Your business is learning to do entirely new things to survive the pandemic. Your business relies on innovation and you need to be able to commercialise it fast. So, your vision for the role procurement plays in your company is more important now that it ever was before. Because your business can’t learn to do new things or commercialise innovation quickly without the support of your suppliers.

Your supplier day can’t wait. It’s an opportunity for you to reinforce your vision and to provide purpose, focus and direction to your supplier community. Taking your supplier day virtual means that you can genuinely make it about people, not places. And all whilst reducing costs, increasing impact and improving outcomes.

Reduce Costs.

• Save time for everyone involved: without the need to travel to your event, you’ll have far greater access to the most important people.

• Save time on planning: a virtual event simply takes less time to arrange and no longer do you need to set your date months in advance to ensure your C-levels can attend.

• Greatly reduce marketing, travel and operating costs: with a virtual event there is no need to source a venue, arrange hotels and book flights.

Increase Impact.

• Focus on what’s really important: going virtual forces you to make choices about what’s essential and how to use participants’ time wisely.

• Create consistent moments: because virtual supplier days are cheaper and take less time to plan you can host smaller events more frequently to provide cohesion to your overall supplier communications strategy.

• Split your agenda: you’re not confined to hosting an intensive 2-day event. Consider a more dynamic sprint-style, split into smaller segments across multiple days.

• Leverage the power of digital: virtual events platforms provide you with greater insight into attendee activity and engagement to help you understand a more accurate return on investment.

Improve Outcomes.

• Build your innovation pipeline: facilitate sessions to exchange ideas and uncover compelling opportunities. Utilise your virtual platform to capture potential supplier projects to follow up afterwards.

• Align on your strategy: with more frequent events, you can use your supplier days to involve your suppliers earlier in key decision-making.

• Create a wider and more diverse community: attract more of the right audience by inviting appropriate participants for the most relevant sessions.

• Meet your sustainability targets: physical events product >500kg of CO2 per attendee. Hosting your event online is an easy and immediate way to reduce your environmental footprint.

Your vision and the need to galvanise your supplier community around it is too important to be left to boring email communications. COVID-19 has presented to us a watershed moment for how we communicate. The necessity to go virtual was borne out of crisis but the choice of how effectively you utilise virtual is yours.