Should you offer live streaming of your conference for free or for a fee? 
Many associations and conference planners face this question and there are no easy answers. If you read this blog regularly, you know I have an opinion that has sparked great debate around this issue. Most agree that live streaming is a great value add-on and way to reach more people. But at what and who’s cost?
In the past five days, two organizations held face-to-face conferences with live streaming:
- SmartBrief & Socialfish’s Buzz2009 in Washington DC, July 9, 2009
- Meeting Professionals International’s WEC 2009, in Salt Lake City, July 11-14, 2009
Buzz2009 sold out with 70 attendees for its boutique association social media conference. Attendees paid $395 or $495 for the one-day experience. Buzz offered a free live streaming 90-minute webinar with four panelists and one moderator featuring Alltop’s Guy Kawasaki and GasPedal’s Andy Sernovitz.
WEC 2009 was $625 for full event or $560 for one-day ticket and had approximately 2,500 people onsite. (This is the best guess I could get from onsite attendees.) MPI charged $299 for members or $399 for nonmembers for full Virtual Access Pass (VAP) to live streaming or $19 for the live streaming of the 90-minute opening general session. WEC 2009′ s 90-minute opening general session had actor Ben Stein, COO for the Obama Presidential Inauguration Betsy Myers, and Harrah’s Entertainment chairman, CEO and president Gary Loveman.
Both asked people to use a Twitter hashtag and tweet during their events. Here’s an interesting comparison of Buzz2009’s Webinar and WEC2009’s opening general session Twitter reach for their respective 90-minute presentations and from one day from each event. Statistics are from wthashtag.com and transcripts from twitter search.
Comparison of Twitter tweets from two 90-minute sessions from two conferences SmartBrief and SocialFish's Buzz2009 and MPI's WEC 2009.
Interesting comparison, right? Buzz2009 has 379% more people who did not attend the face-to-face event tweeting about their event. WEC 2009 had less people tweeting about the event, approximately 7% of total attendance. Yes, WEC probably made some money from their paid VAP that Buzz2009 did not.
(Note: In case you’re wondering, Michael McCurry tweeted yesterday a different total number of tweets for MPI’s WEC2009, 1,093. That’s the total number of tweets from several days, not just one day or a 90-minute presentation.)
From my perspective, the free live streaming reached more people and had more people engaged than MPI’s paid virtual access. The paid live streaming had less participation and the majority of the people tweeting were on location at the event with a few people tweeting while watching the live streaming. Even more interesting was that WEC had a steady stream of tweets from people who were not onsite and wanted to know more about what was happening.
So what do you think? Who had the farther reach virtually? Who had the greater ROI (Return on Influence)? What are your observations from these statistics? What does this tell you about free versus paid live streaming from a conference? Which event’s content is more likely to become viral, spread, have more eyeballs seeing it in the future and will continue to live virtually now that the event is passed? Which event’s content could trigger a “World Wide Rave” as author David Meerman Scott calls it?
There are a few of concerns I have with your analysis.
First, is the date of the conferences. Buzz was on a Thursday, a normal workday for most Meeting Professionals. MPI WEC’s Opening Session was on a Sunday, from my knowledge the least likely day for Meeting Professionals to work out of the week. So they are most likely not at their computers watching the OGS VAP and commenting on social media networks. MPI’s OGS VAP was recorded so people could look at it later, I do not know the status of Buzz’s Opening session. I know when I was deciding if I were to purchase the VAP OSG pass I would most likely watch it today, Monday, than do it live yesterday in the middle of my day. So people can still be talking about it later. From what I remember topics on Twitter usually hit their maximum influence point about 24 hours after the first tweet on the topic.
Second,
Sorry the block quote did not work properly the quote after the Second, is
Buzz2009 Social Media for Associations is the place where association execs learn concepts and strategies to help their organizations make the most out of social media.
Then continue with the rest of the topic.
HI Jeff,
First off thanks for putting this virtual events comparison together. It certainly contained some thought provoking data!
I think it would be interesting to see the statistics of how many people did in fact purchase either version of the MPI VAP. That would in fact put things into perspective a bit.
To me one of the overwhelming statistics of the Buzz2009 conference was the sheer volume of Virtual participants. As one of those participants I can say, without hesitation, that I would not have been able to justify the expense of attending that conference F2F and the delivery of virtual content free of charge enabled me to at least benefit from the session that was broadcast.
Mr. Louis definitely has some valid points concerning the impact of other factors on the participation statistics, but the one fact that is indeed true across most all business sectors is that many business people are not able to afford attending business conferences this year, for a variety of reasons. Delivering the virtual content for the MPI conference at a more affordable pricepoint would have allowed the other 90% of its members to at least benefit from the educational content offered by MPI, not to mention the impact it might have on membership loyalty.
If Membership growth and retention are valid business issues for MPI, which we know they are, then this virtual content, priced appropriately, could also generate new membership growth. As a non MPI member, I was very impressed with the cliff notes I acquired through the tweets that were generated yesterday during the opening general session.
Over the past two days I have been conducting a twit poll survey on the issue of the MPI VAP and its perceived value…. eveyrone is welcome to express their opinion and can participate in this survey at the following url:
http://twtpoll.com/nowb3j
Thanks Jeff, for generating conversation and collaboration and thank you Jim Louis for your perspectives as well!
Mike McCurry
http://twitter.com/michaelmccurry
Jim raises an interesting point about creating the right environment to help the viral spread.
I know when I attended the ASAE Healthcare Conference earlier this year, they were not set up to support blogging or tweeting from a laptop. I had to use my handheld to tweet and I personally think my tweets were as good as a result. There was also no WiFi (unless you wanted to pay the hotel for access), which meant no live-blogging. I attended the conference purely for the Social Technology sessions, yet I was not enabled to participate in social technologies during the session. I’d much prefer my computer over my handheld any day.
There are many factors that can support or deter people from participating in social media at events. I think as an event professionals, you have to ask yourself “What can I do to enable people to communicate while at our event?”
@JimLouis:
Thanks for your perspective and thoughts. I agree that the ROI of an event continues after the event whether via social media or face-to-face exchanges. There is a lot being written about return on influence of Web 2.0 versus face-to-face and I’ve seen it called Social Marketing Influence (SMI).
The question is will 2,300 meeting professionals return home from WEC2009 and share their content and learnings with others. I know when I return from conferences and events, I don’t always share my learnings with others typically because I’m one of the few planners in my job. The information is usually not relevant to anyone else.
I was intentionally comparing live tweets to live tweets not tweets from the day after and it’s obvious that Buzz2009 had a farther reach live in Twitter. That is undeniable regardless of the audience, time of day, day of week, etc. Buzz2009’s Webinar was also recorded and is still available today to anyone free which again is going to create an extended life and the ability for others to share it easily. Buzz2009’s Webinar is continuing to be shared and viewed today yet most tweets about it do not contain the hashtag, so it’s harder to track. MPI’s OGS was recorded too but requires a fee to access it. That’s the barrier to sharing it easily with others. MPI should be able to track how many times it’s opened and viewed for analytic purposes.
If you look at the stream of tweets coming from WEC09 today, they are not about yesterday’s OGS, they are about what is happening now, in real-time at that conference. Also, if you look at yesterday’s tweets during the OGS, you’ll see people asking for the lights to be turned off, just the opposite as you suggest a dark room.
As for breakdown of attendees using VAP, we don’t know those numbers. Reading yesterday’s tweets, I can identify four people who were participating virtually; the remainder of the tweets were from attendees onsite or from those of us participating by reading the WEC09 Twitter stream. There have also been a couple blog posts written by VAP attendees that are not favorable towards VAP because of their inability to access Pathable, the poor quality of the live streaming and audio, and MPI’s lack of response fix these issues.
As meeting and event professionals, we will continue to wrestle with this issue and others involving the integration of online and offline meetings and events.
@MichaelMccurry
Thanks Mike for your additions to this discussion. I agree that a missing piece is the number of people that purchased VAP. We’ll wait to see if MPI shares that number. I think many associations will continue to grapple with the issues of virtual attendance, fee versus free, social media, the economy, etc. These are interesting times indeed.
@Lynn Morton
Thanks for adding your point of view. You’re right on target that meeting and event professionals need to think about creating the right environment to help the viral spread of a message. As meeting and event professionals, we need to begin to reconsider room layouts to enable those that want to tweet or blog during the event. We need to think about lighting, WiFi, electrical outlets, etc. These are fairly new considerations for many meeting and event professionals.
Your final question about events and social media is gold “…as an event professionals, you have to ask yourself ‘What can I do to enable people to communicate [via social media] while at our event?”
Hello Jeff,
I agree with you on the lighting and did not know that Buzz 2009 was recorded, I could not find a link to it on their home page or their agenda page.
I have seen from MPI staff members tweets that MPI has let speakers know they need to repeat questions during the live sessions and they are working with VAP attendees on the access to pathable’s online line community.
I will give you based on the statistics you reported there was more tweets at the Buzz conference. But I still would love to see a comparison between a weekend opening conference session with free virtual access and the MPI OGS VAP. I still think that its a valid point about having a professional business conference general session on a Saturday or Sunday will effect the number of people who will twitter about it vs a conference during the week.
But according to your numbers the MPI OGS a higher percentage of Retweets vs the Buzz2009 conference during the 90 minute session at (20.4 vs. 17.9%) and a lower percentage of tweets by the top 10. Also the average number of tweets for the 90 minute session per contributor was higher at 4.83 for MPI OGS vs. 3.75 for Buzz 2009. Also for the MPI conference the average number of tweets per contributor for the day yesterday was higher at 5.1 vs. 4.5.
Now of you look at total attendance of both groups, (I am figuring that 200 people bought access to the OGS or the VAP full plan) the percentage of twitter contributors for groups is 6.6% for Buzz 2009 and 6.1% for MPI WEC OGS.
These statistics shows that the people who were tweeting at MPI were just as engaged as people at Buzz 2009, granted they may not be as many people, but they were engaged at about the same percentage (I am not going to get into Standard Deviations). Plus Buzz 2009 had Guy Kawasaki, he is a geek magnet, even more so then Ben Stein. Guy has 149,000+ Followers on Twitter. I could not find the MPI OGS Main speaker Ben Stein on Twitter. (Found many others highest one had 158 followers).
So yes more people who were not physically in attendance were involved in twitter with Buzz2009 than with MPI WEC, but I wonder how many people would have virtually attended the MPI WEC OGS live yesterday (not looking at it day)? Would the number have even come close to the Buzz 2009 Social Media conference? I can conclude that more people physically attending the conference were involved with twittering at the MPI WEC OGS then at Buzz 2009.
But I agree that at least the OGS should have been free to members of MPI.
Jim Louis
“There are three types of Lies. Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics” – various authors including Mark Twain and Benjamin Disraeli
@JimLouis
@JimLouis
Great further analysis of the stats I’ve listed and I concur with the majority of your thoughts. Yes, you can spin statistics anyway you want and I think MPI and other associations do it all the time.
Let’s look at a couple more stats that I did not include:
BTW, MPI was two days late responding to the virtual attendees about their concerns accessing Pathable and the problems with sound, which was more than having speakers repeat questions. You saw tweets from today although they started asking for help on Sunday.
I’ve already received two emails from speakers onsite that are furious with how VAP was handled from their point of view. They complained about poor AV, technology and sound issues. They both viewed some portion of VAP later and said they were extremeley dissatisfied with the quality of the presentations. I doubt that is the case with all the speakers but it’s clear it’s a problem with these two.
Good discussion here! Here are just a few observations from onsite.
First, a disclaimer: I arrived late to the MPI OGS — in time to hear Betsy Myers’ talk (the last speaker). I walked into a very large, dark room with three huge screens across the front. 2000+ people were sitting in rows of chairs with no tables. I cannot vouch for the content of the earlier speakers because I wasn’t there and haven’t gone back to look at the broadcast.
Now, I would argue that the purposes and audiences of Buzz2009 and the MPI OGS were quite different. Buzz was designed to be a highly virtual event FOR people who are passionate about Social Media. The OGS was designed to be a powerful experience FOR the meeting planners sitting in the room – and the broadcast to the world was (probably) secondary. (Remember the “Dean Scream”? The experience in the room doesn’t always translate so well into the broadcast experience!)
It is perfectly valid to debate whether these were the “right” objectives and audiences, but I think it’s fair to say that the different objectives led to different design decisions vis-a-vis the virtual experience.
I believe (based on no actual information) that MPI chose to focus the OGS on the people in the room. The lack of tables makes the audience feel more intimate and connected — the “community” of meeting professionals. The powerful music and deep bass makes the audience FEEL (literally) the energy and excitement. The darkness of the house lights makes the onstage “show” much more dramatic. It was a very well-executed, very traditional, broadcast-style show – which is great for motivating & entertaining people. Maybe not ideal for learning, but that wasn’t the objective of the Opening Session. (I don’t think so, anyway.)
Now, the MPI audience is also quite different from the Buzz audience. There were a lot of sessions offered throughout the WEC program on technology and social media, and a fair percentage of them (I won’t even hazard a guess) were very introductory – showing people how to set up a Facebook page, for example. So of the 2000+ people onsite, a much lower percentage are regular SM users. The Buzz audience, by definition since most were virtual, were self-selected SM enthusiasts.
And finally, I think the two programs were quite different. The Buzz panel talked about the real content, the nitty gritty. At the MPI OGS, the big-name speakers were motivational, inspirational and provided some insight into the big picture of things, but not one of them is a meeting professional — they don’t DO what the audience does, and they aren’t really the content experts. So “the meat” of Buzz was delivered in the free stream, but the real content of WEC was delivered after the OGS in the workshops.
These three factors (and the Sunday thing), I think, contribute to some of the differences in Tweetstats. I love this discussion, and I love having this new kind of data to evaluate the impact of a session. But we should also recognize that we’re not comparing apples to apples with these two events.
Personally, I would have liked for MPI to offer the OGS for free — it was mostly messaging, anyway, so why not give it to anyone who might listen? I don’t know if that would have changed the tweeting stats significantly, though. As for the rest of the content from WEC, I liked the suggestion (on an earlier discussion here) of a range of content bundles at different price points.
I’m going to respectively disagree with you on several issues.
First, you’re trying to put caveats on why we can’t compare the two, and I totally disagree with you. Content, expertise and meeting design are not valid reasons in these situations.
I believe that MPI’s February MeetDifferent OGS had more tweets Twitter than MPI’s WEC’s OGS. Same room layout, same setup, same type of motivational speakers, same amount of time. The biggest difference was MeetDifferent OGS was live streamed free and the virtual audience was engaged in Twitter.
1) If the content is engaging, people want to talk about it whether in Twitter, Facebook or onsite in the hallways. It doesn’t matter if the content is motivational or not. You’re saying that WEC09 OGS had less tweets because the speakers had nothing of value to say or it was only of value to those in the room.
2) Buzz2009 was not a virtual event. One 90-minute session was live streamed. The majority of the conference was onsite only. Same structure as WEC.
3) I don’t think we can adequately say MPI’s WEC09 audience was less experienced with social media than Buzz2009’s audience was. That is simply not true. Buzz 2009 was for association professionals to help them learn more about social media. Their focus was strategic in nature and from your perspective, MPI’s social media sessions were tactical.
Well we will have to disagree on some things, but
Sunday was the 12th, the tweets I saw were from MPI was on the 13th. That is one day, not two.
I cannot speak for WEC09, but MeetDifferent OGS had two panels where they answered questions from the audience that were posted through twitter. So there for there would be more tweets at MD vs. if this was not done at WEC. If the format for WEC09 was not the same (which I do not think so from what I heard and read), then your comparison is moot.
Of course you are going to have more tweets when they as for attendee input. I tweeted during the MD09 General session a couple of questions. WEC seemed like it was more of straight speeches than having question and answer sessions. If I am wrong let me know. But I did not see that in the review of the hashtag responses.
Jeff,
Thank you for the additional context – I’m perfectly content to be wrong here, and I was NOT involved in either MeetDifferent or the Buzz event, so I may be speaking out of turn altogether. If so, I apologize.
Did you dig up the MeetDifferent tweet numbers? That WOULD be interesting!
I think you’re absolutely right that more people engaged in the Buzz streaming session because it was free. I have no idea what the VAP’s usage was during the WEC OGS, but I would be willing to bet it was nothing near 5000. But I think that several other factors contributed to the tweetscrepancy between the two events. [Boy, you can really fit "tweet" into ANYTHING!
]
To riff off your points above…
2) I was mistaken about Buzz2009 being a virtual event. In your stats, you mentioned that there were 70 people onsite and 5000 watching the live stream — so most of the participants experienced the event virtually. I misspoke and used the term “virtual event” inappropriately.
I would be very interested to better understand how Twitter was being used in both the WEC and Buzz2009 events. Are most of the tweets coming from the F2F attendees or from the virtual attendees? What is the nature of the tweets — quoting the speakers (which seemed to be a lot of the WEC tweets), or discussing the content?
I’m making a big assumption here, but I imagine that if more people are attending virtually than in-person, then more people will want to discuss the content virtually as well — hence, more tweets. If most of the attendees are in-person, then much of the discussion of content will take place in person as well, in the hallways, etc.
1&3) I’m using my writing to think, which can be dangerous.
Let me attempt to refine what I was trying to say. I think that the topic of the Buzz2009 streaming session was social media — therefore the people who want to watch this content are predisposed to want to use social media as well. The topic of the WEC OGS was “When we meet, we change the world” — a much broader topic that will attract an audience with widely divergent interests, not just those interested in social media. Therefore, my logic goes, a lower percentage of the WEC audience will be Tweeters.
Now that argument just goes for a comparison to Buzz2009. If the numbers for MeetDifferent resemble Buzz2009 more than WEC2009, then I would happily withdraw this argument. (Although one might argue that a conference about “meeting different” might also attract an audience predisposed to SM.)
Thanks for this discussion, Jeff! I’m learning a ton!
@JimLouis
One VAP attendee let MPI know about the issues before June 12, tweeted about it again several times on June 12, wrote about it on her blog on June 12, tweeted about it again on June 13, wrote about it again on her blog on June 13 calling it “Day Two of no response”. I suspect she contacted them by email and phone as well. MPI did not fix the issue until Monday afternoon, a minimum of two days after her complaints. That’s not good customer service. Ironically, MPI staff kept tweeting if you’re having issues with VAP even though they had not fixed the issue. Yes, by what I wrote looks like a 24-hour time response from MPI, but in actuality was much longer.
At both MD OGS & WEC OGS,MPI asked people to tweet about the OGS and the Twitter hashtags were shared before and during the events. MPI heavily promoted Twitter use for both events so it is equal in my minds. At MD OGS, questions from the audience were texted in via Twitter or a second SMS strategy. It was not Twitter only. Most questions from the audience were via the other method, not Twitter.
@Jay
You can print out the transcripts of tweets from both MPI’s WEC 09 (#wec09) and Buzz2009 (#buzz2009) at wthashtag.com. Then you can analyze them all you want any way you want.
I personally don’t think it matters if the tweets are questions, repeating what speakers are saying, or sharing links. What matters is that people are conversing about the topic. Do we really analyze what is being said in the hallways of conferences trying to figure out if there are more questions, statements, repeats of speakers’ content, etc.?
As I said to Jim, both organizations marketed and asked people to tweet about their sessions at their conferences. AND, MPI had set a precedent encouraging people to tweet at MeetDifferent 2009 in February and CLC2009 in June. So MPI’s members already know about this. Buzz2009 was the first time this group met and did not have a precedent. We can say all we want, “well there were more women than men, more Gen Y than Gen X, more people with red hair than black and think those variables caused more tweets. I believe we are splitting hairs.
My point is a free live streaming got more eyeballs, went viral more quickly and the messages were spread farther and for a longer time. Twitter was a tool for both groups to spread their messages and content. MPI missed the boat with WEC’s 2009 OGS and Twitter. If they really felt WEC’s OGS 09 message were important to meeting professionals and the hospitality industry, they would have live streamed it for free in addition to encouraging people to tweet about it.
From Jeff: “My point is a free live streaming got more eyeballs, went viral more quickly and the messages were spread farther and for a longer time. Twitter was a tool for both groups to spread their messages and content. MPI missed the boat with WEC’s 2009 OGS and Twitter. If they really felt WEC’s OGS 09 message were important to meeting professionals and the hospitality industry, they would have live streamed it for free in addition to encouraging people to tweet about it.”
Agree entirely with this, and personally felt the OGS should be free, at least to members, probably to everyone. This was part of the MPI experiment, and I certainly hope they take a different approach with their next big event.
I went to a “Candid Conversation with MPI” session at WEC and asked how the conversation about free v. not-free had gone within MPI. It sounds like the internal conversation was more robust than it appears from the outside. I didn’t get any details, unfortunately, but a “we’re looking at all of the options”. I would be very interested to know what those options are and how they’re evaluating these decisions.
In this session, a couple of criteria were mentioned:
1) We’re in the business of creating and delivering great content. Great content costs something to produce, so someone has to pay for it at some point in the process.
2) We don’t want to develop a “subsidization model” whereby people who pay to attend are subsidizing an equivalent online experience for people who pay nothing.
I think Dave Lutz, among others, has proposed some very interesting pricing models on this blog that address both of these concerns. I just hope that there are more decision criteria at work than just these two, because neither of these appear to support a SM business model.
@Jay
I’ve discussed your final two points at length on this blog. Here’s a quick overview and my arguments about those two points
According to you, MPI said:
We’re in the business of creating and delivering great content. Great content costs something to produce, so someone has to pay for it at some point in the process.
My POV:
MPI does not pay speakers at their conferences. Either speakers present pro bono or bureaus underwrite any fees. Look at any of MPI’s call for speaker proposals and you’ll see a statement that they do not offer compensation to speakers. They may cover a couple nights lodging and conference registration but that’s it. Therefore, MPI’s costs to produce content are minimal at best. What costs are they incurring to cover development of content?
We do know that MPI does incur costs because of some of the extravagant productions for onsite attendees. They can’t claim that it costs them to produce some experience and out of the same mouth say most of their expenses are in-kind donations or greatly discounted.
I also argue that I already pay them $375 in membership fees. Use that money to provide content to me. The real root of the problem: MPI uses WEC and MeetDifferent as revenue generating sources.
According to you MPI said:
We don’t want to develop a “subsidization model” whereby people who pay to attend are subsidizing an equivalent online experience for people who pay nothing.
My POV:
That is ludicrous and shows that MPI places more value on people who can afford to attend than their entire membership. UStream.TV is being used across the globe for free live streaming videos, hosting and recording. As I’ve already written in this blog, people are paying for the face-to-face experience, not content. The online experience could never be equivalent to the face-to-face experience and whoever said that on MPI’s staff does not understand the value of the face-to-face meeting. That’s very unnerving.
In case anyone else is even reading these, take a look at these free videos from WordCamp Unconferences captured through UStream.TV. http://wordpress.tv/
Quality, excellent. Sound, excellent. Streaming great. People paid (very low fees) to attend face-to-face and no one complained that the content was live streamed free.
Jeff, all I can say is AMEN!
Wake up MPI, this is a “new now”
Jeff, interesting material.
Might I offer this perspective?
The comparison is much like oranges and strawberries. Both provide nourishment. But that’s where the comparison stops. One is high in sugar, one needs to be peeled, one comes from a tree, one is usually red in color, etc.
Both meetings provide mental nourishment. But that’s where the comparison stops.
The meeting objectives are quite different. The audiences are quite different. They are attending for different reasons.
For Buzz2009… Social Media for Association Executives is the very reason for attending. For the WEC, one might be there as a supplier, or a senior corporate planner looking for Strategic Meeting Management, or a young professional attending the 101 type session on contract negotiation, etc. etc.
My understanding is that MPI is offering VAP as an alternative for those not able to attend. And to that I say, kudos. Maybe by supporting these interested professionals in this way, this people might attend in person in the future. Who knows?
Their cost model for each of these meetings is just that, THEIR cost model. Base on their business model. Might it need tweaking? Maybe. That is where their analysis of evaluation data comes in to play.
But this is a snapshot in time. Things change, technologies change and, as we all know, the economy changes. But all associations will be dealing with these questions to some extent in the future. They have to look at their members, their business model and their value proposition.
With meetings typically being the greatest source of non-dues revenue for an association, these are more than philosophical discussions of “free or fee”… but discussions about the future financial viability of an association.
Thanks for keeping this topic going. Given that fact that this touches the Knowledge, IT, Finance, Membership and Meetings departments of an association, I think this exercise illustrates that association boards need to make this part of their strategic discussions.
This is a starting point. It will evolve as each association evaluates their members’ needs. Ultimately, users will determine what route to take.
Jamie
Knowledge Architect
FusionProductions.com
@Jamie
Thanks for the thorough and different perspective. I agree that often associations use conferences as an important source of non-dues revenue and can understand their fear that offering live streaming free might cannibalize their face-to-face attendance. I also think associations need to be more transparent about why they are holding the meeting and their objectives. If the goal is a non-dues revenue stream, state that. If the goal is to educate as many members as possible, state that. I agree with you that meeting and event planners as well as board members need to think about these issues as part of their strategic discussions before events are planned.
Thanks for bringing up meeting objectives too. I would argue that one of MPI’s WEC OGS meeting objectives was to educate and help people embrace the message “Meetings Change The World.” Was that message only for the people there at the event or was the message for a larger audience? MPI missed an opportunity for that message to be spread virally both inside and outside the hospitality industry by not offering free live streaming. That’s unfortunate.
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