PCMA’s Annual Meeting is under way here and preliminary numbers show that the conference is already a success, at least in terms of registration numbers.
The Dallas meeting, held Jan. 10-13 at the Dallas Convention Center, surpassed last year’s number of attendees for the New Orleans show, which came in at a final count of 3,134. PCMA said it will not release final attendance numbers until after the meeting ends. The association’s 2008 meeting in Seattle currently holds the attendance record, with approximately 3,400 attendees.
“PCMA is doing very well, and you can see that in this conference,” said Deborah Sexton, president & CEO of PCMA. “We have gone beyond last year’s numbers…and we did very well last year.
“In late November and early December we weren’t where we are today,” Sexton continued. “We got a lot of late registrations.”
PCMA also said it will add its Executive Edge meeting in Washington, D.C., as a lead-off to the popular Springtime in the Park meetings industry event.
Sexton said that the attendee pickup was due to more planners registering. As of Jan. 9, the association said it had 100 more meeting planners on the roll as attendees compared to last year, with less attendees representing the supplier community.
Sexton added that membership retention in 2009 will probably come in at approximately 78 percent, but final numbers won’t be available until early March.
The association is also working on an economic impact study in conjunction with PriceWaterhouse Coopers to help determine the value meetings bring to the economy. Sexton said the cost of the study is expected to be somewhere between $500,000 to $600,000, before additional costs such as distributing the information and marketing.
Other PCMA news included the results of a task force conducted before the event, which opened up the possibility of more clearly defining the role of suppliers in its membership categories, as is currently done by MPI.
The 2010 conference also featured a much higher profile for those engaged in social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook, with PCMA addressing the social networking revolution in its general sessions. The association also for the first time is broadcasting Annual Meeting video content in hopes of driving face-to-face attendance for next year’s show, which will be held in Las Vegas.
