Generating Meeting Scores in MustMeet events

In this article, we'll explain how you can generate meeting scores in your Grip MustMeet event, and how you can use these to generate meetings. Meeting scores are simply a rating for how good a match your participants are for each other.
You'll need to be an App Admin in Grip Engage in order to take these steps.

You can generate scores as many times as you need, and it is essential to do so if your event goes through changes after you've previously generated scores. For example, if a new participant has joined the event that you want meetings to be generated for, or if new preferences or custom field data has been added.

Table of contents

• Preparation
• Initial Steps
• Score Weighting
• Score Modifiers
• Met Before cut-off date
• Final Steps and Checking Scores

Preparation

A few things need to be in place before you can generate scores. If you're not sure however, you can simply head to the scoring page and it will inform you if your event setup isn't complete.

1. Expand the "MustMeet" menu item in the Grip Engage dashboard.
2. Click on "Scoring".
   1. If everything is correct, you'll see the "No scores generated yet" banner with an option to start generating scores. You can move on to the next section in this article.
   2. If not, you'll see a warning that your setup isn't ready yet, and a link to the Custom Groups page.
3. On the Custom Groups page, check that the following is in place (refer to our article on Group setup for MustMeet events for full details).
4. For "Buyer <> Supplier" events:
   1. At least one group for Buyers and one group for Suppliers exists.
   2. The groups have participants in them.
   3. The groups have the correct metadata added (to indentify them as Buyer or Supplier groups).
   4. The groups have the correct permissions added to them (e.g. Buyers can see and be recommended Suppliers).
5. For "Any2Any" events:
   1. At least one group for participants exists.
   2. The groups have participants in them.
   3. The groups all have the correct metadata added (any2any)
   4. The groups have the correct permissions added to them (e.g. groups can see and be recommended other groups). If there is only one group, you'll need to add it under these permissions so that participants in the group can see and be recommended each other.
6. Go back to the Scoring page and check that you can start generating.

 

Initial Steps

1. Expand the "MustMeet" menu item in the Grip Engage dashboard.
2. Click on "Scoring".
3. Click on the "Generate Scores" button
4. You'll notice that based on the custom group setup in your event, we'll automatically add the right groups under the right fields for you. If you wish to prevent scores from being generated for participants in a specific group, you can remove it from the Buyer/Supplier/Any2Any groups fields.

 

At this point, you can go ahead and generate scores with one click if you like! If so, you can jump to the Final Steps and Checking Scores section below.

However, you may first want to enable one of our score modifiers or check your Met Before date - and for Buyer <> Supplier events you should first ensure that the scores are weighted in the direction that aligns with your event strategy. The following sections will run through these options.

Score weighting

For Buyer <> Supplier events only

Buyer <> Supplier events have a natural score weighting, where the Buyer groups' preferences are scored slightly higher than Suppliers. This matches the typical arrangement in this type of event, where the Buyer's opinions and satisfaction are usually more important to the Event Organizer. See our article explaining MustMeet scoring for some examples of this slight difference in score calculation between the two sides.

In Grip, you'll need to chose which of your groups are given this extra weighting - and note that this doesn't necessarily need to be your Buyers group.

• Simply choose either the Buyer or Supplier checkbox when generating scores.

For Any2Any events

There is no difference in weighting in Any2Any events, so every participant's preferences are treated equally.

Score Modifiers

There are some options to modify the way that Grip calculates scores between participants. These are shown as checkboxes in the score-generation stage - simply choose one or more before hitting the 'Generate scores' button.
Remember that you can generate scores as many times as you like before generating meeting schedules, so you can experiment with these options before moving ahead!

Some options only apply to Buyer <> Supplier events, so you'll only be shown the options that are applicable for your event.

Generate scores for inactive participants

By default, inactive participants are not scored. This is because if a participant has never logged in, we assume that they are not engaged and may not arrive to meetings that are booked for them. This is a safe assumption and helps to prevent no-shows.

However, you may know that your participants are definitely going to attend, and so will want to override this rule. If that is the case, check this option, and all participants in the groups will be scored, regardless of whether they've logged in to an event in your Grip application.

Average scores between Sharers

If you've set up some participants as Sharers, you may know that preferences are copied between them when scores are calculated. For more information on the standard process, see our articles on Sharers and MustMeet Scoring.

This is great for the standard use-case where Sharers are from the same company, and one Sharer is given the task of setting preferences on-behalf of their colleagues, as it means that only one participant needs to undertake that task.

However, if Sharers are not from the same company and you want a more realistic score based on the actual preferences and data for each Sharer, this option may be very helpful.

When enabled, this score modifier does the following:

1. Prevents Sharers’ preferences from being copied to their related Sharers.
2. Takes an average of the Sharers’ individual scores, and applies the resulting score to those Sharers.

The result is that each Sharer is responsible for their own preferences, and Sharers that haven’t all made preferences will naturally be scored lower than Sharers that have. AI scoring will also be taken into account here, so if some sharers are a worse (or better) match with a participant than other sharers, that will bring all of those Sharers' scores down (or up).

Only allow mutual preference meetings

By default, Grip will book meetings for participants as long as they are permitted to meet, and haven't made a 'No Thanks' preference.
In some cases though, Event Orgnizers want a more restricted experience, where both participants need to have made a positive preference on each other for a meeting to be valuable.

Enabling this score modifier will ensure that meetings will only be booked if there are mutual preferences between participants - i.e. they both specifically want to meet each other. Any one-sided preferences will be scored a "0" which means no meeting will be booked.

There are two things to note when it comes to what's classed as a 'mutual preference':

• Sharers' preferences are counted as mutual (even with score averaging enabled).
  • i.e. if any of your Sharers made a preference on a participant that made a preference on you, that is classed as a mutual preference.
• Company preferences are taken into account too.
  • i.e. if you made a preference on a participant, and they made a preference on your Company profile, that is classed as a mutual preference.

Apply AI scoring to mutual preference meetings

By default, if there is a mutual preference between participants, the scores are fixed, and no AI scoring is considered. See the MustMeet Scoring article for details on those specific scores.

However, you may want to leverage Grip's AI scoring even when mutual preferences are present. This will help to spread scores out between participants based on the AI's perception of whether they're a good match, creating a range of scores when otherwise they would be identical to each other.

For example, all the participants listed below have chosen to 'Meet' each other. By default, this would result in a fixed score, giving them an equal chance of having a meeting booked.
However, in reality, Mulan and Jas are a better match for each other, based on their custom field matches and profile activity.

From this table you can see how this modifier helps to give a small advantage to the better match, making them more likely to meet.

 

'Met Before' feature

MustMeet has a built-in function to flag participants that have had meetings in previous events. This is a really handy feature that prevents repetitive meetings in communities that attend regular events within the same industry. For more information, we have an article dedicated to this feature.

To change the cut-off date:

1. Go to Event Details > Event Setup
2. Scroll down to the Meeting Settings section
3. Choose a new date in the 'Met Before' cut-off date field
4. Re-generate meeting scores

Final Steps and Checking Scores

After you've clicked on "Generate Meeting Scores", the process will begin - this may take a while for events with many participants, but will usually be quite rapid. If you like, you can leave this page while the process is ongoing and return after a short time.

After a short time, you can click on "Check Meeting Score Status" (or just revisit the page) to see if the scores are generated. You can keep doing this every few minutes until you see that meeting scores are available.

Analysing Scores

Once meeting scores have been generated, you'll see all the scores listed in a table, along with a summary of overall details.

At the top you can see some details about the current score generation:

• Potential average score
  • An average of all scores that are above 0. A basic but useful metric for checking overall scores, especially when using different modifiers.
  • This is a 'potential' score because typically there aren't enough meeting slots in the event for absolutely everyone to meet. You can see an average of the meeting schedule scores in MustMeet later, once meetings are scheduled.
• Time of generation
  • When the scores were last generated.
• Modifiers used
  • A record of which modifiers were used the last time scores were generated.

You can modify the columns shown in the table if you want to see additional participant details like their group, personal information or custom field data.

You can also search, order and filter the data as you'd expect within this table - though note that if you're looking for a single person's scores, ensure that you check both the Profile One and Profile Two columns, as they may show up in either order.

If you'd like to retain a copy of the scores for your records, click on "Export as CSV" and download the generated file.

Score Reasons

These provide a systematic explanation of the score given, as a reference. They can include the preferences made by the participants and their Sharers, Company preferences, a list of matching Custom Field values, Met Before status and other details related to scoring modifiers.

Generating Meetings

Once you're happy with your meeting scores, you can go on to generate meeting schedules in MustMeet. Move to this article for more information on how to continue.

FAQs

Why have lots of my participants 'Met Before'?

If you've imported scores in to MustMeet and noticed a very high number of 0 scores then the cause is likely to be the Met Before date being incorrectly set. Make sure that this date is set after any meetings you want to be included in the calculation, and before any meetings you want to ignore. Meetings are checked across all events that your participants are attending in your Grip application.

Why does my event take so long to generate scores?

Though most events take minutes to calculate, events with numbers of participants in the 1000s can take a long time. This is because the number of potential matches between participants rises exponentially as the population increases, especially in Any2Any events, where there are fewer restrictions on who can meet. You can leave the page, make a coffee and check back later!

Why can't I generate scores?

Make sure that your Custom Groups are set up correctly so Grip knows how to calculate scores - refer to our article on Group setup for MustMeet events for full details.