This story is part of a special section from The Meeting Professional, brought to you by 

When the Society for Incentive Travel Excellence (SITE) held its Global Conference in Thailand in January, the organization gave everyone something to remember the event by: The Bangkok Manifesto.

“They are 10 statements that define and represent what we believe our community thinks of the state of the industry,” says Didier Scaillet, CIS, CIPT, SITE’s CEO.

The Manifesto was an attempt to close a gap SITE saw for a clear statement to guide the industry in the coming year.

“It’s quite a lofty aim we have with the Manifesto,” says Padraic Gilligan, SITE’s chief marketing officer. “Without having a statement that sets out exactly what it is you stand for, it’s hard to know how to behave on a day-to-day basis. We didn’t have a credo, a belief statement, that helps us all to understand what we were part of creating.”

Although the statements that emerged from the effort were crowdsourced, The Bangkok Manifesto didn’t happen by accident. Considerable planning went into creating the innovative process that elicited the document.

The facilitator was Martin Sirk, former executive director of the International Conference & Convention Association and now the owner of the strategic consultancy Sirk Serendipity in the Netherlands.

“I don’t know of any organization in the meeting industry that has tried to design this type of policy statement,” Sirk says.

Before the Global Conference, SITE’s international board of directors, trustees of the SITE Foundation and a group of global experts involved in incentive travel came together in a series of invitation-only workshops to get the project rolling. The initial group of about 28 people came up with 40 statements about the nature, purpose and direction of incentive travel for potential inclusion in the Manifesto. Then, using a crowdsourcing exercise, they whittled the list further, to 26 points. They did so in a 90-minute session guided by the meeting organizers as to the broad themes they might cover.

“The real challenge was to contain all of this work into a very limited space and time,” Sirk says.

At a second, 75-minute meeting with chapter leaders and strategic partners, the group trimmed the 26 statements to 15.

“Statements no one could really get behind fell by the wayside,” Sirk says. “We made sure we ended up with 15 that clearly had far higher scores than the others.”

Once the full conference assembly was in session, SITE asked the crowd to choose the 10 statements that would serve as the Manifesto for the coming year by voting. The statements were polished for clarity prior to the session. During the voting, attendees were asked to identity one statement that, if NOT included, would annoy them, or those whose omission would be a serious loss, to make sure the emerging list was true to what the group believed.

“It was very important to get validation that everyone felt they could get behind the final Manifesto,” Sirk says. “We felt the Manifesto had to speak to a wide range of audiences. It had to be something that spoke to individuals and companies planning to get into the incentives industry. It had to speak to companies considering using incentives as a motivational tool. It had to speak to other stakeholders, policymakers and city leaders to get people to understand the nature of incentive travel and its role as a critical tool for good business.”

The organizers were well aware an event like this could end up being unpredictable.

“In this sort of live event, you really don’t know how this is going to go,” Sirk says. “These people are the thought leaders of the business. If this paper doesn’t reflect what the industry stands for, they will tell you.”

However, the tight timeframe worked in favor of creating a strong document.

“The limited time forces people to think intelligently and quickly,” Sirk says. “If you go to people when they are focusing much more on their day jobs, it’s difficult to get people to apply time to this particular exercise.”

The Manifesto was formally passed in the General Closing Session of the conference, with 92 percent adoption among the roughly 200 people in the room who voted. SITE used Slido, an audience engagement platform, to elicit input from the attendees via their smartphones.

“We wanted to make sure this was as grassroots as possible,” Scaillet says.

Once completed, The Bangkok Manifesto was published on SiteGlobal.com.

Scaillet says the Manifesto is aimed at bringing a cohesive message to four audiences: SITE and its community; the meeting, events and incentive travel industry; the corporate market; and society at large.

“We’re making sure travel and the joint experience of people traveling together is perceived as something positive,” Scaillet says.

Among the key points in the document that emerged:

• Every stakeholder in the incentive travel industry should embrace social responsibility.
• Relationships and team building build business results, not isolated individual effort.
• Luxury in the future will be defined by “authentic, unique and personal experiences,” rather than logos and brands.

Although the 10 points of the Manifesto are not listed in order of priority, Scaillet says he is pleased by the voters’ selection of the first one, which speaks to social responsibility.

“It’s valuable, in terms of the industry being very responsible,” he says. “We are wanting to go to new places, unusual places, wild places, but the industry feels it has responsibility toward the local communities. It needs to source as much as possible locally and has a role to play in terms of leaving a legacy.

“Yes, we are bringing top salespeople and winners who are over-achievers within their own organization into luxurious and very unique places, but there is a sense that over and above bringing these people over there, we need to leave something positive and be careful about the use of the resource.”

Among the inspirations for the Manifesto, Gilligan says, was The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book by “four geek hippies” which, when it was published in 1999, anticipated some of the changes the internet would bring to the world of work. Another inspiration was the Burning Man festival’s manifesto, which looks at what the festival will be about. The European Cities Marketing Group’s manifesto on the future of destination marketing organizations provided further creative fuel.

“These are the touchpoints that helped us draw together our thoughts,” Gilligan says.

SITE considers The Bangkok Manifesto to be a living document—meaning it will change over time. The group plans to draft a Vancouver Manifesto, using a similar process, at its conference in 2020.

“It’s an evolving document that will take its name from wherever it is located,” Gilligan says. “We will use the full assembly at that conference to harvest native statements about the major purpose and direction of incentive travel.”

The activity around The Bangkok Manifesto will not be confined to the conference. In the next stage of the project, SITE will invite 10 industry leaders to comment on the statements, Gilligan says.

“Each of these 10 leaders will choose a statement and write a 300-word commentary on that particular statement, fleshing it out, giving it a broader scope of reference, giving it some substance and body,” he says.

The statements will be published in time for IMEX Frankfurt in late May.

In addition, every quarter, SITE will issue short videos about one or two statements.

“We are going to bring more information and knowledge about it in terms of what it truly means,” Scaillet says. “We want to make sure that regularly, throughout the year, we provide more context, more data and more knowledge about specific statements.”

SITE will model these after the videos the World Economic Forum is producing regularly, Scaillet says.

“You will see videos giving great insight into societal issues, ecological issues and so forth,” he says.

The Bangkok Manifesto has emerged at a time when the incentive travel industry is thriving.

“Incentive travel is still the fastest-growing segment of the business events industry,” Scaillet says. “We are growing faster than corporate meetings, association meetings and trade shows.”

Valuations in the corporate world were driven by tangible assets 40 years ago, notes Scaillet, but that has changed.

“It was about the factory. It was about the product,” he says. “Today, 85 percent of it is linked to intangible assets—patents, technology, people. Organizations are now realizing the true value of their organization lies in their people. They are realizing that attracting and keeping top talent is absolutely essential to their future.”

That trend, in turn, has led them to consider how they are compensating their teams.

“Corporations are realizing that non-cash rewards are that golden nugget,” Scaillet says. “Rather than giving each employee an additional $5,000, you can privatize the Louvre in Paris for 600 people. This is something they cannot buy for themselves. This is something the corporation can buy.”

If The Bangkok Manifesto is effective in achieving its goals, that message will be a lot clearer to corporate clients in the coming year.