Our Most Demanding Audience
By Mitchell Beer | January 31, 2010
Meeting professionals, meet your future audience.
Last week, amid the hype and humour that greeted the release of the Apple iPad, some of the most pithy assessments of tablet technology came from a group of keen observers who will probably begin attending conferences in the next 10 to 15 years.
By the time they start arriving in our plenary halls and breakout sessions, we’ll probably want to be ready.
The analysis came from Portable Radio, a podcast series produced by Grade 5 students at South March and A. Lorne Cassidy Public Schools in suburban Ottawa. In the iPad episode, students from South March considered whether tablet devices will be the end of printed books.
“I think books will exist in the future, because lots of people don’t like computers or can’t afford them,” said one student. “Sometimes the screen hurts my eyes, and looking at a screen all day is bad for you.”
“I think books will always be wanted, even if technology invents other ways to read,” agreed one of her classmates. “When I go to bed, reading on a computer or BlackBerry is not as comforting as reading with a good book.”
“Books will not exist in the future because books are made of paper, paper comes from trees, and trees help circulate the air,” a student countered. “I bet that by the time we’re 30, we will each have a PDA, a cell phone, or a BlackBerry, and we will forget what a book is,” said one of the other children.
The Portable Radio podcast left me with a sense of hope for the future of meetings and events, tempered by the challenge of meeting the demands of a sophisticated new audience.
The children behind Portable Radio are a whole lot more articulate than I can remember being in elementary school. They quite obviously scripted their audio segments before they began recording. But it’s clear that they’re thinking in full paragraphs, not the sound bites that pass for business strategy or the monosyllables that substitute for political debate in adult circles.
At age 10, they’re learning to explore an issue from multiple angles, cut through the spin, and dig into the issues behind a news story or a press release.
And when they begin attending conferences, they’ll bring their high expectations and higher mental firepower along with them.
This generation of participants won’t much care whether the lunch menu calls for chicken or beef (though they may ask tougher, more informed questions about whether they’re eating a 100-mile diet). They won’t sit still for presentations that are long on motivational language but short on substance. They’ll expect to be heard and participate, whether their meeting is live or virtual. They’ll see close integration between conferences and social media as a given, not a nifty new innovation. And they may not be satisfied if the conversation onsite ends with the closing plenary, rather than continuing on into productive action when they get home.
It’s hard to draw wide inferences from a short audio segment. There are a dozen reasons to think I’m over-interpreting, a dozen more to see Portable Radio as the leading edge of a brilliant new audience trend.
Either way, if meeting planners and designers decided to drive that trend, rather than waiting for it, imagine how much more powerful the average meeting would be.
Topics: Business Issues, Conference Content, Meeting Design, Onsite Learning | No Comments »
Social Media Metaphors and the Death of Print
By Lynne Melcombe | January 19, 2010
Editor’s Note: This guest post is excerpted from the “oblogatory blig” produced by Vancouver writer Lynne Melcombe, a former associate and longtime friend of our firm. It flags some of the unexpected twists that knowledge producers—including meeting professionals—can expect to run into on the road to new media and “free” content.
According to Gillian Shaw, writing in the January 2 issue of the Vancouver Sun, 2009 may go down in publishing history as the year copyright died.
According to Vancouver Sun and Province publisher Kevin Bent, writing about Canwest Communications filing for bankruptcy protection, business will continue as usual. Yeah, right.
I’ve read enough lately about the impending deaths of both print and copyright that I can no longer argue that they won’t happen—or that they shouldn’t.
But as a person who has made my living by my pen for 25 years, and argued in favour of copyright, I have questions not only about the death of print and copyright, but about what happens to print writers and editors—those who are salaried, and those who are self-employed—after the funeral.
New media experts point out that this is not time first time in history that artists have feared new technologies would diminish their livelihoods. Shaw notes that American composer John Philip Sousa thought player pianos would take business away from real musicians, and I’ve heard other experts say the same about the early days of radio. Instead, musicians just began making money in different ways.
These experts argue that the same principle applies across the board—the death of print and copyright will not be the death of writing, but will simply change the way writers “monetize” their work.
To Vancouver’s Miss604, for example, the issue is not one of direct remuneration but of recognition. “For me monetization comes with having my name on [my work],” Shaw quotes Miss604 (AKA Rebecca Bollwitt) as saying. “For me it is all about the exposure and lassoing that back in and making business opportunities out of it.”
Shaw also quotes Internet and e-commerce expert Michael Geist as saying, “There are going to be some winners and some losers and it’s not going to be copyright that is going to determine that. . . . The winners become those who think out of the box and envision and provide new opportunities that consumers either expect or don’t even realize they want.”
I wouldn’t have said this even a year ago, but I’m now sure that everything the new media experts are saying is true.
That being so, I have a concern that is less about the transition from old to new media and more about the people who will be most affected by it.
Thinking back to player pianos and radio, do we really suppose that there were no musicians put out of work then, or did they just occur in small enough numbers for history to ignore? Will it be as easy to brush aside much larger numbers of print writers and editors affected by our forging ahead into this brave, new media world?
How many sides of a box are there for all those people to think and work outside of? How many lassos can they toss in the air at once without them all getting tangled up and falling fruitlessly to the ground?
I’m not suggesting we don’t forge ahead. There’s too much that’s great about new media not to move forward, even if it were possible not to.
But I am concerned about the glibness of metaphors that belie the enormity of the transition. I know that this transition, like most, will not just be about technology. It will be about people. And I don’t think it’s enough to say that there will be winners and losers, and the winners will be the ones with the best lassos, and the losers will be, well, losers.
Because among those people who have a difficult time adapting, there will be many whose knowledge, skills, and experience should not be lost, and may in fact be entirely transferrable even if they lack the ability to do it themselves.
I would like to hear some of the bright minds of new media addressing that. I would like to hear acknowledgment of what experienced print writers and editors can bring to a medium that is often shy on things like research, fact checking, and proofreading. I would like to hear less about business going on as usual (which, in spite of appearances, I’m sure it is not) and more about the best and brightest of new media working with the best and brightest of old media to make sure that, in the transition, we don’t all end up losing out.
Topics: Business Issues, Conference Blogs, Conference Content, Social Media | No Comments »
Hands Across the Water
By Mitchell Beer | January 14, 2010
On the meetings circuit, Haiti is not a place that often comes to mind.
The now-devastated capital of Port-au-Prince is just 713 miles by air from Miami, 960 miles from Cancún, but it might as well be a universe away—in its infrastructure, in the opportunities open to its citizens, and in its visibility to people who organize and attend meetings and events.
Haiti placed 149th out of 182 countries in the 2009 Human Development Index, with an adult literacy rate of only 62.1%, and gross domestic product of US$1,155 per capita. According to the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, Haiti’s life expectancy was 60.9 years in 2007. Compare that with expected lifespans of 80.6 in Canada and 78 in the United States.
And that was before the earthquake earlier this week—measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale—destroyed the country’s already fragile infrastructure, claiming anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 lives, and affecting at least one-third of Haiti’s nine million inhabitants.
Right now, one of the survivors’ most immediate, dire needs is for clean drinking water. Before the quake, uncontaminated water was a rarity in Haiti. Now it is impossible to find. And that doesn’t even take into account the staggering need for food, medicine, and safe shelter.
Which is why I read carefully, and with mounting horror, when Knitters Without Borders went live with an urgent and detailed call for donations to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), one of the world’s leading humanitarian relief agencies.
KWB was launched in response to the 2004 tsunami by Canadian knitter and blogger Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, aka the Yarn Harlot, whose passion for knitting and fibre arts captured our managing editor’s attention a few years ago.
Incredibly, through KWB, the Harlot had already raised more than $600,000 for MSF (Canada here, United States here, other countries can find their site here) before the earthquake. Not 24 hours after she posted the special appeal, hundreds of replies had poured in from readers who had sent donations, large and small. By midnight last night, the interim tally had surpassed US$25,000. It continues to climb today.
I expect our finance manager might have thought I’d taken leave of my senses, but we’ve donated $1,500 to the relief effort—$500 from the company and $1,000 from our household.
I could claim that it’s because MSF Canada is one of our favourite clients.
I could point out that a dollar spent in a developing country goes so much farther than the same amount spent in an industrialized economy.
I could try to tell you how important it is for meetings and hospitality to think about countries like Haiti and Philippines. They’re two of the countries that supply a work force that rarely factors into our industry’s strategic thinking, but provides essential support for anything we do in just about any hotel that hosts a meeting.
But it’s more than that.
Our firm was as glad as anyone else in the industry to see the end of 2009, but we’re under no illusion that we’re bearing the real brunt of the economic crash. Haiti had too much violence, too little clean water, too high a level of child mortality, and far too much environmental degradation before the earthquake crushed much of their infrastructure and many of their people. Their future looked dim enough last week. It looks far worse today.
A tragedy like the Haiti quake puts a different, much broader twist on any discussion in our industry that might seem urgent. We’re beginning to see a practical response from some meetings industry suppliers, and at least one MPI chapter, but this is a moment when each of us can and should step up.
We have shelter and clean water. We even have telephone and Internet access. That’s why we’ve made a donation to MSF, and you should, too.
Topics: Corporate Social Responsibility | 2 Comments »
Top 10 Reasons to Attend the Sustainable Meetings Conference
By Mitchell Beer | January 8, 2010
With the 2010 Sustainable Meetings Conference coming up in Denver February 9-11, the Green Meeting Industry Council is circulating the top 10 reasons that this is a must-attend event.
This might just be the best, most in-depth green meetings conference the industry has ever seen. But the 10 reasons point to a bigger, wider value proposition than you might expect…
10. Green Strategies Save Money: Green meeting specialists know how to save money onsite—by cutting waste, working with local suppliers, and proving that the “eco” in eco-efficiency is about economy as well as ecology.
9. Earning Customer Loyalty: A sustainable meeting builds customer loyalty, showing participants that their organization cares about the bigger picture—even in hard times.
8. Improving the Onsite Experience: The skills and knowledge behind a sustainable meeting can help you create a smarter, more interactive learning experience for participants.
7. Competitive Advantage for Vendors: Hoteliers and other vendors who demonstrate green knowledge and performance gain competitive advantage in an economy where any advantage is crucial to the bottom line.
6. Measuring the Bottom Line: Green performance metrics can only succeed environmentally if they pay off financially. So green measurement is a great way to assess the return your organization receives from its meetings investment.
5. Managing and Mitigating Risk: Leading organizations like Oracle, The Gap, the American Institute of Architects, and the U.S. Green Building Council know that greening is the “right” thing to do. But it also mitigates risk. For top associations and Fortune 500 businesses, sustainable meetings are a great way to demonstrate good citizenship and corporate social responsibility (CSR).
4. Striking the Balance: Meeting professionals have been struggling to find a balance between live and virtual meetings and to cope with the mounting challenges surrounding air travel. The 2010 Sustainable Meetings Conference is a place to explore solutions that keep the participant experience front and centre.
3. Learning the Standard: The program for the 2010 Sustainable Meetings Conference is built around the green meetings standard that will soon be released by the U.S. Accepted Practices Commission (APEX). Learning the practicalities of this detailed new standard will be an advantage for every organization that participates in the conference.
2. Building a Network: The annual Sustainable Meetings Conference draws a network of senior, experienced meeting professionals who’ve built their green checklists into strategic action plans that support their companies’ core values and objectives. Attending the conference is the first step in making these thought leaders and decision-makers a part of your network.
1. Building Momentum: This conference is about getting green done! On the first day, the Future Leaders’ Forum and the Leaders’ Track will both deliver action goals for the year ahead. At the closing roundtable, GMIC will invite leading meeting experts and association leaders to discuss next steps for building a sustainable industry.
As a GMIC board member and co-chair of the conference program committee, I won’t even try to convince you that I’m objective about this meeting. I’ll just hope to see you onsite…
Topics: Airlines, Business Issues, Carbon Footprint, Corporate Social Responsibility, Green Meeting Industry Council, Green Meetings, Meeting Design, Meetings ROI, Meetings Technology, Onsite Learning, Virtual Meetings | 2 Comments »
After Copenhagen: How Meetings Can Kick the Carbon Habit
By Mitchell Beer | December 15, 2009
By the end of this week, the 192 countries represented at the Copenhagen Summit may or may not reach a global deal to control climate change and reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide.
But whether or not humanity rises to the challenge, the science doesn’t lie. With or without an agreement, this is the moment for industrialized nations to set a course to cut their carbon emissions 80% by 2050. Like every other industry, meetings and events will have to be a part of that solution.
My column this week on MeetingsNet touches on the catastrophic consequences meetings will face if climate change is allowed to continue unabated. It concludes with the immediate, practical steps that meeting professionals can take to reduce onsite carbon footprints, based on e-interviews with a half-dozen of the industry’s leading sustainability specialists.
But the longer-term journey toward a truly sustainable meetings industry will take decades, not months, to complete. Here are some of the steps our industry panel foresaw along the way.
Elizabeth Henderson, Chief Strategist, Down2Earth Sustainable Event Strategists
The effort to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint will face “resistance from destinations and suppliers that depend on meetings, events, and other forms of business tourism, like incentives,” Henderson said. Sustainability initiatives will have to navigate “the simple inertia of not wanting to change a model that has worked well in the past, lack of knowledge of potential impacts, and the need to identify, measure, and report impacts.”
Longer-term carbon reductions will depend on fundamental design changes for conference and convention centres, hotels, and other venues, universal use of environmental standards, standardized measurement and reporting, industry and organizational benchmarking, and new expectations about the registration bags, printed materials, and other giveaways that participants receive onsite. Henderson said carbon measurement will have to drill down to specific meeting components (transportation, energy, water, waste, food and beverage, and the broader meetings supply chain), so that organizations can meet their onsite goals and objectives within their target carbon footprint.
Marge Anderson, Associate Director, Energy Center of Wisconsin
With a deal in Copenhagen, energy efficiency will become an even bigger economic winner than it is today. If carbon cap and trade becomes a reality, “utilities will be taxed for their emissions and pass the costs on to customers based on their electricity demand,” Anderson said, so “wasting electricity will begin to cost more than what you pay for a kilowatt-hour.”
With the right price signals in place, the future of meeting facilities will include heating and cooling systems that are re-engineered to capture waste heat, solar hot water, and control systems to make better use of lighting, heating, and cooling. “Demonstrating environmental leadership might look like getting a facility LEED certified, installing a green roof, recycling water on property if your facility is in a drought area, and helping guests and users modify their own energy use.”
Midori Connolly, Principal, Pulse Staging
Even in the short term, audio-visual companies can cut power consumption 50% by replacing plasma screens with LCD and, eventually, LED monitors. They can also cut costs and carbon by working with local production partners and “shipping fewer, fuller loads, scheduling delivery and pickup more carefully, and using smaller vehicles when possible.”
Over the longer term, AV companies can introduce smart programming technology to track actual energy consumption when equipment is onsite. But at some point, communication will be just as important as hardware. “We desperately need to work on awareness,” Connolly said. “By explaining how much cooler our new equipment operates, we can work with venues to reduce cooling needs, then measure those team results.”
Sarah Champoux, Environmental Director, Green Ride Global Inc.
For transportation providers, the first steps to carbon reduction include anti-idling measures, driver education, and regular maintenance for vehicles, Champoux said. Companies can also reduce electricity consumption in their facility operations, encourage ride-sharing and public transit for employees, and use low-carbon modes (rail, rather than air) for intercity business travel.
With these measures, a transportation company can hope to reduce its carbon footprint by 20% over five years, although “getting compliance from all staff and drivers can be a difficult feat,” Champoux said. “Monitoring, measuring, and reporting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can also be difficult without a third-party verifier who follows the most current environmental standards and protocols.”
Nancy Wilson, Principal, MeetGreen
The meetings industry “will have to work collectively” to achieve the carbon reductions that would result from a real deal in Copenhagen. “Sustainable meetings will be the norm,” Wilson said, with hotels and convention centres hosting virtual meetings for communities, airlines moving more swiftly to develop biofuel technology, rail emerging as an accepted travel alternative, and local food and products used routinely.
Megan Rooksby, Procurement Specialist, Maxvantage Meetings
Long-term carbon reductions will depend on government regulation, widely-accepted industry standards and certification, and leadership from meetings firms that are prepared to “drive the shift toward sustainability and carbon reductions,” Rooksby said.
“We still see corporations on the fringe, reviewing surveys that still place sustainability on the back burner,” she said. “Many of them conclude that if their customers don’t have sustainability on their radar, it must not be a priority right now. But where is the vision? Where are the corporate leaders who recognize sustainability as a competitive advantage that will deliver innovation and transform the industry as we know it?”
Investing in innovation can seem risky in uncertain times, but the opportunity is out there for any company that can demonstrate the return on investing in carbon reductions as well as cost savings. “We’re waiting for a global leader to sincerely and transparently lead the charge and seize competitive advantage,” Rooksby said.
Topics: Airlines, Business Issues, Carbon Footprint, Corporate Social Responsibility, Emergency Preparedness, Green Meetings, Meetings ROI, Meetings Technology, Virtual Meetings | No Comments »
Okay, You Caught Me
By Andrew Horsfield | December 12, 2009
(Editor’s note: The following declaration was retrieved from a little-used email cache in The Conference Publishers’ account management department. Those responsible have been sacked hacked.)
The recent release of emails hacked from leading climate scientists has convinced me: the jig is up. I can finally admit the truth. I am a member of a vast, secret conspiracy to convince the world that global climate change is real.
Actually, I’m not a full-fledged member; I’m just a low paid administrative assistant at the Society To Usurp Proper Industry Dogma.
This society operates from a huge secret underground lair—well, under-ice, if you want to get all technical about it—hidden at the North Pole, with a branch office in the Antarctic. We thought we’d been busted years ago when that X-Files movie came out, but luckily everyone thought the movie was a work of fiction. The reality is that members of STUPID secretly meet at our Antarctic base four times a year. That’s where we hatch our plans to control the world.
When the polar ice cap started to melt because of the exhaust from our heating systems, STUPID came up with the idea of telling everyone it was “global warming.” This is where it gets really interesting.
To get away with our sly plan, STUPID had to replace the editors of all the major, reputable scientific journals with its own people. Once we’d done that, we convinced thousands of scientists from around the world to manipulate their climate studies, writing papers to support the idea that global warming was real and the result of human activity.
I personally started the bit about “greening meetings” because I wanted to see if meeting professionals would actually buy in. They’ve jumped onboard with such gusto that we’ve built a super-secret fabrication facility producing re-usable water bottles to replace those perfectly harmless, disposable plastic containers at conferences and trade shows. We can barely keep up with the demand!
STUPID also had to buy off any scientist who had information that might have exposed the fraud. Our biggest coup was when we infiltrated the top levels of the Nobel organization, so as to award a phony Nobel Peace Prize.
Fortunately, our members are very savvy businesspeople who’ve grown incredibly rich from their investments in so called “eco-friendly products” like bicycles, mass transit, insulation, and silicon caulking. In fact, STUPID’s whole plan turns on money. Its members invest heavily in things like solar energy and wind farms. Some are even putting their money into concrete barriers, since the shorelines will have to be protected as the water begins to rise.
Of course, our members won’t live to see the payback on these investments, since the plan has taken over 25 years to get this far. But they are dedicated grandparents who hope their children’s children will be able to reap the billions of dollars they expect to make in the future.
Like any great secret society though, STUPID does have its enemies. And unfortunately for STUPID, our opponents will never give up.
Lifelong Industry Advocate Representatives Society is made up of ethical, kind-hearted people who represent good corporate citizens in the oil, coal, automotive, and chemical industries. These people have been fighting the good fight for years. Working together with a small band of brave politicians, they have shown they will stop at nothing in their quest to get at the truth. The incredibly accurate, unbiased reporting by FOXNews has been particularly annoying for STUPID.
They have managed to ferret out the few remaining ethical scientists in the world—who, coincidentally, are usually hiding in the LIARS’ laboratories. These few brave scientists are willing to stand up against the great lie of global warming.
And now, after years of self-sacrifice and delaying tactics, LIARS has finally won a major victory. They have managed to hack into the email accounts of STUPID’s Ground Central, and they’ve released the truth. LIARS agents have released all the emails, in their entirety, without taking a single syllable out of context. This has put a serious crimp in the STUPID plan for world domination.
But I have a feeling that STUPID isn’t out of it yet. We will fight back. We managed to beat down the noble tobacco industry with our claims that “smoking causes cancer,” so I think we’ll be able to defeat the LIARS in the end.
At some point, the funds that support the oil, coal, automotive, and chemical industries will not be enough to stop the overwhelming financial advantage enjoyed by eco-friendly industry. And once that happens, our world is doomed.
Topics: Carbon Footprint, Green Meetings, Greenwashing, Humour | No Comments »
Orlando Underwater: Here’s What’s at Stake at Copenhagen Summit
By Mitchell Beer | December 10, 2009
Map of projected sea level rise from Carbon Solutions America, reposted on Climate Progress.
How will climate change affect the meetings industry if we don’t slow down and reverse the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
Start with a map that shows coastal Florida and Orlando underwater by 2100, and gives you an idea of what other popular coastal destinations can expect. Unless we get a deal in Copenhagen.
The map appeared today on Climate Progress, the self-described “insider’s view of climate science, politics, and solutions” produced by the U.S. Center for American Progress. The post summarizes the latest research on sea level rise.
The map is disturbing. There’s no happy talk here. But note that the sea level projections are the results of empirical research. The kind based on (cue the Dr. Evil quotation marks) numbers. In contrast to the drumbeat of misleading drivel coming from the climate deniers who stole, then misinterpreted a batch of emails from a climate research centre in the U.K., and are doing their best to derail a global climate deal.
Topics: Carbon Footprint, Economic Impact, Emergency Preparedness, Green Meetings, Meeting Design | No Comments »
A Meeting Worth Holding
By Mitchell Beer | December 8, 2009
At a time when conferences are cancelling, participants are staying home in large numbers, and the flavour of the month is to replace live meetings with webcasts and virtual events, there are two sure criteria that still make it essential for groups to gather in person:
• A clear, immediate purpose that is best served by face-to-face deliberation, and
• The need to capture the energy and momentum that bring participants together and make it even stronger by the time they return home.
For sheer urgency, it’s hard to beat the global climate change summit that convened this week in Copenhagen. On MeetingsNet this week, I argue that the conference has already served a profoundly important purpose, bringing a new seriousness and initial political commitments to an urgent international dialogue that had been stalled for a decade.
But sometimes, it’s hard to see the impact of a major international meeting over the short term. That’s one reason I’ve been thinking back to what one of our project teams was doing just over 12 years ago, at the conference where we got to help ban a weapon of mass destruction.
It’s a story we tell often because, to this day, the Landmine Treaty Conference is one of our firm’s proudest moments.
It took 14 months of negotiation, with many, many preparatory meetings along the way. But by the time they gathered at Ottawa’s Government Conference Centre in December, 1997, diplomats from most countries of the world were ready to ban a product that had been described as “a weapon of mass destruction, moving in slow motion.”
Landmines have killed more civilians than both world wars, and they represent a fundamental barrier to international development, blocking access to food, water, and other essentials long after the warring parties that laid them have moved on. Before the Treaty Conference, there were dire warnings about the supposed risks of banning landmines, just as we now hear anti-scientific rants from climate deniers who will go so far as to steal private emails, then misrepresent their content, in a last-ditch effort to scuttle a global climate agreement.
To no one’s surprise, implementing the landmine treaty is still a work in progress, but there have been huge gains. In mid-November, just after Remembrance Day and just before the anniversary of the treaty, Mines Action Canada reported that 3,200 square kilometres of land had been cleared of mines and other explosive remnants of war, and new casualties “declined significantly” to 5,197 in 2008.
“Serious challenges remain, with more than 70 states still mine-affected today, and assistance to mine survivors falling short of what is needed,” MAC stated. Still, looking back, a face-to-face meeting was the catalyst that brought negotiations for a global landmine treaty to a successful conclusion. The job could not have been done with a webcast or TelePresence, even if those technologies had been available in 1997.
Last month, the Canadian chapters of Meeting Professionals International (MPI) released an economic impact update that documented the 70 million participants who attended 673,000 meetings in Canada in 2008, generating C$23.8 billion in direct spending, C$71.1 billion in industry output, 552,000 full-year jobs, and C$14.2 billion in government revenues. Those results matter, and you could probably crunch similar numbers for the Landmine Treaty Conference or the Copenhagen meeting.
But what’s the economic impact of banning a weapon of mass destruction? Of many thousands more children surviving to adulthood, with all their limbs, in dozens of countries around the world? Of landmine removal making it safer for those children to go to school when, “in a very poor country, just one year of education can increase lifetime earning capacity by 10%,” according to former U.S. President Bill Clinton?
And then, once we’ve answered those questions, why are we satisfied measuring the economic impact of a major international conference by the meals, room nights, and airline seats its delegates consume?
If we want to justify our existence as an industry, while bringing greater purpose to our work as meeting professionals, the first step is to align more deliberately with the urgent problems our participants try to solve by going onsite. As our industry scrambles to prove its value and measure its economic impact, we can look to the Ottawa Treaty—and, we should fervently hope, to the Copenhagen summit—for evidence that the results we produce are so much more important than the goods and services we consume.
Topics: Conference Content, Corporate Social Responsibility, Economic Impact, Meeting Professionals International, Meetings ROI, Meetings Technology, The Conference Publishers, Virtual Meetings | No Comments »
And Then, I Joined the Circus
By Mitchell Beer | November 24, 2009
For all the planning and deliberate effort behind a successful conference, sometimes it’s the random moments that bring home the importance of what happens onsite.
I’m in Toronto this week, working with a team of local writers at a two-day meeting on refugee health. This morning’s opening session highlighted the profound health and social challenges facing refugees and immigrants, as well as the unimaginable courage, resourcefulness, and resilience that life has demanded of them.
After the session, I stepped out of the conference facility to run a quick errand. Half a block away, the intersection was blocked by crime scene tape. I saw a half-dozen police cruisers on the scene, with another one weaving through traffic to join the crowd. With 225 participants nearby, my first reaction was to look for any signs of imminent danger that should be reported back to my client.
But then, I found out that all the fuss was about…
…a stray deer.
I gather the animal was first spotted around Toronto’s Union Station and led a merry chase to the block north of Chestnut and Dundas, before being taken down by someone who was handy with a tranquilizer gun. By then, the scene had drawn a crowd of spectators, from passersby on the ground to workers on the roof of a nearby construction project.
I’ve lived in cities all my life, and I have a definite soft spot for wildlife. On a visit to British Columbia’s incomparable Pender Island a couple of years ago, Karen found it hilarious that I took so very many photos of so very many deer.
So I’m glad the deer was caught. I understand why a small deer in a big city was a public safety hazard that had to be dealt with. I trust that it will be released safely. I don’t begrudge whatever Toronto’s Finest had to spend to get the job done. I just wish I couldn’t think of so many dozens of other areas where people, households, and communities are falling through the cracks in a fractured economy.
At the conference, I’m hearing about aspects of the refugee health and resettlement system that are working well, even heroically. But there are also areas where service delivery falls short, often because agencies find it difficult to decide who should fund which programs. A delegate told me the various governments seem to have trouble talking to each other across the “perceived divisions” between health and resettlement.
I guess Toronto’s police and animal control services found it easier to sort out jurisdiction over the immediate health and long-term resettlement of a stray deer.
Before this story was done, I’m afraid I may have become a small part of the circus. A TV reporter saw me step into the intersection, camera in hand, and invited me to comment. I think I blathered something about hoping the deer was caught safely. I hope I was also clear about the human services and supports that are in dire need of funding.
I don’t know whether the refugee health conference has drawn any news coverage. If it has, I can guarantee that the story will have to get in line behind a very frightened deer on Toronto’s mean streets. Too bad the refugee camps in Africa and Asia don’t have Bambi on their side.
Topics: Business Issues, Conference Content | No Comments »
The Right Tool for the Job
By Karen Irving | November 17, 2009
A debate has been raging over the past few days in one of my LinkedIn groups. Proponents on both sides have advanced arguments and theories, knowledgeable and otherwise, on the topic at hand. Swords have been brandished, fists shaken.
It should come as no surprise that this dispute revolves around grammar—to provoke the fiercest debates on the Internet, all you need to do is proclaim some purported grammatical rule or another, and then sit back and watch the fun. In this case, the topic is “adverbs ending in –ly.” Not exactly soul-stirring stuff, unless you fancy yourself a writer or editor.
Here’s the question: Are –ly adverbs going out of fashion? Discuss.
On the “yes” side, many seem to think that using adverbs ending in –ly (slowly, quickly, foolishly) break the cardinal creative writing rule of “show, don’t tell.” I learned this rule when I was writing crime fiction: don’t tell the reader what’s going on; describe the scene and make it come alive. For example, rather than “she ran quickly down the street,” a creative writer might write, “she broke into a run, and the sound of her own footsteps echoed back to her as she dashed along the empty street.” Or something like that.
On the “no” side, others argue that adverbs do an excellent job of summarizing—they say in a single word what could otherwise take several. So “he said in a plaintive tone” could become “he said plaintively,” turning six words into three. “Plaintively” telegraphs a message to the reader, and saves him or her the trouble of reading the extraneous words.
So who’s right?
As the great Jewish philosopher Tevye said in Fiddler on the Roof, “You’re right! And you’re right, too! You’re both right!” In creative writing, “show, don’t tell” is an excellent rule of thumb. The creative writer’s task is to draw the reader into another world, to paint a verbal picture full of telling detail and engage the reader’s imagination.
But for the journalist or report writer, brevity is the name of the game. At The Conference Publishers, we turn conference content into online session summaries, news capsules, summary reports, and all sorts of variations thereof. Our goal is to capture and summarize the words we hear onsite, and sum them up swiftly and economically. It’s why our clients hire us in the first place: we know that more words are not always better.
When I’m briefing writers and editors before a project, I put it this way: “You have an allowance. I’m giving you 350 (or 500, or 1,200) words. I want you to spend each word wisely, and I don’t want a single word wasted.” For this kind of writing, adverbs—those ending in –ly or otherwise—can be just the thing.
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