As Sue Pelletier mentioned, this is a debate every association faces. It is also foremost on the minds of exhibitions and user conferences. The Event Marketer, a Red 7 Media company, chose to make their EMS event available at a smaller price, including the ability to purchase individual sessions for cheap. I thought that they did the best job I have seen of anyone charging for online content from a F2F event.

I agree with you that the online content needs to be free, but not because it should be. I believe it needs to be, in no small part, because of people like yourself, who strongly expect it to be free. And because making content available for free, even some of it, will generate interest in the event, the organization, and it’s community. Ultimately, it will drive higher attendance to the F2F event – I truly believe that. Organizers will need to make some or all of this content available online, for free, just to compete. Once there is enough data in the industry calming organizer’s fears that online content will cannibalize onsite attendance, the floodgates will open. Right now, they’re all convinced that no one will go to their event if the content is available for free. I had hoped the event marketing institute would generate this data but they seem to be focused as myopically on how to drive people to F2F events as the oil industry is on how to find more oil. In both cases they’re missing the sea change around them.

I am not outraged at MPI’s decision because, as Bruce MacMillon has stated, this is an experiment. They are testing the waters and plan to report back to members on how it went. That is a brave maneuver and while it will certainly impact their membership, if they back it with a quality experiment in the “free” direction then I applaud their leadership. Big IF.

Thanks again for sharing.

Of course my next dilemna was, how do I make this WEC session available to as many people as possible? Here was the challenge: As I was making my technology decisions, I realized that a session like this was not a good candidate for streaming as the vast majority of it is going to be highly interactive with participants working in small groups learning from each other as well as from the subject matter experts. Formal presentations are going to be extremely brief. The Twitter backchannel made the most sense to me as a way to open it to the membership because people who read the briefing paper can ask questions or post comments that are relevant to them. People tuning into a video stream with a room full of people talking to each other would be extremely frustrated.

I have added all that I can to this particular discussion at this point so I’ll sign off from this thread and look forward to interacting with you around your excellent content-related exchanges in the future!

I do not doubt that “The Case for Meetings” was quality content and received outstanding scores. Unfortunately, many veteran planners like myself found the topic elementary and one that didn’t meet our needs.

The free WEC workshop you mentioned is only for those at WEC. It is not free content to MPI membership at large. It is exclusive, not inclusive. I know that’s not your or Freeman’s intention, yet it feels like you are rewarding those that could afford to attend the event and penalizing those that couldn’t. If you were going just one more step and live streaming the workshop via Ustream.tv, (free service – all you need is a camera, computer & internet connection), I would be jumping for joy because then I could have the next best thing to the face-to-face experience.

Another example is that the MPI Foundation and Freeman are sponsoring a free half-day workshop at WEC (that would normally cost upwards of $275 to attend over and above a conference fee). This has been a significant investment by the MPI Foundation and Freeman and others (myself included) to providing free, high-quality content to members. And it will have a Twitter backchannel. Those of you who won’t be there in person, please tune in! The hashtag is #4elements and the session is from 1:45 to 5:30 on Monday the 13th. You can read the free briefing paper before you submit your questions.

Here’s a link to a video that describes the session a little more, complete with pictures of how we’re designing the learning environment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeLj4Leqxxg

Good healthy debates are powerful ways to bring about change, so I applaud everyone for their candor. While some of you may disagree, I do believe that MPI provides significant value to its membership and that it will continue to do so.

My unscientific and biased poll is still open and as of right now, 83% of the votes are against paying for content.

Thanks for adding to the discussion and you’ve raised two very good points: ROI and fair price.

How does one judge the ROI of a webinar, conference attendance or face-to-face educational event? What is a fair price? You’ve even written about high risk and low return dealing with the hospitality industry. I submit to you that this very situation is similar to what you experienced with high risk and low return of the hotel brand where you had negative experiences.

I argue that disruptive technology of Ustream.TV has made the costs of live streaming an event $0 dollars. Furthermore, no association owns a monopoly on content or even its industry content.

I also argue that the TED model is one that works. If you’ll read some of the follow-up posts you’ll see other ideas and suggestions that work as well.

Here’s the rub: MPI offered free live streaming of it January conference to members and nonmembers alike, made a big deal about it and people renewed their membership based on that service. They set a precedent. MPI did not tell people that it was a beta to see if people would take advantage of the service until last week. Then ten days before their July conference, they announce a fee for virtual attendance to their July conference, which is half the price of the face-to-face event. They mislead others and me with their actions. That is wrong.