• Do your homework: anticipate and plan for costs increases.
• Have a baseline budget but keep it flexible.
• Safeguard your budget reserve to allow for change and innovation.
• Factor in budget buffers to help deal with unexpected twists
• Embrace “cash is king” and be willing to front-end funding to retain a valued supplier.
• Review any exclusive services in your existing venue contracts and negotiate flexibility to bring in third-party providers party if the venue cannot deliver the service levels you need. (This is especially important when it comes to internet speed and capacity.)

The panel offered sage advice on managing and succeeding with increasingly compressed timelines:

• Be prepared – plan for what is and what might be.
• Always be resourcing (ABR). ABR means having resources at the ready – even things that aren’t on your immediate roadmap.
• Accept that there will be tradeoffs between keeping an accelerated timeframe and the breadth of what can be done.
• Consider developing program packages that allow you to ramp up quickly and focus more on tailored elements of the event.
• Have a two-minute drill – plan and practice, so many things can be planned in advance, but you have to be able to adapt effectively on the fly onsite.
• Educate leadership on the reality of costs and new timelines – help them understand where they need to adjust expectations and processes.

The panel concurred that partnerships are more important than ever and given the stress everyone faces in dealing with budget and time pressures, they need to be less transactional and more collaborative. The partner relationship must change from “us vs them to “we,” with flexibility, balance, patience, kindness, and above all, trust.

Event execs that bring partners in early and often can build the partner’s institutional knowledge across the team and get them intimate with the business.  In return, partners can bring a high level of expertise to help improve event design and drive better outcomes.

Event execs can also build collaboration by helping partners manage the business end of the relationship. They can front funding to help stabilize partner cash flow and design projects in stages to allow for course change and new approaches.

As a parting thought, the panel challenged attendees to resist the urge to fall back to the old ways of doing things when the event landscape normalizes. We all need to keep the collaboration spirit going.

Three Topics Driving Sustainability in the Hospitality and Events Industry

Marina Bay Sands is one of the world’s leading hotels that has implemented sustainability best practices.  Read the full white paper here.

The hospitality and event sectors have been talking about sustainability for more than 20 years, and clearly, we’re not closer to solving some of the main issues. Are there missteps in the past that we should look to avoid?

We’ve often taken the easy way out and not taken the urgent and ambitious approach that is needed. Such as:

• Pushing non-transformative solutions: Sustainable event and hospitality education has encouraged best practices that are helpful, like recycling, eliminating bottled water, not having linens changed daily. Although these are good things to do, it’s possible to get stuck in just doing the basics. More ambition is needed.
• Redirecting responsibility elsewhere:Sustainable event plans can often get stuck when there is concern sponsors, suppliers, and participants won’t take action. For example, it might be risky to take a hard line to establish minimum sustainability guidelines for exhibitors or shift to plant-based menus. Sometimes a line gets drawn in terms of what we’re willing to do, and how hard we’re prepared to push.
• Emphasizing the downsides: This can take a variety of forms. We’ve all heard (or said) “it costs too much”. This can be true in the short term but ignores the even higher cost of delaying action. The expectation of perfection can also be a deterrent. Being willing to test and experiment with better methods or materials is sometimes the only thing that gets us to the best ones. We can’t wait: we have to start somewhere.