MustMeet - "Met Before" feature

Automatic protection against repetitive meetings

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 record suppliers and buyers that have had any meetings in the past.

The purpose of this is to try to prevent repetitive meetings for your event participants when they're taking part in a MustMeet event.

The feature takes into consideration pre-scheduled meetings as well as meetings created by attendee meeting requests 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, 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, we take that as a sign of their intent to meet, and we ignore 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 flag

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.

However, there is some protection for cases where meetings are created in an event, and then need to be updated a few times due to, for example, changes in schedule or drop-outs. We need to make sure that the meetings in the current event aren't incorrectly recognised as old meetings by setting a date and time after which meetings will be ignored.

This is done during the scoring process using the field 'Past Meetings Cutoff', and is explained in this article about generating scores.

Finding attendees that have been flagged as 'Met Before'

You'll be able to see when people have been flagged as having met before if you download the meeting scores export, as shown in the article linked in the previous paragraph.

This spreadsheet contains a column called "met_before_flag". For any pair of attendees that have met before, you'll see a "1" in that column, as opposed to a "0" for those that haven't.

In short, 1 = yes, and 0 = no.

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 chosen to meet each other, and so we score them normally.