February 2015
Cover Story/CMP Series
Could Your Meeting Use a Little Drama?
The theater world specializes in engaging audiences and moving hearts and minds. What can meeting professionals learn from actors and producers about creating more memorable meetings?
Cover illustration by Owen Gildersleeve
Features
The Fall and Rise of the Medical Meeting
Health-care digital-marketing consultant Len Starnes on the demise of the old paradigm for medical conferences — and the birth of a new model that drives year-round engagement with members.
21 Cities on How They're Different
Every city has that one signature asset — a festival, a neighborhood, a drink, a venue — that sets it apart from everywhere else. Among second-tier destinations, where convention center space and hotel-room inventory can run neck and neck, it means even more. Here’s what 21 of them told us is their one special thing.
Departments
Prosthetists Meet Printers
Volunteers who use 3D printing to make and distribute free prosthetics hold their first DIY medical conference.
Drinking in the Postmodern Winemaking Symposium
Clark Robert Smith follows classical ideals in both winemaking and meetings.
Strategies to Improve Your Surveys
Your survey results are only going to be as strong as the questions you use to get them. Make sure you’re asking the right things in the right way.
The Next Generation of Conference Education
Traditional conference-education models — calls for session submissions, transmitting and dispensing information, and packaging it as professional development — are losing their relevance.
Supported Article Innovative Meetings
Pioneers Festival Bolsters Startups
Pioneers Festival has evolved its focus from building a better economy to building a better world. Not bad for a student project.
Plenary
Exploring Fort Lauderdale
Florida is a destination that excels at mixing business and leisure travel.
How 100 Cities Built Resilience
It’s a new organization with an initiative that supports a new global role, for which it recently created an entirely new conference. And, without exaggeration, it deals with issues of a life-and-death nature.
When Rheumatologists Meet
ACR’s Annual Meeting draws up to 15,000 physicians, scientists, and health professionals who research or care for patients with autoimmune, rheumatic, and musculoskeletal diseases.
GES Acquires onPeak and Travel Planners
In October, event-marketing giant GES acquired two major providers of event-housing services: onPeak, headquartered in Chicago, and New York City–based Travel Planners.
What Is Meetovation?
Visit Denmark has been developing meeting-design principles for more than a decade, based on research as well as the country’s own cultural values.
New Strategies for Digital Event Marketing
Feeling a little fuzzy on how you could leverage your thousands of members, attendees, and/or Twitter followers to create buzz around your next event?
Texas Instruments Branches Out
Texas Instruments’ (TI) T3 conference brings together 1,500 educators and administrators from middle school through college to explore new learning technology.
3 Days in Copenhagen
There’s really only one way to describe the guest room that planners toured at the Hotel Crowne Plaza Copenhagen Towers, one of seven hotels on the itinerary of a three-day fam trip hosted by Visit Denmark and Wonderful Copenhagen in early December. It was a mess.
Also In This Issue
Now We Know
We’re not kidding when we say Convening Leaders is a learning lab. Here are a few things we learned from this year’s show.
Which Meeting Professional Are You?
Convening Leaders helps attendees bring out the best version of themselves.
No Little Takeaways
PCMA’s Convening Leaders 2015 — themed ‘Make No Little Plans’ — is a wrap. Here are five things our team learned.
6 Red-Carpet Tips for Meeting Designers
Why shouldn’t your meeting use some of the same tools that Hollywood employs to create blockbusters?