March 13–15, 2015
Fort Worth Convention
Center/Omni Fort Worth Hotel
Fort Worth, Texas

OVERVIEW

Electronics giant Texas Instruments (TI) hosted more than 1,600 middle-, high-school, and college educators in Fort Worth this spring to help them master new technologies and bring those skills back to their classrooms. This year’s conference saw a more than 20-percent increase in attendance over 2014.

CHALLENGES

One potential challenge for T3 organizers was balancing exhibits and program content between two separate venues, but the outcome was serendipitous. (Read our Pre Con profile at convn.org/pre-con-t3.) “We took advantage of the best things each venue had to offer,” said Dale Philbrick, TI’s director of customer success programs. “For example, we used the large ballroom in the convention center for the opening and closing sessions, which drew our largest audiences, and we used the open space around the breakout rooms in the hotel for exhibits in order to maximize traffic to our vendors.”

INITIATIVES

T3 organizers put a lot of thought into this year’s social-media campaign, using the hashtag #T3IC to keep the virtual conversation flowing. “The conference generated over 3 million Twitter impressions,” Philbrick said, “which represents a 173-percent increase over our social-media impressions from the 2014 conference.”

Convene’s Pre-Con/Post-Con series asks meeting planners about their challenges and how they intend to address them (Pre-Con), and then circles back around after the meeting has occurred (Post-Con) to see how well they worked out.