By Rayna Katz
The average person might think that, of all industries, the meeting industry must do education right. After all, if event organizers in this field don’t know what comprises a good educational session, who does?
But that average Joe, or Joan, would be wrong. Seismic economic shifts in recent years, new technologies and changing demographics have converged and led meeting planners, suppliers and consultants to the meetings and conventions field to demand much more from professional education than what they’re being offered by the industry’s various associations.
“We’ve gotten very good at building the logistics of a meeting, but no one comes back to a conference because it was the best organized,” said Jeff Hurt, director of education and engagement at Velvet Chainsaw Consulting, a meeting industry consulting firm. “It’s like we can build a glass but we’re not focused on what’s in it.”
He continued, “Education is one of the main reasons people go to a conference, and industry organizations aren’t evaluating whether learning is occurring. Instead, they’re looking at the ‘smile sheet,’ which tells them whether people are happy they are there.
That realization—coupled with tight budgets and increasing time constraints in light of staff reductions—is forcing meeting planners to scrutinize what they’re getting from their industry associations.
“People are asking themselves what’s cost effective and where they’ll get the best education,” says Joan Eisenstodt, president of Eisenstodt Associates, a meeting planning and consulting firm. “They’re making tough decisions when the dollars are limited, because the cost of attending conferences is prohibitive.”
Fortunately, the organizations have taken notice and are making changes. In fact, sweeping changes have taken place in recent months at one entity, while another made big adjustments to its annual conference last year and a third has gone high-tech.
Is it enough? Time will tell. But one thing’s for sure: it’s a new day in industry education.
At the Professional Convention Management Association, more partnerships have been struck recently than one might find created at a speed dating event.
Following the debut of the annual Americas Meetings & Events Exhibition in Baltimore last June, PCMA joined forces with the show as its exclusive strategic partner.
The event featured a hosted buyer program for planners as well as education for both buyers and suppliers, and it was co-located with other industry events. It was considered a rousing success.
Finally, PCMA seems to have honed in on a segment of the industry not typically associated with the organization: corporate meeting planners. In November of last year it announced plans to create an annual Global Corporate Summit. Slated to take place July 22-26 this year, in Scotland, the new event kills two birds with one stone: it goes after a growing niche for the association, and it responds to complaints from veteran planners who are ready for more sophisticated programming.
"PCMA membership of corporate planners has grown by 67 percent this past year,” said David Peckinpaugh, president of Maritz Travel Company.
"We had our first corporate chairman of the board a few years ago, and then Susan Katz, director of corporate events and travel at True Value, was at the helm last year,” said PCMA’s COO, Sherrif Karamat.
“PCMA has a strong corporate task force to develop this niche,” he continued. “The corporate focus may be coming together now, but it’s been in the works for a decade.”
Previously, the association launched its Virtual Edge Summit, a program for producers of virtual events, or hybrid meetings that combine face-to-face gatherings with virtual elements.
In other words, PCMA staff and the board know that education and its delivery systems need to continually be reinvented.
“We’re not about to sit back and rest on our past," Karamat said. "You have to continue to evolve.”
Officials at ASAE agreed. The association radically reinvented its educational programming last year. Although it learned the need for this the hard way, said Velvet Chainsaw’s Jeff Hurt.
“At the 2010 conference, people were sending out tweets like ‘I’m bored. I’ll be outside of xyz room in a few minutes.” The idea was for attendees to essentially form their own sessions and discuss the issues of the day.
ASAE officials declined to discuss the tweets, but the association did take action.
When it was ready to plan the 2011 conference, it “put together a task force of past attendees and education professionals to help create some new and different learning formats,” according to Amy Ledoux, senior vice president of meetings and expositions.
“We were getting feedback that even though the typical meeting formats of 75 minute breakout sessions worked for most attendees it did not work for all attendees,” she said.
As a result, ASAE set aside one designated breakout room, available all day long, for anyone to claim and start a discussion. The organization also rolled out three “game changer” sessions, which gave attendees the option of three “keynote type” topics and speakers to choose from in a time slot, or they had the option of a regular breakout session.
And it didn’t stop there, noted Ledoux. ASAE introduced a variety of cutting-edge learning styles, including “Ignite,” a five minute presentation format for which the motto is “enlighten us but make it quick”; and conversely, several half-day sessions which allowed for in-depth exploration of a topic.
“It is critical for organizations to constantly review their meeting content and formats to make sure that the conference experience engages attendees and exhibitors at all levels,” said Ledoux.
Meeting Professionals International must have done just that when it developed its “solution rooms,” a space at conferences for a guided session to narrow down what is on attendees’ minds. “That peer to peer interaction is so important,” said Diana Rogers, director of professional development.
MPI also is using technology to reach attendees. The association last year launched “Professional Development on Demand,” a learning portal comprised of 260 sessions for meeting planners to download to a smart phone to listen to or to a tablet to view a seminar. Currently, the education sessions are sortable by topic and then by the levels of ‘novice,’ ‘intermediate,’ and ‘advanced,’ Rogers noted.
But in a sign of wanting to keep giving attendees more, the association is considering adding an even higher level of educational content, Rogers revealed.
“It ties into what seems to be the unofficial catch phrase of everyone in this profession now: aim higher.”
