SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – Meeting Professionals International (MPI) kicked off its 2009 World Education Congress today with an opening general session that cemented the organization’s focus on the threats the meetings industry has faced over travel, incentives, and the value of meetings.
But along the way, participants heard some ideas on the structure and purpose of meetings that the industry itself is very far from embracing.
The opening session featured author and economist Ben Stein, Harrah’s Entertainment CEO Gary Loveman, and Betsy Myers, COO of the Obama for America campaign, all painting a compelling picture of the role meetings can play in a tough economy. But by the time the session began, Myers had been onsite for two days. She arrived Friday to accept MPI’s first annual RISE Award for Organizational Achievement on behalf of the Obama campaign.
The award recognizes organizations that use meetings to create transformative business results, and MPI has won some well-deserved praise for its choice of recipient. The change wrought by Obama for America might be the most profound we see in our generation, whether or not the result was change you personally believed in.
But Myers’ message to the awards ceremony (somewhat in contrast to her general session speech) carried some deep challenges for the industry, unintentional as they almost certainly were.
We tend to remember the Obama campaign by the big numbers it racked up. The US$100 million raised (compared to $3 million, Myers said, for one of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns in the 1990s). The two million people who crowded the U.S. Capitol for the inauguration January 20. The huge, jubilant crowds that kept growing as the campaign progressed. The triumphant public rally in Berlin. The transcendent election night celebration at Chicago’s Grant Park.
But Myers remembered the smallest of small gatherings, at kitchen tables and in church basements, where people showed up to hear about a campaign and ended up finding a community. Voters might have come out to hear the candidate, or at the behest of an enthusiastic campaign worker. But Myers said many of them stayed, and worked their hearts out, after they bonded with their fellow volunteers.
Meetings were also integral to the campaign’s own ability to create a genuine connection with voters. In the crucial primary battleground of Iowa, the candidate held face-to-face meetings in all 99 of the state’s counties. Myers said her own work on the campaign was powered by people she met and stories she heard on the campaign trail.
This is the sense of commitment and momentum, of common ground and shared passion, that we work so hard to create at meetings, whoever hosts them and whatever their purpose. Yet the majority of Myers’ favourite, most memorable meetings would not even have fit the formal definition established by the U.N. World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), on which the industry bases its economic impact analysis.
Many of them involved fewer than 10 people.
They generally had no need for a booked venue.
We can only hope, for the sake of everyone present, that they fell short of the UNTWO’s minimum four hours’ duration.
And of direct interest to the association that chose to honour the Obama campaign with a brand new award, all of those meetings were organized by volunteers, almost certainly without a single paid meeting professional at the table. (Hmmnh. In the midst of a vibrant online debate about the value and scope of free content—ultimately, of free content services—here’s a case where meeting and event planning was successfully brought into the informal economy. Do we still think all services yearn to be free?)
Yet Myers couldn’t have been more deliberate or concise with her comment that “meetings and events elected U.S. President Barack Obama.” The RISE Award recognizes transformative results achieved by bringing people together face to face. In this time and place, MPI picked the right winner.
But it’s not yet clear how our industry finds a place in the wildly successful model that Obama for America created. It matters, because it took less than two months for the former campaign team to apply its new mass mobilization template to a large national consultation on health care reform.
In early January, The Edge commented that professional meeting skills will be sorely needed in hybrid organizations that try to hold huge numbers of meetings driven by volunteer energy and enthusiasm. It’s a safe bet that those organizations don’t see themselves as a market for meeting services. And while a great many meeting planners work with volunteer boards and committees, I don’t know that our industry has a coherent model for bringing together the best of paid and volunteer services. We could use one.
The other striking point about Myers’ acceptance speech was that it was all about the value of the results we produce, not the inputs we consume. From MPI’s work on the economic impact of meetings and events, many of us have realized that adding up the spending on the meeting space we occupy, the hotel rooms and airline seats we book, the food and beverage our participants consume is an essential first step to understanding our value as an industry. But it’s not nearly the end of the road.
As COO, Myers surely cared about the wise use of the US$100 million that Obama for America raised. She said she was drawn to Obama in part by his determination to see his campaign run like a business.
But the campaign didn’t form to create a market for sign- and banner-makers, short-term leases for providers of campaign storefronts, demand for the GPS systems that kept door-to-door canvassers moving in the right direction, or jobs for campaign staff. Its value—its measurable impact—was all about the outcome.
I’ve never been very good at partying for the sake of partying. For as long as I can remember, I’ve felt that celebrations and award ceremonies are at their best when they mark a genuine, worthy achievement. At the level of process and best practice—even setting aside the sheer joy with which many of us greeted the result—Obama for America aced that standard.
But one of the best reasons to recognize a best practice is to encourage its wider adoption. Our industry is still figuring out what it can learn from the hundreds and thousands of meetings that elected a U.S. president.