Successful Meetings - January 2008 - 19

> Associations MPI Raising the Bar on PEC The largest meeting-planner association in the world, Dallas-based Meeting Professionals International, is making bold moves in the planning of its next major educational conference and trade show. The 20,000-member association’s Professional Education Conference (PEC), to be held February 2-5 in Houston, has been branded “Meet Different.” And “different” is indeed the operative word for this event. Not only have a majority of the educational sessions been replaced with new topics, but the sessions will become far more interactive before, during, and after the live event. And the exhibit floor has been completely revamped—the traditional grid configuration comprising pipe-and-drape booths has been scrapped in favor of an open-floor, lounge-heavy layout design which one MPI planner member described as “like nothing I have ever seen.” The association began the transformation of its event offerings at its World Education Conference (WEC), held last July in Montreal. There, keynote speaker Don Tapscott spoke about the blogs, wikis, realtime polling systems, and other applications that are changing communication, and which can be used to greatly enhance the quality and effective lifespan of in-person events. Besides using a blog on the event’s site weeks before the event to gauge attendee interest on possible topics he’d present, Tapscott also modified his session on the fly based on instant audience polling, and maintained a wiki after the event to keep attendees interacting and learning. That was just the beginning, says MPI President and CEO Bruce MacMillan. “The ‘Meet Different’ idea came from seeing that our members are trying to succeed under a truly different set of parameters than in the past, which now includes social media and corporate social responsibility. So we used focus groups and other means to ask SUCCESSFUL MEETINGS JANUARY 2008 News & Analysis members, ‘Are your meetings evolving and changing at the same pace your business is changing? And what aspects of creating effective meetings and events are keeping you up at night?’ It’s probably not good for any organization to have the same type of meeting and event model year after year when so many elements in business are changing.” —Robert Carey

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Successful Meetings - January 2008

Successful Meetings - January 2008
Contents
Editor's Note
Associations
Research
Events
Suppliers
Associations
On the Record
Associations
Suppliers
Planner Spotlight
Websites of the Month
Management Matters
Meeting the Law
Personal Success
Mouth for Sale
Food & Beverage
Professional Development
On Site
Pre-Event
Tools of the Trade
Veggie Power
Tennis, Anyone?
Seeing is Believing
The Wild Green Yonder
Game On
Places & Spaces
Galveston & Texas Beaches
Greater Seattle
Singapore
Gurus

Successful Meetings - January 2008