Ira Kerns founded MeetingMetrics^SM in 2006 and formed its parent, GuideStar Research, in 1987 in New York City. He is the firm's Managing Director. GuideStar is a Web-centric survey research firm specializing in the measurement and quality improvement of its clients' primary business relationships - with employees, customers, distribution channel networks, licensee/franchise networks and alliance partners.

Organizational communications research is one of GuideStar's core capabilities - measuring and consulting on the effectiveness of an organization's communications effectiveness through communications audits and large group meeting measurement.

Kerns leads a staff of experienced research analysts and consultants, predominantly Ph.D. level professionals specializing in organizational and social psychology. The combined GuideStar-MeetingMetrics staff is supported by an extended network of research professionals in North America.

The firm has developed proprietary, validated methods and technologies for diagnosing, measuring and analyzing the quality of relationships between organizations and the groups that matter most to their success. Kerns is the primary collaborator with Howard V. Perlmutter, Ph.D. and Emeritus Professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, in the development of Deep DialogSM relationship research methodology and analysis.

As the firm's Principal Consultant, Kerns is a trusted advisor to the senior leadership of GuideStar's clients, Kerns provides strategic counsel on the improvement of key relationships that impact the firm's clients' business outcomes.

Kerns is a pioneer in the measurement and productivity improvement of large group meetings and events using pre- and post-event surveys and measures which he developed originally as the Meeting Productivity Process (MPP) in the early 1980's.This process is the methodological foundation for the MeetingMetrics online service.

Kerns has extensive experience in the meeting industry. Before founding GuideStar and developing MeetingMetrics, Kerns was Chairman of Creative Establishment, Inc., a leading national corporate communications agency for seventeen years. CE specialized in premier meeting and event programs for Fortune 500 companies, specifically, the design, production and staging of major corporate meetings, shows, teleconferences and other communication events as well as award winning audio/visual presentations video, film and multi-image and corporate communication programs

As a writer and creative director, Kerns has designed and scripted literally hundreds of executive meeting presentations. The company was the most awarded production firm in industry festivals, primarily AMI and the New York Film and TV Festival, for three years in succession. Among CE's major innovations was the development of audio/visual adaptations of important business books such as "Megatrends', "In Search Of Excellence" and "The Marketing Imagination"

Mr. Kerns was a founding member of MPI, Meeting Professionals International, and a director and past President of CAPA, the Chicago AudioVisual Producers Association, comprised of over sixty member firms.

Mr. Kerns also founded the Chicago Coalition, an organization of over 20,000 professionals to protect the community from runaway productions and revitalize the television commercial industry in Chicago. The revitalization, growth and prosperity of the production industry in Chicago during the seventies is acknowledged to be a result of the Coalition's formation and actions.

Dr. Bulgarella’s work at MeetingMetrics^sm and GuideStar has involved the management of numerous research projects supporting the design and planning of corporate and association meetings and the performance measurement of these key communication events.  Working in collaboration with professional meeting planners, and corporate and association executives, the thrust of Dr. Bulgarella’s work in this area has been understanding drivers of success and optimal performance for events that really want to make the difference and harvest powerful and long-lasting results at the organizational level. 

Using the MPP approach, Dr. Bulgarella has conducted insightful pre-meeting research, both qualitative and quantitative, providing her clients with research-based guidance for designing and developing meeting content that can effectually meet attendees’ needs and expectations, while helping organizations and organizers produce events that meet critical objectives.  At the same time, her work has focused on measuring large events’ performance by using a strategic approach aimed at evaluating the role of such events in the larger organizational picture. 

Dr. Bulgarella has years of research experience in various areas of organizational consulting such as employee satisfaction and loyalty, employee morale, job burnout, ethics in the workplace, conflict and negotiation, competition, leadership, individual and group decision-making processes.  As a skilled analyst with command of several advanced statistical techniques, Dr. Bulgarella seeks to extricate the layered levels of information that complex data-sets capture, evaluating the impact of specific findings against key outcome variables and strategic frameworks. 

Prior to joining GuideStar, Dr. Bulgarella worked for several years as an independent researcher at New York University where she also taught undergraduate courses in Statistics and Applied Psychology.  Before moving to the States, Dr. Bulgarella lived in Italy where she worked in the HR field. 

Dr. Bulgarella received a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, and an M.A. in Personnel Psychology from New York University.  She also received a Baccalaureate in Business Administration from Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Italy. 

Mr. Watts specializes in modeling survey data to estimate the antecedents to behaviors and beliefs, such as purchase data and satisfaction data. Most of his experience is in market research data, but has also directed projects in customer relations management, employee retention, and segmentation of employee preferences for benefits bundles.

He uses structural equation modeling methods to make path diagrams of the explanations of customer satisfaction and retention. He also applies the technique to purchase data from customer panels and in jury selection. He uses conditional categorical modeling to analyze event history data and brand choice experiments.

Event history analysis is an important part of understanding large ticket purchases of households. EHA uses panel data of shopping behaviors prior to purchase to understand how household choose to purchase any of a product category and how decision-makers sort through choices for a final selection.

The data for explanatory models is typically five-point or seven-point ratings scales, raising the question of the meaning of a ‘4’ or a ‘5’ rating to the customer. Mr. Watts applies multiple classification analysis to estimate the percentage reward or penalty for intent to purchase that comes from moving a customer upward (or downward) along a rating scale. In other words the procedure can show the client the reward they can gain for managing customer satisfaction upward on each of the salient product/service attributes.

Modeling is the first step for profitably segmenting a customer class. An overall model of customer satisfaction or purchase preferences masks differences in what underlies satisfaction, customer retention or selection. It’s possible to see some of the segments differences by comparing feature differences in the leading brands of a product category, but such a comparison does not lead to product innovations that reflect current unmet customer needs. Segmentation requires modeling current choices as well as potential choices of hypothetical brand changes to see if latent segments exist, untapped by currently configured brands.

Mr. Watts forms segment definitions from several perspectives. For estimating clusters in single brand intent to purchase or customer satisfaction he uses mixture modeling regressions which find subgroups within the data set that have significantly different choice criteria, that is, the regression coefficients are tested to be different from each other. This technique finds and sizes the price-sensitive group and compares their profile to those seeing greater differences in product/service benefits.

Although most of his education was gained from experience Mr. Watts received an MA in econometrics from Memphis University. He has attended modeling seminars in data modeling at Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania Wharton School and Columbia University.