Bonnie Grant
Executive Director
Greater Philadelphia Life Sciences Congress
Bonnie Grant came to medical meetings from marketing, first for the City of Philadelphia, then for the Philadelphia Eagles football team.
“From the destination perspective, medical meetings is a buyers’ market. Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Orlando, Houston, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Denver and a growing list of destinations are wooing the same customers.
Medical is a very coveted market because there are so many things constantly changing on the health care landscape and they are constantly having meetings about it. With every discipline and disease, there are hundreds of medical meetings every year.
Planners should ask early in the process how they can effectively build attendance and what resources a CVB has to connect them with industry leadership in the area. The key to a successful event is connecting to local leadership in your association, specialty or industry segment. If your meeting includes a special outreach to students or fellows, maybe a special day or discounted pricing, we know who to go to in each of our local medical schools. If you want more exhibitors to be aware of opportunities at your event, we can do the data mining, we can work with industry codes, we can send those highly targeted communications for you.
As a CVB, we spend a lot of time figuring out who does what in the local health care landscape. If we don’t know, we know who to ask. And CVB services are always free for planners.”
