How do I use MustMeet's "Met Before" feature?

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What do we mean by "Met Before"?
• How to control the Met Before Cut-off Date
• Finding attendees that have 'Met Before'

What do we mean by "Met Before"?

Met Before is a function that tracks meetings across different events within a single Grip application, in order to check whether participants have already had meetings. The purpose of this is to try to prevent repetitive meetings for your event participants when they're taking part in MustMeet events.

The feature takes into consideration pre-scheduled meetings as well as meetings created directly by participants in non-MustMeet events - basically any meeting between two or more people.

If a past meeting is detected between two people in a MustMeet event, and no preference has been made either way in the current event, that pairing will receive a score of 0, which will prevent a meeting from being scheduled. You'll be able to see this on any exports of the Scoring Matrix, and it will also be flagged in MustMeet when you look at booking a meeting between those people.

You can still override this and manually book a meeting between them if you like - and again, if either party has made a preference on the other profile, Grip takes that as a sign of their intent to meet, and ignores the fact that they've met before.

What about meetings with different representatives from the same company?

Yes, the feature is smart enough to account for situations where the same companies attend year-on-year, but with different representatives. This works in a way similar to MustMeet's Exclusive Meetings feature.

Buyer <> Supplier Events

The platform will identify Suppliers (defined by group type) using their Exhibitor IDs, which they should share, as they'll be related to the same Company profile. If there is no exhibitor ID for a specific supplier, then it will default to using their Profile ID instead.

For non-suppliers, the email address of the profile is used.

For example:

• In a previous event, a Buyer called Jack with the email address "jack@grip.events" met James from Microsoft. James from Microsoft had an Exhibitor ID of "MIC240788".
• In the next edition of this event, there were no preferences made between the profile with the email address "jack@grip.events" and any profile with an Exhibitor ID of "MIC240788".
• Therefore, we flag these profiles as having met before, and so no meeting will be booked between Jack and anyone from Microsoft - even if Microsoft's representatives have personally never attended the event before.
• If either Jack or one of the Microsoft representatives had made a preference in the current event, then we would ignore the 'met before' flag, and score them normally so a meeting could be booked.

Any2Any Events

This is much simpler as there are no sharers in Any2Any events, and so each attendee has their own meetings. There's no need to check on the Exhibitor ID, so instead we rely on the Profile IDs only.

Example:

• In a previous event, a Buyer called Jack with the Profile ID 123456 met James, who has a Profile ID of 098765.
• In the next event, those two profiles will be flagged as having met before, and that pairing will get a score of 0.
• If either of them make a preference in the current event, then we would ignore the 'met before' flag, and score them normally so a meeting could be booked.

How to control the Met Before Cut-Off Date

As a reminder, if you want to force a meeting between people that have met before, you can do so by booking a meeting manually via the MustMeet dashboard. Other than that, you don't need to do anything to make this feature work, it's entirely automatic.

The date is set automatically to the start date of your event, so that any meetings happening before your event days are considered. This is the most common usage and can usually be left as-is.

However, if you're running co-located events, or just an events that are very close to each other, you may need to modify this date. To do so:

1. Go to Event Details > Event Setup
2. Scroll down to the Meeting Settings section
3. Choose a new date
4. Re-generate meeting scores (if they've previously been generated)

Why change this?

Imagine you have two events, happening one weekend after each other. In these events, you are aware that some of your participants are attending both events.

If any of those participants meet in the first event, those meetings will be happening before the Met Before cut-off date, and so those same participants will be prevented from meeting in the following event the next weekend (unless they made a positive preference on each other).

In this scenario, you don't want the first event's meetings to affect the meeting schedule in the following event. You would then need to set the Met Before cut-off date for the second event to a date before the first event's meetings happen.
Doing so would ensure that Grip ignores those meetings and scores participants normally.

Of course, you may want to prevent participants from meeting each other two weekends in a row - which is what this feature is designed to prevent. You'll need to make sure that all of the meetings for the first event have been scheduled before you run the scores in the second event, but in this scenario you can leave the Met Before cut-off date in its default state (the start date of the second event). 

Finding attendees that have 'Met Before'

You'll be able to see when people have been flagged as having met before in the Grip Engage Scoring page, along with in MustMeet. The table contains a column called Met Before, where any pair of attendees that have met before will show a 'yes'.

You'll also see this explained in the Score Reason column and you should also notice that their score will be a 0 - unless of course one of the attendees has made a preference on the other one, in which case we'll score them normally.

Here's an example:

You can see that two pairs of people above have Met Before.

• One pair has a score of 0, as no preferences were made between them. No meeting will be booked.
• The second pair have a score of 67 due to the MustMeet preference made in this event, and so we score them normally.