Face2face is a blog about planning face-to-face meetings, conferences, conventions, and trade shows, plus business travel and hospitality news.
While many association meeting planners are looking at the daily news and anticipating lower attendance at their annual conventions this year, lets not forget that there are some (perhaps even many) who are bucking the trend. Like this one. Kevin Holland explains how his organization actually increased attendance at its recent conference–hint: it’s not just luck.
I want to hear more stories like this one.
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March 11th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Sue,
The California Physical Therapy Association (CPTA) also saw 41% increase in attendance from Sept 2007 to Sept 2008. As the economy was beginning its downturn last fall, we decided to reduce our member registration fee by 65%. We wanted to drop the price in order to encourage more members to participate. It worked!
I also feel that we had a strong program and good location. The location (Oakland) was accessible by BART, it does not carry the same cost as being in San Francisco, and those coming from suburbs (1-2 hours away) did not have to manage the traffic associated with driving in the city.
As most CA associations, we alternate the placement of our meeting between northern and southern CA. When looking to place 2010 in northern CA, I decided to scrap Sacramento and return to Oakland because of the large number of members in the Bay Area.
Our exhibitors are happy with the increase in attendance (we expanded our Hall by 15% in 2008). They also noted the positive attitude and optimistic outlook of our attendees.
I believe that in times of difficulty, professionals turn to their membership organizations or associations for help, support and the inside edge on information. Our members see and appreciate the steps that we are taking to ensure that they continued to be paid for their services and they recognize that we are the group fighting for them legislatively. Our membership numbers continue to grow each month as professional look to us to help them through these difficult times.
As a side note, I think that associations are a group/market that need to meet face to face in order to conduct business. Most association are non-profit and their members are volunteers. We do not have the resources that corporation do, nor the funding that the government does.
At the post con meeting in Oakland in 2008, the General Manager stated that we were the only group to exceed expectations by bringing more people to the meeting than we anticipated, by picking up more rooms and by consuming more services than expected. This made us feel good. We were thrilled that we made good decisions that brought so many more of our members out to our annual conference.
We are planning on the same numbers for 2009. No growth. One reason is the continued downturn in the economy. The other reason is that our national Association scheduled their annual conference in Las Vegas in February 2009 and San Diego in February 2010. We are sandwiched right in between! In February 2009 their meeting had over 8,000 people attend. 1,200 of them were from California. We expect that number to grow in 2010. If I can maintain the numbers at this year’s state conference that I had last fall, I will be thrilled! Already I am hearing people say, “I chose to spend my con ed dollars on the national meeting this year” and anticipate hearing the same next year. I will be working VERY hard to market and promote and encourage CA physical therapists to attend and support both meetings! Wish me success!
Rita
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