Streamlining the Sales Funnel for Event Venues with Sustainable Digital Twins Technology

In the competitive world of hospitality and event management, venues are constantly seeking innovative ways to attract and retain clients for conferences, meetings, and other in-person events. While all types of strategies are being explored to gain the consumer edge, venue managers are finding success using a somewhat surprising tactic: Sustainability.

Today’s event organizers are increasingly prioritizing venues that not only meet their logistical needs but also align with their sustainability goals. As businesses face heightened scrutiny from stakeholders and investors to develop and operate more sustainably, the demand for environmentally conscious event solutions is rapidly increasing.

To stay ahead in this evolving and sometimes confusing landscape, venues should look to embrace innovative technologies that address sustainability demands and help solve some of the challenges event hosts face in modern hospitality.

One such innovation is digital twins technology – a powerful tool that creates virtual replicas of physical spaces, allowing for real-time planning and optimization all from behind a computer screen. Digital twins provides venue managers with a green solution that can be passed on to sustainability-focused businesses hosting events, helping sell space more efficiently and creating sustainable pathways for those looking to reduce their negative social and environmental impact.

Below, we explore how event venues can use digital twin technologies to streamline their sales funnel and help customers solve the pressing challenges faced in the rapidly changing sustainability landscape.

Key sustainability challenges faced by event hosts.

A clear shift towards sustainable business is underway, driven by increasing consumer demands, stringent expectations from investors, and the need for companies to align with global environmental goals.

The growing importance of sustainability can be seen in numerous aspects of development and operation.

1. Sustainability reporting requirements

Many hospitality businesses and event hosts now face annual sustainability reporting, which, depending on the business, requires them to clearly and transparently document and communicate their social and environmental efforts to stakeholders and regulatory bodies.

As regulations tighten and expectations from stakeholders intensify, transparency in sustainability efforts is becoming the norm, which requires some form of environmental accounting and monitoring. For event hosts, this means a heightened focus on minimizing the environmental and economic footprint associated with conferences, meetings, and other gatherings.

2. Supply chain disruptions and inefficiencies

Supply chain disruptions and inefficiencies are serious concerns for event managers, and over the past years, it has become painfully clear just how vulnerable global supply chains are. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine, for example, caused massive supply chain disruptions for all sorts of materials and products. The interruptions impacted areas far outside of the conflict zone, driving up material prices and affecting supply-demand dynamics.

Now that we know how vulnerable our supply chains are, many are looking to build resilience to these types of situations.

One solution for event managers is partnering with event venues that help alleviate supply chain vulnerabilities and support sustainability goals – be it through immersive event planning technologies, local partnerships, or event supply services.

With supply chains accounting for nearly 90% of a standard company’s supply chain emissions, event managers should first look to supply chain optimization to see significant (and quick) improvements.

3. Customer and investor demand

Consumer and investor demands increasingly influence how event managers choose venues for in-person experiences, and a clear and powerful shift toward sustainability is underway. Businesses are pressured to adopt greener practices, partner with sustainability-focused businesses, and optimize their supply chains to lower operational impacts on the planet.

For event leaders, this means ditching the venues that are not making a clear effort to put people and the planet above profit and moving towards those with a defined and progressive outlook on sustainability.

With 87% of US consumers willing to support and pay more for products and services with a sustainability mission and action plan in place, it’s a no-brainer for event leaders to choose more sustainable venues to drive consumer alignment and increase brand loyalty.

Digital twins: sustainability solutions for event leaders going green

With more and more pressure to reduce an event’s environmental impact, event leaders should begin searching for venues that can help them reduce emissions, energy, and waste generated from each event – whether in the planning process or the event itself.

One strategy for event managers will be to employ venues, technologies, and services that simplify and streamline environmental accounting. This is where venues equipped with digital twins will shine and provide value that most other event venues can’t.

Digital twins technology can be deployed as a forward-facing example of how to host events more sustainably, and it can be used as a sales tool to promote spaces that help solve customers’ sustainability concerns.

1. Sustainability reporting

Event venues equipped with digital twin technology can provide businesses and event hosts with tangible strategies that address annual sustainability reporting challenges. Digital twins help create a virtual replica of the venue for exploration and event design, which significantly reduces the environmental impacts of an event through the planning and preparation process.

Some digital twin platforms even allow for real-time energy and resource data monitoring, which could come with specific KPIs that could be used within carbon reporting, resource reporting, and other aspects of sustainable operations.

Emissions metrics and other KPIs

By eliminating or reducing the need for in-person planning and preparation at the event venue, event organizers inherently reduce the amount of carbon emissions generated and resources used in the planning stages.

Tools like carbon calculators can help benchmark current and historical carbon emissions through the event planning process, which can then be used to showcase how tools like digital twins can help reduce overall emissions and support broader climate goals.

Planning efficiency and optimization

Digital twins enable venues to simulate various scenarios and optimize the event for resources used and waste generated. A business that hosts annual events may be able to go back in its records to see the amount of resources used or how much waste was generated at each event. From there, they can work backward and assess the savings associated with the virtual planning software.

All of these data can be used to showcase sustainability efforts within yearly reports.

Real-time data and analytics (looking ahead)

In the near future, digital twins will be able to provide continuous, real-time data on various operational metrics. For example, they should be able to integrate with building infrastructure to monitor energy consumption, water usage, and waste generation throughout the event, which is beneficial for producing detailed sustainability reports and showcasing the reduced environmental impact when using digital twins for events.

Event hosts will be able to use these metrics to document reductions in energy use and waste and identify key areas for improvement moving forward.

2. Supply chain efficiency

Venues equipped with digital twins enable event hosts to manage resources more effectively, reduce waste, and streamline operations, which directly addresses the inefficiencies impacting event logistics.

By choosing venues that leverage such advanced technologies, event managers can ensure smoother, more sustainable events that align with their green priorities, ultimately mitigating supply chain disruptions and reinforcing their commitment to environmental responsibility.

Here’s a closer look at how digital twins helps reduce supply chain inefficiencies and optimize the event process for fewer problems and less negative environmental impact.

Optimized resource management

Digital twins can help forecast resource needs and optimize how they are sourced and shipped to the venue. For instance, they can predict how much food or materials will be used based on event types and guest attendance to avoid overuse and reduce costs.

Digital twins can even model different scenarios, allowing hosts to make more informed decisions and avoid potential problems with food, materials, and waste.

Vendor coordination

Digital twins offers a centralized, collaborative platform where all of the event’s vendors and stakeholders can access up-to-date information about the venue’s layout, schedules, and resource needs. Digital twins allow event coordinators to play with and try out everything from event layouts to materials used, and each vendor can be tapped in during the planning process to prevent miscommunication.

The collaborative, immersive technology allows for everyone along the event’s supply chain to be involved from start to finish, reducing the worry about things like material availability, delivery timelines, cost, last-minute changes, and more.

Reduced environmental impact

The virtual planning and collaborative capabilities of digital twins help reduce the environmental impacts of a typical event. Since more can be done remotely, fewer people will be traveling to meet the needs of the event – both pre-event and the day of.

Further, since food, materials, and resources can all be optimized and predicted through virtual planning, it reduces the need for last-minute transportation, deliveries, and anything else that could compound carbon emissions associated with an event.

3. Customer and investor alignment

Outside of the financial, environmental, and logistical benefits of choosing a venue with digital twins or similar immersive 3-D design technologies, event hosts see undeniable benefits in customer and investor relations when employing green technologies at events.

According to one study, investor interests in ESG are booming, with over 40% of global investors positioning their investments in businesses that are making a clear effort to operate more sustainably. In the hospitality and events industries, this means choosing venues that can help drive brand awareness and reputation through sustainable practices, such as employing digital twins to reduce the social and environmental impacts of an event.

Digital twins help optimize resource use, eliminate redundancies with materials and their supply chains, and drive awareness with actionable insights throughout an event’s lifecycle. One of the biggest benefits of this is that these green technologies not only help eliminate cost and reduce the environmental impact of an event, but they also offer material and content that can be recycled into customer campaigns and investor meetings.

By showcasing a clear commitment to more sustainable operations and having the data and information to back the efforts, businesses can stand out from their competitors and act as leaders around sustainability in hospitality and event planning. This could lead to in-person speaking events, features in sustainable business outlets, or even drive awareness around industry-specific problems.

Customized sustainable solutions

Digital twins technology allows event hosts to completely customize the guest experience for all kinds of in-person events. Rather than making a “best guess” decision on venue layouts, food and materials, and other things that could impact an event, hosts can customize an event to match their company’s or event-specific sustainability goals.

For example, if a business that regularly hosts events and conferences had benchmarked its material and resources used in previous years but wanted to lower the impact for regulatory compliance moving forward, they could employ digital twins to showcase how they actively and intentionally used less of the core materials and resources.

While some digital twins technologies only offer sustainability benefits in the form of event planning, others (and more in the future) will also allow integration into energy systems for real-time insights and specific data parameters that can be used directly for reporting or communications purposes. As more venues and event leads begin to employ these technologies, we can expect to see digital twins’ capabilities gain traction toward innovative evolution.

Attracting green investments with transparency and accountability

According to Statista, investments in low-carbon growth across 21 emerging industries were estimated at over $10 trillion in 2022. In the hospitality industry, the story isn’t much different. Investors are increasingly prioritizing investments that show sustainable promise for people and the planet, and that trend is likely to continue as more technologies and innovations take the stage and continue to make a positive impact.

Businesses that employ digital twins for their events can demonstrate a clear commitment to sustainability and attract green investors for future growth. One of the benefits of digital twins is that it allows the user to access some level of data, be it for energy use, resources used, waste generated, or time spent in the planning process. These data directly translate to investor relations, and event leads can even develop things like case studies to show how the technology made a positive impact on annual operations.

Investors also love to see some level of awareness and risk management around sustainability, which Digital twins can help deliver clearly and transparently. By showcasing how a company is preparing and building resilience against the rapidly changing sustainability landscape, investors are more likely to trust the company to continue trends toward more sustainable long-term operations.

Long-term value creation

We know by now that by making internal changes, a business can lower its operational costs and reduce the waste generated through day-to-day operations. These changes inherently save businesses a ton over the mid to longer terms.

What is less visible is the long-term value generated through brand awareness and customer support.

By aligning a business with global green initiatives, preparing for regulatory and policy changes before they occur, and making changes that spark innovation and creativity, businesses inherently drive up the value of the business and its services through change resilience. Rather than making changes as needed when they happen, entities can now look to the future and make changes that can drive progress. This ultimately moves businesses ahead of sustainability hurdles before they happen, and digital twins are one solution that can help kickstart that journey.