Set meeting limits and minimum targets for individual attendees
Meeting targets are a powerful feature of Grip’s MustMeet scheduling system, that gives event organizers more control over their participants’ experience, while simultaneously saving lots of time.
In this article, we will cover:
- What are MustMeet Meeting Targets?
- Functionality
- Setup
- How the Meeting Targets are displayed in MustMeet
- Can I Change or Override Meeting Targets?
- FAQ
What are MustMeet Meeting Targets?
Sometimes organizers sell a specific number of meetings to some of their participants, perhaps as part of a meeting ‘package’. This can take the form of a ‘guarantee’ of a minimum amount of meetings, or a maximum limit to ensure that participants aren’t getting more than they’ve paid for. In short, you can set a meeting minimum or meeting maximum, per participant.
In MustMeet events we want this process to be as easy as possible, to avoid the need for organizers to spend hours tweaking meeting schedules in order to stay compliant with these targets.
Functionality
When generating a meeting schedule, Grip’s MustMeet system will give priority to those participants with meeting minimums. This means that the system will first try to ensure that participants have their minimum meetings quota met, before continuing to generate meetings for the rest of the attendees with no minimums set.
For maximum meeting values, the scheduler will simply stop scheduling meetings for a participant once they have hit that limit.
It is important to note that it is impossible to absolutely guarantee that a minimum meeting value will be hit in all events. The scheduler will meet these targets only if conditions within the event allow it to do so.
For example, if there are enough available participants and meeting locations in the event, but a given participant has ‘Met Before’ or chosen ‘No Thanks’ on too many of the other participants, it may not be possible to give them the number of meetings that are desired.
If it is possible to hit the targets, the scheduler will do so.
It's also not intended for minimum limits to be attributed to large numbers of your attendees - e.g. all suppliers. The scheduling process prioritises the profiles that you've attached a target to, so of course the more people you try to prioritise at once, the less it's possible to prioritise them.
Setup
We use some special profile data fields to assign these targets to individuals within the event. These can be seen and applied within the dashboard under a participant’s profile details, under Settings > Unstructured Profile Data
Use these protected fields to add the number of meetings desired, as shown in the image below.
Minimum Meeting Target - “mm_meeting_minimum”
Meeting Limit - “hb_meeting_limit”
Please note that Meeting Minimum targets are only compatible with Buyer <> Supplier events at the time of writing. Support for Any2Any events is planned, and will be released later.
Meeting Limits are fully compatible with both Buyer <> Supplier and Any2Any events.
- Use a number above 0
- Use only whole numbers (no decimal places, percentages or fractions)
- Make sure that your Minimum value is below your Limit value, if you’re using both!
Of course, these values can be input in bulk when uploading participants through a CSV, or from any integration with a registration system, if that’s where your event data is coming from.
Uploading/Updating via CSV
When filling out the CSV template for your participants, add one or two new columns using the special field names. Then add the values under each of these columns and upload as normal.
Uploading/Updating via Integration
This data will need to be included in the registration profile data that Grip is receiving from the registration system, but essentially works the same way as the two previous examples. These fields can be added to the incoming data, under the “metadata” or “metadata_raw” JSON objects with their own values set per participant - see our API documentation for details on adding metadata.
You only need to add these fields under the ‘en-gb’ locale object, if using “metadata_raw”, other ‘translations’ are not required.
How the Meeting Targets are displayed in MustMeet
When these values are detected by MustMeet after importing your data, you should see these targets displayed in the participants table under the ‘Meeting Targets’ field. If you’ve used a minimum and a maximum, you’ll see a bracket of meetings shown.
Don’t get confused with the ‘Estimated Meetings’ column - this is a quick calculation done by the MustMeet platform which does not take into account the users’ individual targets. Instead this is a general estimation based on the number of participants and slots, if meetings could be shared out evenly.
Can I Change or Override Meeting Targets?
In short, yes you can!
If you’ve not generated your meetings schedule yet, you can modify the field values as much as you like, as they’re only taken into account once schedules are being generated.
If you’ve already scheduled your meetings and want to add meeting limits retroactively, you’ll need to add the data in Grip, load into the MustMeet platform, and then either:
- Regenerate all meetings (if there are lots of participants’ targets added). This will remove and replace all previously-generated meetings.
- Remove the booked meetings manually for whichever users have new Meeting Targets, then ‘Generate for Unbooked Slots Only’, which will take into account these new limits while trying to fill up any available slots in the event.
Additionally, you can always choose to manually modify any participant’s schedule in MustMeet, and the system will allow you to break these limits yourself. You can refer to the Meetings Report to check whether the changes you’ve made have broken any of the rules.
FAQ
I have set a Minimum Meetings amount for a participant, but they don’t have enough meetings!
Ensure that conditions allow this participant to have the desired number of meetings. There are many elements that go into a meeting schedule - here are some things to consider:
- There are enough available participants to meet
- There are enough available meeting slots left in the event
- The participant hasn’t blocked out too much of their calendar availability
- The participant hasn’t made a ‘No Thanks’ preference against the other available participants
- The participant hasn’t already met the other available participants in the current event
- The participant hasn’t ‘Met Before’ the other available participants in a previous event
- The participant isn’t already meeting another participant from the same company, where Exclusive Meetings have been set
- The participant isn’t prevented from meeting other available participants due to Group or Data Type permissions
- The participant isn’t prevented from meeting other available participants due to multi-venue Group rules
I have added the required fields and values to a participant’s profile but I can’t see the targets reflected in MustMeet
The data has not been detected by MustMeet. Check the following:
- The field names have been spelled correctly
- The values input are valid whole numbers and make sense
- Make sure you have reloaded data into the MustMeet system after making changes