#Eventtable LIVE! From GMIC: A Chat on Take Aways From the Conference
To accommodate a special Sustainable Meetings Conference edition of the #eventtable Twitter chat next week, the chat will change from it’s regularly scheduled time of 3 pm est, to 5 pm est Monday April 22 and will focus on takeaways from the conference. The Sustainable Meetings Conference, hosted by the Green Meetings Industry Council (GMIC), [...]
Chat Yields Wealth of Info & Discussion on Event Sustainability Standards
The following is a summary of an #eventtable chat held 3/27 with Andrew Walker, event sustainability specialist and founder of E3 Strategy. There are new standards for event sustainability. That means, event professionals now have an agreed-upon definition of what it takes to ensure meetings and events are organized with social, environmental and economic sustainability [...]
Content Strategy in a Newly Connected World: Free, Fee or Hybrid?
Should content be free or offered for a fee? There could be a lot of revenue and visibility riding on the answer. As content capture specialists, we spend a lot of time talking to clients about the objectives behind their meetings and the specific format and level of detail that will help them achieve those [...]
Four Tough Challenges that Make Sustainability Easier
Earlier this month, a colleague shook up my thinking about green meetings with an idea that could shift any organization’s sustainability program in a more practical direction. And here’s the twist: the surest way to simplify our industry’s approach to sustainability might be to sharpen our focus on the toughest sustainability issues we face. Thanks [...]
The Building Your Building Can Be
When I stepped onto the construction site for the new Ottawa Convention Centre late last week, during an advance tour for members of the OCC Advisory Board, I saw the end of a 15-year campaign that burned through at least three generations of local industry volunteers. The original Ottawa Congress Centre opened in 1984, and [...]
Sweating the Small Stuff on Sustainable Hotels
I’ve just recently returned from a month in Western Canada, about half of it spent onsite. It was a good trip, but I have a quibble with one of the hotels where I stayed. It’s a small quibble, as quibbles go. You wouldn’t be wrong to conclude that if this was my only complaint, I [...]
Tread More Lightly on the Planet: Advice for Meeting Planners
Planning a sustainable event is about doing more with less, said Andrew Walker, Toronto-based founder and managing director of Eco-Efficient Events, who led participants in an interactive Tuesday morning session at MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress. Participants discussed strategies for reducing the carbon footprint of the meetings industry, which has a reputation for unsustainable practices. [...]
Action Against Carbon Emissions will Raise Travel Costs
The end of cheap oil could affect the meetings economy in a number of different ways, but panelists in a Tuesday morning breakout on peak oil agreed that the industry must adapt to an era of volatile energy prices and drastic reductions in the carbon emissions that cause climate change. Economists may debate whether oil [...]
Address Social Responsibility Head-on: Panel
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) should be renamed collective social responsibility, said Paul Salinger, vice president of marketing at Oracle, during MPI’s 2010 World Education Congress on Sunday afternoon. “It’s disappointing to me that [citizens] haven’t started doing what we would like corporations to do.” “A lot of people know the problems, but don’t know what [...]
Case Study: The Better Buildings: Better Business Conference
Name of Conference: Better Buildings: Better Business Conference Host Organization: Energy Center of Wisconsin Dates: March, 2005 Location: Wisconsin Dells, WI Objectives: The annual Better Buildings: Better Business Conference seeks to make midwestern United States homes more energy-efficient by delivering hands-on training workshops, technology demonstrations, and building science education to homebuilders and contractors. The Energy [...]
