What Event Professionals Actually Want From the Next Decade

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A new report from The Meetings Show has landed, and if you work anywhere near sustainability or ESG in events, it’s worth your attention.

Titled Human Led, Tech Enabled, it’s built on a futures workshop run in June 2026 by Graham Norris, an organisational psychologist and Conference Futurist. Norris put a room of organisers, venues, destinations and suppliers through a structured exercise: scan the forces reshaping the world to 2036, stress-test four contrasting futures, then design the one they actually want.

Get the report from The Meeting Show here.

The results are striking not for what they include, but for what they leave out. Given a blank canvas to imagine events a decade from now, nobody in the room reached for holograms, robot hosts or metaverse conferences. Across 20 workshop sheets, one idea kept resurfacing: human connection. Technology showed up constantly in the material, but almost always backstage – handling registration, logistics, data and admin. Centre stage was people.

The industry is asking for proof, not promises

For those of us who’ve spent years arguing that sustainability and social value need to be measured, not just claimed, the report’s sixth headline finding is the one to sit with. It describes a shift “from unquestioned growth to pressure for visible social, environmental and commercial value.” Participants expected events by 2036 to demonstrate all three kinds of value at once – commercial, social and environmental – not trade one off against the others.

That expectation runs through the report’s eight tensions too. One in particular gets to the heart of what platforms like ours exist to solve: the tension between commercial returns and social value. The workshop wanted events that build wellbeing, belonging and community, while also worrying openly about proving return on investment for exactly that kind of value. As the report puts it, current metrics barely capture things like connection and community, which makes them hard to defend at budget time.

This is precisely the gap Impact and Track are built to address. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and an industry that wants to be judged on social and environmental value as seriously as commercial value needs tools that make that value visible – to clients, to boards, to the people signing off next year’s budget.

Sustainability and travel: a tension the industry can’t outsource

The report doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable maths either. Events remain a travel-dependent industry, and the workshop’s environmental scan was blunt: extreme weather, water scarcity, venues at risk of closing, energy-hungry data centres. One group’s preferred future explicitly asked for “affordable travel for all” and sustainable events “at the same time” – an ambition, not yet a solved problem.

That’s the tension Track exists inside. Carbon reporting won’t make the trade-off between accessibility and travel disappear, but it turns an abstract worry into something an organisation can actually track, report and improve year on year – which is the precondition for making better decisions about it at all.

Why this matters for how we think about our own work

None of this is really new territory for us at event:decision – it’s the argument we’ve been making since day one. But it’s striking to see an independent, structured piece of futures research land on the same conclusions from a completely different starting point.

The people closest to running events, when given room to imagine the industry a decade out, didn’t ask for less accountability. They asked for more – just delivered without friction, and without technology getting in the way of the human experience events are ultimately for.

 

Read the full report, “Human Led, Tech Enabled,” from The Meetings Show and Graham Norris, Conference Futurist.

Events create value. Now make it visible.

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Events create value. Now make it visible.

Every event creates more than an experience.

Events move people. Events spend money. Events create work. Events use resources. Events support communities. Events consume energy. Events build relationships. Events change behaviour.

Much of that value disappears when the event ends.

The lights go down, the kit goes back on the truck, and what’s left is an invoice and a few photos. The work that went into sourcing locally, choosing the right venue, cutting freight or employing local crews rarely survives the wrap report.

event:decision makes it visible.

From performance to evidence

We turn the performance of an event into evidence across environmental, social and governance impact. Then we show you how that performance compares, where it can improve and what value it creates.

So you can do more than say your event was responsible.

You can prove it.

Reframe the question

The industry usually asks: how do we make events more sustainable?

That question comes with baggage. It suggests more work, more cost and more compliance. It frames sustainability as a tax on delivery.

We ask a different question: how do we make the value events already create visible?

That changes the conversation. It starts from the good things you’re already doing and asks you to prove them. You’re not being told to add value. You’re being asked to show it.

You don’t need to create more value. You need to see, measure and prove the value you’re already creating.

What that means for you

Event owners. Understand what your event delivered, not just what it cost. Show your board a return on the investment, backed by data rather than adjectives.

Agencies. Turn delivery performance into a commercial asset. Evidence that strengthens pitches, shows your expertise and gives clients something they can take to their boards.

Venues. Go beyond sustainability credentials and prove how the events you host actually perform. Give buyers evidence they can use in procurement and venue selection.

Production partners. Show the impact of your choices across power, freight, travel, materials, people and kit. Make better performance a reason to choose you.

One intelligence layer, four lenses

event:decision is the intelligence layer for event value. It works through four lenses:

  • Track. Prove your environmental performance.
  • Impact. Prove & benchmark your ESG performance.
  • VenueLens. Prove your venue creates better event outcomes.
  • AdVantage. Prove the value of your production choices.

All four run on the same cycle:

Benchmark → Improve → Prove → Win

The last word matters most. Data has commercial value because of what it lets you do, not because it fills a report. Win the pitch. Win the tender. Win the renewal. Win the budget.

The agency conversation changes

Today, the agency pitch often sounds like this:

“We can help you deliver sustainable events.”

Every agency says that. It doesn’t separate you from anyone.

Now try this:

“We can prove the value we’re creating for you. Here’s how our events perform against the industry.”

That’s a different sales conversation. You’re not claiming to take sustainability seriously. You’re showing the numbers.

Agencies that measure consistently keep portfolio intelligence, peer benchmarks and quantified social value evidence that compound over time. Each measurement feeds the next pitch instead of ending as a one-off client report.

The flywheel looks like this:

Deliver → measure → benchmark → learn → improve → build evidence → win the next client → repeat

That’s a commercial intelligence proposition, not a sustainability one.

Venues: credentials aren’t performance

Venues tend to sell credentials: accreditations, solar panels, local food, waste policies, BREEAM ratings, net zero commitments.

Those matter. But they describe the building, not the event.

Buyers need to know what happens when their event is held in your space. As we’ve written before, venue credentials and event performance are two different things. Credentials describe how the building operates. Event evidence describes how the event actually performed.

So stop telling buyers your venue is sustainable. Show them what happens when they hold their event there.

Your venue has credentials. Your events have performance. Impact:VenueLens measures the difference and turns it into a reason to buy.

Carbon is part of the answer

Carbon matters. Social value matters. Event Governance matters. We measure all three.

But they all serve a bigger question:

What value did the event create, and can you prove it?

That’s the question event owners, agencies, venues and suppliers will increasingly be asked by boards, procurement teams and clients. Those who can answer it with evidence will win the work.

event:decision gives you the evidence.

Measure better. Decide smarter. Prove your value.

 

It all matters, but some matters more.

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Event carbon, without the spreadsheet, for the professional event planner…

 

Most conversations about a conference’s carbon footprint start with the water bottles. The water bottles are one-tenth of one per cent. Here is where the footprint actually sits – and the handful of decisions that genuinely move it.

If you have ever sat in a sustainability briefing for an event, you will recognise the shape of it. Someone raises reusable cups. Someone else asks whether the delegate bags can be made locally. There is a long and sincere discussion about recycling bins, and everybody leaves feeling that something has been done.

None of this is wrong, exactly. It is just wildly out of proportion to the thing being discussed.

We modelled a fairly ordinary event: a two-day conference, 500 delegates, one overnight, single venue, and around 40% of the audience flying in. The whole thing comes out at roughly 120 tonnes of CO₂e – about what fifteen people in the UK are responsible for in an entire year. Here is how it splits.

Where 120 tonnes actually sits

Modelled two-day conference · 500 delegates · UK venue

Calculated on DEFRA 2024/25 emission factors. Bars are scaled to the largest category; waste is shown at a minimum width so it remains visible at all.

 

The useful question isn’t “what’s big”

Knowing that flights dominate is the easy half. The harder and more useful question, if you are the person actually gathering data for a footprint, is: how much detail do I need before the number stops changing?

Because that is where the real cost sits. Chasing a delegate-by-delegate breakdown of who drank which coffee is days of work for an answer that does not move. Meanwhile a single unasked question about flight bookings can shift the total by 40%.

The rule is simpler than it sounds. Detail pays off where the range inside a category is wide — not where the category is large. A category can be enormous and still need only rough data, if everything inside it emits at roughly the same rate. And a small category can demand precision if the options inside it differ by a factor of twenty.

Three questions clear that bar comfortably.

1. Who flew, from where, and in which cabin

A business-class seat takes up roughly three times the aircraft’s fuel per passenger that an economy seat does, because it takes up roughly three times the floor. In our modelled conference, twenty long-haul delegates turning left instead of right adds 73 tonnes – more than half the footprint of the entire event, from a booking decision nobody thinks of as environmental.

So flight data needs to be person-level, or at least route-and-cabin level. What it does not need is precision about airports. Getting the exact terminal pairing rather than a city estimate changes the answer by a percent or two. Getting the cabin wrong changes everything.

2. What was on the plate

Food and drink is under 3% of this event, which surprises people who have been told to feel bad about catering. But the range inside it is the widest of any category on the list: a red-meat main course carries roughly twenty times the carbon of a vegetarian one. Swing the menu from beef-led to a standard 80/20 chicken-and-vegetarian split and the category drops from 8.8 tonnes to 1.9.

Which means all you need from catering is the protein split – how many meat, how many fish, how many vegetarian, per service.

Ingredient-level menus, provenance, food miles, organic certification: interesting, occasionally worth doing for other reasons, but essentially invisible in the number.

3. Whether it was built or hired

Set, staging, exhibition stands and branding are the second-largest category here, and the single biggest variable is not what they are made of but whether they already existed.

Hiring a stand and re-skinning it, versus fabricating one from scratch, is around a five-fold difference. Air-freighting it rather than sending it by road is another six-fold difference on the transport leg.

Both are decisions made early, by procurement, usually on cost and schedule grounds — which is exactly why they need to be visible before the contracts are signed rather than reported afterwards.

Worth knowing, second tier

Three more that matter more than you’d think

  • Which country the hotel is in. A room-night in France is 7.7 kg; the same room-night in Australia is 41.8 kg. That is a six-fold spread driven entirely by the national electricity grid. The hotel’s star rating, by contrast, moves it by about a third – worth capturing, not worth arguing about.
  • How many rooms were genuinely slept in. Assuming every delegate stays every night, when in fact 60% did, overstates accommodation by more than a third. Ask for the rooming list.
  • Whether the venue is on a renewable tariff. This is a yes/no question that can zero out an entire category. It takes one email.

And what you can genuinely stop chasing

This is the liberating part. In a footprint of this shape, the following are all rounding errors, and collecting them to three decimal places is time you will never get back:

  • Coffee, pastries and bottled water counts – about 1.6 tonnes across two days, roughly 1%. This can all be included empirically.
  • Item-by-item AV power draw. A full 60kW rig over a two-day conference comes to 0.3 tonnes. event:decision will calculate this for you.
  • Waste tonnage by stream. 0.03 tonnes. More on this below.
  • Square metreage of every breakout room, and the exact courier distance for every individual delivery.

To be clear: waste still matters.

It is the most visible thing you do, it is what delegates and clients actually see, and it changes behaviour in ways that carry well beyond the event.

Just be honest in the reporting that it is a cultural win rather than a carbon one – otherwise clients spend their sustainability budget where it feels best rather than where it works, and nobody ever tells them.

One important caveat

Everything above describes one event shape: a conference with a meaningful fly-in audience. Change that and the order changes with it. A city conference drawing 90% of its audience from within city limits inverts the whole table – ground transport and materials become the swing factors, and flight precision stops mattering almost entirely. A gala dinner has a fraction of the accommodation and twice the catering intensity. An exhibition stand is mostly materials and freight from the start.

The method survives the change even when the ranking doesn’t. Work out where the wide ranges are for the event in front of you, spend your data-gathering effort there, and use documented defaults for everything else.

Three questions, asked early

  1. Which cabin are we booking, and for whom? The single largest lever on the largest category.
  2. Are we building this, or hiring it? Ask before the design is signed off, not after.
  3. What’s the protein split at each service? The catering team knows. It takes one line on the BEO.

 

Get those three right, and you have roughly 85% of the answer – and, more to the point, you have it at the stage where you can still do something about it.

Figures throughout are modelled on a reference two-day, 500-delegate UK conference using DEFRA 2024/25 emission factors, including radiative forcing on aviation. They are illustrative of proportion and sensitivity, not a benchmark for any specific event.

At last! A simple channel for food rescue…

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We spend a lot of our time telling event organisers that food is one of the biggest sustainability levers they have. In most of the footprints we measure, catering sits behind only travel and accommodation – and unlike a delegate’s flight, it’s a line item that the organiser controls almost completely. 

But it’s the surplus food left after the event that’s always proved to be the awkward bit.

Organisers who have done everything right – accurate numbers, sensible menus, plant-forward choices – still end up staring at trays of perfectly good food with no plan for it. The honest answer, most of the time, has been a shrug and a bin. Perhaps a composter, should the venue provide one.

So we’re supporting Olio – the leading surplus food sharing platform for events, trusted by organisers, venues and caterers across the UK – to give event planners something better than a shrug.

What’s Olio – and how does it actually work? 

Olio has spent the last decade on a mission to create a world where food waste doesn’t exist – and they’ve built partnerships with the UK’s biggest retailers, caterers, hotels, venues and more to make sure that (perfectly edible) surplus food always gets eaten, rather than binned.

For events, their redistribution process has four simple steps:

  1. You press a button on Olio’s app for event organisers to confirm there’s food to collect. That’s the only action required from anyone on site.
  2. A trained volunteer collects your food. One of Olio’s Food Waste Heroes (there are 100,000 of them nationally, all food safety-trained) comes to the venue and picks the food up directly.
  3. It’s redistributed locally. Volunteers share the surplus with people in the surrounding community via the Olio app.
  4. You get an impact report. Olio reports back on what was collected and where it went, along with testimonials from the people who received it. That’s the bit that goes in your post-event report and your sustainability reporting.

We know what you’re thinking – what about food safety?

It’s the first thing every event team asks, and it’s the right question. Three things worth knowing:

  1. Olio takes on legal liability from the moment its volunteers collect the food. From the point of collection onwards, food safety responsibility is theirs.
  2. Their redistribution process was built with their primary authority and food safety specialists (their in-house team includes the former President of the Institute of Food Science and Technology).
  3. Every volunteer completes thorough food safety training before they can claim a collection. 

Their track record says it all: Olio volunteers have safely shared 160 million meals since 2019 – with zero food safety incidents. 

 

 

What about the local charity route?

Plenty of organisers have tried donating to a nearby charity, and it can work beautifully. It’s also fragile. Charities can’t always find a volunteer at short notice, often can’t take every food type because of transport or cold storage constraints, and coordinating it eats staff time on the night. There’s rarely any formal record of what happened afterwards.

Olio isn’t a replacement for that relationship where it already works – but events move, and given their national scale, it’s a more widely available option. 

With Olio, event organisers get:

  • On-demand volunteer availability (including last-minute)
  • Volunteers can take all food types
  • Your team just needs to click a button on their user-friendly software (no missed calls)
  • A detailed impact report of where your food’s ended up – every single time.

The side effects nobody expects

The reason we like this partnership isn’t only the diverted waste. It’s the secondary benefits we keep hearing about:

Costs come down. Less overcatering and less waste disposal both show up in the budget.

Teams feel better. Kitchen staff, waiting staff and organisers no longer have to watch good food go in the bin.

Katie McNeill, Event Manager at BeaconHouse Events, described it to Olio as “a really nice way to solve two problems at once.” 

Guests eat more sensibly. Buffet signage explaining that surplus is being donated changes behaviour – people take what they’ll actually eat, which means less overproduction is needed in the first place.

Why food waste is worth your attention

The hospitality sector throws away around 1.1 million tonnes of food a year, and roughly 75% of that could have been eaten. The cost of that waste runs to about £3.2 billion annually. Meanwhile, 1 in 6 UK households experienced food insecurity in 2025.

Where to start

If you’re already working with us on measurement, food waste diversion is a natural next step – you’ll see it land in your footprint and in your reporting. If you’re not…

This is a good place to begin, because it’s a sustainability intervention that costs little, changes behaviour on site, and produces a hugely positive story worth telling afterwards.

Talk to us about adding Olio to your next event. Read more

What event planners can learn from Life Cycle Analyses

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Break an event into carbon and social value by lifecycle phase, you ask?

Here you go. Plus advice that falls out, split cleanly into what to decide once – and what to fix every time.

We recently re-cut three real events – a multi-day conference, a long-haul incentive trip, and a festival brand activation – by lifecycle phase rather than by expense line: the build, the day people travel in, the days they are actually there, the day they travel out, the close-down. Client and agency names have been removed throughout; only the format and the numbers are real. The point wasn’t the chart. It was what the chart is useful for, which is telling the difference between two types of decision that are usually discussed as if they were one.

Some choices set the ceiling on what an event can achieve before a single supplier is briefed – destination, format, whether to build or hire. Others are made inside whatever ceiling has already been set – which coach company, which catering default, where is the welcome dinner and so on. Call the first kind strategic and the second tactical. Both matter, but they need different owners, different timing, and different conversations with a client. Here is what the lifecycle view actually recommends for each, on both carbon and social value — with the underlying charts and numbers alongside it.

Carbon

 

 

Strategic – decide this once, before the brief is written

The clearest finding across all three formats is that travel to and from the event dwarfs everything that happens once people arrive. One conference’s own numbers: 118.9 tCO2e on arrival day, a plateau of just 9.5 tCO2e across the entire three-day live programme, then another 118.9 tCO2e on departure day. That shape holds, in miniature, across the incentive trip and the activation too. Which means the single biggest lever on any event’s footprint is set at the concept stage – destination and distance – and almost nothing done well during delivery can claw it back.

The live programme is a rounding error next to the two flight days bracketing it. Almost nothing you do well during delivery claws that back.

The second strategic decision is one most agencies aren’t currently making at all, because it isn’t currently being measured: site inspection travel. We modelled a realistic scouting trip – three travellers, London origin, economy, a two-day visit – against all three formats. For the conference it was a rounding error. For the long-haul incentive trip, it added more carbon on its own than the entire five-day on-site programme it existed to plan.

If a format involves long-haul travel, the decision to fly a person out to scout it, versus a virtual walkthrough or piggybacking the visit onto other travel, belongs in the same conversation as destination choice – not left as an invisible add-on nobody owns.

The third is a procurement policy rather than a project-by-project call: build or hire. The one format in our sample with its own physical structure carried a real pre-event materials footprint that the other two – both of which occupied a room rather than built one – simply didn’t have. Whether a brand experience gets built from scratch or dressed with hired and returned stock is a decision made in the contract, not on site.

Tactical – fix this every time, inside whatever’s already been chosen

Once destination and format are locked in, the remaining levers are operational discipline on the days already under your control. None of them reshapes the curve, but they compound across a season of events, and none of them cost the reward proposition anything. Consolidate ground transport: one shared vehicle for a crew rather than three separate cars is a real, repeatable saving, and it is already the pattern in the best-run categories we looked at. Hold cabin class to economy or consolidated group fares by default, including for crew, and treat any upgrade as the exception that needs a reason rather than the default that needs defending.

Favour a plant-forward main at group dinners – the single heaviest catering choice in every capture we’ve seen is a red-meat main, and swapping the default rather than banning the option costs nothing in guest experience. And keep materials on a hire-and-return model wherever a physical build is involved, which is already what separates the best-performing production lines from the rest.

Social Value Yield (SaVY)

 

If carbon spikes hardest on the two days people are in transit and barely registers while they’re actually there, the plausible shape for social value is close to the mirror image: built almost entirely during delivery, and – unlike carbon – still accruing after everyone has gone home.

 

Strategic – design the delivery phase for it, don’t audit it afterwards

If social value concentrates in the live phase, it has to be designed into that phase at the brief stage, not measured after the fact and hoped for. That means choosing a venue and a destination with a genuine, specific local-engagement opportunity – not just a nice backdrop – and building a community / local touchpoint into the live programme as a scheduled part of the day, the way one of the incentive programmes we looked at ran a local community visit alongside its excursion schedule. It also means treating “legacy” as a deliverable with an owner, not a hope: what happens to the supplier relationships, the skills the crew picked up, the local partnerships, six months after the event closes down is a question worth answering in the original brief, because nobody answers it afterwards if no one was asked to.

 

If carbon and social value peak in different phases, most of the good decisions for one don’t cost you the other.

Tactical – the choices that raise it inside a live programme you’ve already set

Inside whatever format and venue have already been chosen, the day-to-day decisions that move social value are mostly about where the spend actually lands. Sourcing catering, décor, production and crew locally – rather than flying in a team – puts spend into the local economy the event is already visiting, on top of whatever it does for the travel line. Local hire over flown-in freelance, where the skill exists on the ground, does the same thing twice over. And the smallest, easiest-to-skip tactical fix is capture: circulating the debrief, the case study, the story of what actually happened, so the legacy that was designed in at the strategic stage is something people can point to rather than something that quietly evaporates once the invoice is settled.

Putting it together

The useful discipline here isn’t really carbon versus social value. It’s separating what gets decided once from what gets fixed every time, and being honest about which conversation you’re actually having with a client at any given moment. A destination choice dressed up as an operational tweak never gets challenged properly. An operational tweak treated as a strategic trade-off wastes a client meeting on something a checklist could have handled.

The genuinely useful pattern, though, is that carbon’s peak and social value’s likely peak sit in different phases of the same event. That’s rare in sustainability work, where the two sides of ESG usually pull against each other. Here, most of the good decisions on one axis don’t cost you anything on the other — which means there is very little excuse left for not doing both.

For your event?

To create this data for your own event could not be more simple.

Track, produces the carbon footprint of your event with no data entry for you

Impact, provides you with (a) the performance of your event across ESG (b) alignment with UNSDGs and (c) the Social Value Yield of your event

*How this was built

Both charts split each event into five real lifecycle phases plus one modelled addition. Production is materials and freight – what goes into a physical build before anyone arrives. Arrival travel and Departure travel are each event’s own reported flights total, split evenly in two: a stated 50/50 allocation. Live (on-site) is ground transport, hotels, catering and venue or AV energy – the days people are actually there. End-of-life is waste and de-rig. These five are drawn directly from each event’s own signed carbon capture.

Site inspection is different: none of the three included one in event data, so we modelled a realistic scouting trip rather than leaving it blank – three travellers, UK origin, economy class, a two-day, one-night visit, using DEFRA 2024/25 flight and ground-transport factors, each event’s own reported hotel or apartment rate where available, and standard meal factors for two days. It is shown throughout with a hollow marker and a dashed connector, distinct from the solid line that carries the five measured phases, and it is not included in any of the reported totals above.

 

 

Shout about your (social) value. beam Annual Forum 2026

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A few who attended this session have asked for a copy of the presentation. Here you are.

And a very short summary:

Every ESG conversation in events collapses into carbon. It’s measured, regulated, table stakes almost – and it misses what events already do brilliantly: generate social value nobody bothers to record.

That’s the argument in Matt Grey’s “Social Value Yield of Events.” His point: don’t confuse Event Social Value Yield (SaVY) this with CSR. A beach clean, a painting task, a garden clear. All great, but removable. The event happens without it. SaVY isn’t: the riggers, carpet layers, chefs and waiting staff are the event. Remove them, and there’s nothing left.

The numbers back it up. The UK events sector turns over £68bn a year, and 10–30% of any event budget defensibly aligns with social value – living wages, local suppliers, local food, skills development, access, and social enterprises. At the 20% median, that’s £12bn delivered annually and never claimed. One UK incentive agency measured just two events and surfaced £405,000 in social value they didn’t know they were generating.

The fix takes minutes, not months: capture it during delivery, report it while the news cycle’s still alive. Public sector clients already demand this data. Private sector clients will start asking soon.

“My advice: get there first!”, says Grey.

How? Demonstrate your value, tell more stories, deliver better business, win more.

The Global Destination Report Just Confirmed What We’ve Been Measuring All Along

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The evidence gap behind events’ sustainability claims

The Business of Events’ Global Destination Report 2026 paints a sector that has moved past pandemic recovery and into something harder: proving its value on terms beyond delegate counts and room nights (Davies Tanner / SFA Connect, 2026). Buried in the interview findings is a pattern that will be familiar to anyone working in event measurement – destinations believe deeply in the sustainability and legacy case for business events, but almost none can evidence it.

The report is candid about this. Sustainability is described as “the most visible part” of a widening value proposition, with destinations leaning on frameworks like GDS-Index and EarthCheck. Yet one European city representative admitted sustainability “is not yet usually the first thing clients ask for,” and only becomes persuasive “when concrete measures are presented.”

Legacy impact fares worse: interviewees across Europe, Canada and the UK say measuring knowledge-economy or innovation outcomes “takes time, research, and money” that funding models simply don’t prioritise.

The report’s own recommendation – fund “a small number of repeatable impact studies” tied to major events – is effectively a call for exactly the kind of measurement infrastructure event:decision already builds, with Impact: Event reviews.

Connectivity sharpens the point. Air access is now the most consistently cited competitiveness constraint, particularly for Tier-2 destinations, and the report links it directly to sustainability: destinations are starting to treat “access, price, and sustainability not as separate issues, but as linked parts of competitiveness.” Since flights typically dominate an event’s footprint, this is the tension our clients are increasingly navigating in real time – chasing international delegates for economic value while facing growing scrutiny on the emissions that travel represents.

There’s also a resourcing story underneath this. 58% of destinations say their teams are too small, and funding cuts hit sustainability programming, market intelligence and legacy design first – the specialist capabilities hardest to build in-house and easiest to lose when budgets tighten.  We’ve just witnessed this very thing within Visit Britain. That’s a structural argument for bringing in dedicated carbon and impact measurement rather than expecting it to emerge from stretched internal teams.

One caveat worth carrying into any conversation: the report finds economic ROI still dominates as the argument that moves governments, while sustainability and legacy are viewed as “less compelling” at the policy level, even as destinations themselves increasingly believe in them. In practice, that means credible sustainability data currently does more work with organisers and clients than with policymakers – useful context for how we frame the numbers we deliver. This was framed well at The Business of Events Policy Forum in July-26 by the MP Martin Rhodes. Yes, shout about big numbers, but more value comes from the story.

Source: The Business of Events, Global Destination Report 2026, produced by Davies Tanner, researched by SFA Connect.

Beyond the big numbers

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The UK events sector is £68 billion big – but it is, first and last, a people business. Now we can prove both.

Matt Grey, event:decision  ·  written at The Business of Events

At The Business of Events Policy Forum today, MP Martin Rhodes gave the sector a clear, and I think correct, challenge. Keep using our big numbers – the UK Events Report put the industry at around £68 billion in November 2025, and figures like that earn us a seat at the table with government, Ministers and decision-makers.

But don’t stop there.

Tell stories. Because a number that big is impossible to feel, and the things that actually change minds – a minister’s, a corporate client’s, a finance director’s – are specific, human and evidenced.

He’s right. And the reason he’s right goes to what this industry actually is. Strip away the £68 billion and events is a people business: local suppliers hired, regional economies fed, crews paid, communities included, relationships built face to face. It always has been. What’s new is that we can finally put a number on the human value — the local investment, the fair pay, the social good – that was always the real product.

The big number proves scale. The people stories prove our worth. And now they’re measurable.

£68 billion tells a policymaker the events industry matters to the economy. It doesn’t tell your client whether the money they spent with you last quarter did any good beyond the room hire – whether it reached real people, in real places. For that, you need to look them in the eye and say something like this:

“The two events we’ve managed for you have generated $687,500 in social value.”

“92% of crew used in the last year were paid at or above a living wage – up 15% on the previous year.”

“64% of the events we managed took place in venues using renewable power.”

“100% of events in the last quarter had appropriate cancellation terms in place.”

“74% of your events included a nominated sustainability lead.”

“58% of your UK events redistributed unused food and drink to the local community.”

And then the line that turns a report into a relationship:

“…and here’s exactly how we plan to increase every single one of those metrics across your portfolio next year.”

That’s sticky.

Look closely and almost every one of those is a story about people and place. Living wage is a story about the freelancer on the build. Food redistribution is a story about the community down the road from the venue. Social value with a currency sign is the local investment your event made, counted. These aren’t soft claims — they’re specific, measurable, and told with a commitment to do better. A percentage that moved 15 points in a quarter is a story a CFO will repeat.

The £68bn earns attention. The people stories earn trust.

Local, regional, personable – and now demonstable

We’ve always sold ourselves on service: professional, personable, close to the client, rooted in the places we operate. The best agencies and venues invest locally by instinct – regional crews, nearby caterers, independent suppliers — because it’s good practice and good business. The problem was never the doing. It was that we couldn’t evidence any of it, so the most human, most valuable part of what we deliver stayed invisible on the balance sheet.

That’s what changes when the human value is quantified. Local hiring becomes a living-wage percentage. Regional spend becomes a social-value figure a client can report upward. Personable, professional service becomes a track record of outcomes rather than a promise on a pitch slide. Demonstration is now the differentiator: venues and agencies that can hand a client hard, comparable, audit-ready outcomes will win the work — and help their clients tell their own story to their own boards. Every other sector a client buys from already gives them that evidence. Events, the most human sector of all, is finally catching up.

How event:decision turns people-work into proof

This is the entire point of the Impact suite – to make each of those human story-lines a measured fact rather than a claim.

Impact: Event measures what a delivered event actually achieved for people and place – carbon, social value in pounds and dollars, living-wage coverage, food redistribution, sustainability leads, cancellation terms. It’s where the $687,500 and the 87% come from, event by event, then rolled up across a portfolio.

Impact: VenueLens moves the evidence upstream to the sourcing decision, comparing venues on their credentials – renewable power, local supply, accreditation – so “99% of events in renewable-powered venues” is a choice you make deliberately and prove afterwards, not a happy accident.

Impact: AdVantage for Av & technical production, turns that performance into a comparative advantage – benchmarking a client’s portfolio against the wider dataset, showing where they lead, where the next gain sits, and giving the account team the evidenced “here’s how we’ll improve every metric” narrative to put in front of the client.

Behind all three sits the data: more than 6,000 event ESG data points, from over 200 clients across agency, corporate, brand, venue, association and destination planning, measuring thousands of events a year across the US, EMEA and APAC – and every event decision mapped to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Use both numbers

So take Martin Rhodes’ advice – all of it. Keep saying £68 billion; it opens doors. But walk through those doors carrying the people paid fairly, the communities fed, the local money invested – and the plan to push each one higher. The macro number proves the sector deserves to be heard. The people’s stories prove it deserves to be trusted.

We’re a people business that can finally quantify what it does for people. Event planning and delivery behaviours are changing for the better — our job, and our clients’ opportunity, is to make sure that change is understood, measured, evidenced and, above all, told.

Hey venues! Buyers are losing faith in venues. Here’s how to win it back.

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Not our words.

The latest Cvent and Northstar Meetings Industry Pulse Survey (EMEA, May 2026) carries good news and a warning for M&E venues. Confidence is back: 43% of planners are more optimistic than they’ve been in a year, and 70% expect to run more meetings than last year. But dig into how planners rate the venues they’re working with, and the picture turns uncomfortable.

Satisfaction has fallen on almost every measure. Value for money is now the lowest-rated service of all, at 2.96 out of 5. Sales support, food and beverage, tech and AV, on-site production and sustainability have all slipped year on year. In short: demand is returning, but trust in what venues deliver is going the other way.

That’s the market Impact: VenueLens is built for.

Stop describing. Start proving.

When every venue’s ratings are sliding, every venue’s brochure sounds the same. Buyers have heard the claims before, and the numbers say they no longer believe them. Impact: VenueLens turns what your venue actually delivers into decision-grade intelligence – benchmarked against comparable spaces, evidenced across Environmental, Social and Governance. It’s the difference between telling a buyer you’re sustainable, safe and good value, and showing them a scorecard that proves it against your peers.

 

Escape the race to the bottom

Cost pressure dominates this survey. More than a third of planners say they’ll switch to lower-cost venues when budgets tighten, and value for money is where they’re least satisfied. Compete on rate alone and you lose. Impact: VenueLens gives you a different currency: the Social Value Yield (SaVY) of your proposition, which and how many UN SDGs you align with in your event and how well your sustainability infrastructure is used on that specific event.. This reframes the conversation from “cheapest room” to “most value per pound” – and, just as importantly, it arms the planner with the evidence to justify choosing you to their own boardroom, at a time when only 17% expect revenue to grow. Help buyers make their internal case and you become the easy “yes.”

Get your proof in early

The biggest structural shift in the survey is timing. Planners are now sourcing seven to twelve months out, and Cvent is clear that buyers are shortlisting on performance, not just capacity and rate. Longer lead times mean more scrutiny, earlier. A pre-event Impact: VenueLens review means your evidence is ready to drop into the bid before the buyer even asks – while your competitors are still scrambling to answer ESG questions late on.

More than carbon

Look beyond emissions and the survey rewards it. Duty of care and emergency planning is a rising concern, and health and safety is the factor buyers are most satisfied with – proof they care. Those are Social and Governance strengths VenueLens evidences directly, turning “we’re safe and well-run” into a benchmarked, audited score.

Demand is back. Trust isn’t – yet. The venues that win the next cycle won’t be the ones with the best story. They’ll be the ones with the proof.

Prove your performance. Make it the reason you win the business. Talk to event:decision about Impact: VenueLens.

Credibility can’t be bought. But you can earn it.

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Buy the badge. Join the scheme. Add the logo to the deck. Sponsor the award. Put “passionate about sustainability” in the bio and let the halo do the rest.

It doesn’t work like that. Credibility isn’t a purchase. It’s a balance you build up slowly and lose in an afternoon. And the only currency that pays into it is evidence.

LinkedIn’s 2025 B2B Marketing Benchmark found that 94% agree that trust is the most important factor in achieving B2B brand success.

The good news is that evidence is earnable. Here’s how.

The say-do gap

Ask almost any organisation whether sustainability is a top priority, and the answer is yes. Survey after survey says the same thing: it’s on the board agenda, it’s in the values statement, it’s “central to how we operate.” Stated intent has never been higher.

Then look at what actually gets measured.

That’s where the gap appears. Across the events we’ve measured and benchmarked with Impact and Track, the pattern is stubbornly consistent: the thing everyone says matters most is the thing fewest people can put a number against.

In carbon terms it’s Travel, that much is well-known. Travel is by far the largest slice of nearly every event footprint we calculate, routinely 70% and not rarely above 90% – is the category most often left unmeasured, unmanaged and unmentioned in the post-event report. Organisations declare the priority; the data shows the priority hasn’t reached the events floor yet.

This isn’t an accusation. It’s an opportunity. Because the gap between what organisations say and what they can show is precisely the space where credibility is won.

If everyone is claiming priority and almost no one is producing proof, then proof is the differentiator.

Credibility is a metric, not a mood

A pledge is…well ask any politician how many pledges are kept. A score is a fact. The difference matters because your clients have stopped accepting words and are looking for deeds.

The questions coming down the line are harder than they were even two years ago. Not “are you sustainable?” -mwhich invites a yes – but “show me.” Show me the number. Show me how this event compares to my last one. Show me how it compares to everyone else’s. Show me what you’d change, and by how much it would move.

You cannot answer those questions with a badge. You can answer them with metrics and outputs. That’s what Impact was built to produce.

What Impact actually puts on the table

Impact assesses an event against 30 defined criteria spanning all three ESG pillars – environmental, social and governance – and turns them into things you can hand to a client without flinching:

A benchmark, because a score in isolation is meaningless. Impact compares your event against the wider event industry, against your sector, against your event type – so “good” stops being a self-assessment and starts being a relative, defensible position.

A gap analysis, because credibility isn’t claiming you’re perfect; it’s knowing exactly where you aren’t, and saying so first. The highest-priority improvements, named and ranked.

An SDG view, with every factor now mapped to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and shown by event – so you can tell a client not just how you scored, but which of the world’s seventeen agreed goals each choice advanced. That’s the language their board and their delegates already use.

And increasingly, a Social Value Yield – a real number against the “S”  in ESG that most events leave entirely unclaimed, where credible programmes are generating value worth 10–30% of budget and simply not counting it.

Those are outputs. They’re comparable, repeatable and external. They survive scrutiny because they were built to be scrutinised.

Outputs beat intentions, every time

Here’s the quiet test of whether something earns credibility: could a sceptic check it?

Intent fails that test instantly. A logo fails it. A certificate that describes how a building was constructed tells you nothing about how your event ran inside it. But a per-event score, benchmarked against peers and traced back to source data, holds up – because the sceptic can check it, and it still stands.

That’s also why measurement beats accreditation as a credibility strategy. Accreditation tells the world you cleared a bar once. Measurement tells the world what happened this time, and the next, and the time after that. Credibility compounds through repetition, and only measurement repeats.

Track keeps the carbon side honest

On the environmental pillar, Track is the reality check. It produces the carbon footprint without the data-entry burden that stops most agencies before they start – which matters, because the say-do gap is, more than anything, a measurement-effort gap. People don’t avoid the number because they don’t care. They avoid it because it’s been hard.

Remove the friction and the evidence appears. And the evidence Track produces tends to tell organisations the uncomfortable, useful truth: that the footprint they assumed was about materials and waste is actually about travel, and that the lever they’ve been pulling isn’t the one that moves the number. That’s not a comfortable finding. It is a credible one – and credible beats comfortable every time you’re in front of a client who’s done their homework.

Earn it, one measured event at a time

Credibility can’t be bought because it was never for sale. It’s the accumulated weight of evidence you’ve been willing to produce, publish and be judged against – event after event, score after score, gap honestly named and then closed.

So if sustainability really is a top priority, prove it the only way that counts.

Measure the event. Benchmark it. Show the gaps. Put a number on the value. Then do it again.

That’s not a badge. That’s a track record. And a track record is the one thing nobody can buy out from under you.