Winning When Everybody (By Which I Mean the Mainstream Media) Thinks You Should Be Failing

A couple of weeks ago, we had our annual meeting and expo. Each year the event gets bigger and more complex, and as a result it takes me longer and longer to get over it, so to speak. I come back a little shellshocked, a little excited, and a lot weary. I must be getting old (and oddly enough, the timing of our annual meeting meant that I had to miss the annual awards luncheon of Association Trends, who were kind enough to honor me this year as one of their “Young & Aspiring” association professionals, in spite of the obvious fact that I am neither!).

This year seemed especially shellshocking, because it went really well — and like many of you, I’ve been conditioned by the recent pessimism of the media and the leaders in Washington to expect the worst. When the best happens instead, it makes one step back and wonder why.

Our attendance was up 60% over last year, and we had the largest number of exhibitors ever (and this doesn’t even include the bump in exhibitors and expo attendance we received overall as a result of co-locating our expo this year with another organization that is related but non-competitive).

Here are some reasons why I think this happened, for those of you planning conferences and expos and who are fraught with worry (as I have to admit I was) over the state of the economy.

Location, location, location! Our annual meeting was in Fort Worth. Now, you may think “Fort Worth? That’s a great location?” (And actually, it is — what a great downtown!) But even without the downtown, it’s a great location … FOR US. Because Texas is a huge state for our membership and our industry, we went in this year with the strength of a lot of local traffic behind us. Tip #1: Pick locations that play to the strengths of your audience rather than locations that seem like a fun place to visit.

Charge people for what used to be free — sort of. We have to balance between full conference attendees and expo attendees — all conference attendees come to the expo, but not all expo attendees come to the conference. “Expo-only” registration at our trade show has always been free, in order, we thought, to increase attendance. Well, this year, we decided to charge a $19 admission fee instead — and had more attendees than ever before. Of course, we blanketed the state with marketing last fall promoting a free ticket to the expo for people who signed up before December 1. It worked better than we anticipated — and getting those signups got us a huge advance list that enabled us to market “upgrade” registrations to the full conference, plus keep in touch with them to ensure that they showed up at the expo. Which they did. Tip #2: Understand the different needs of different kinds of attendees, and play to them — but don’t give away things you should be charging for.

Play well with others. As I mentioned above, this year we “co-located” our conference with another organization whose constituency is related to ours, but non-competitive. They had their annual meeting at the same time we had ours, but the two conferences were separate, allowing us to maintain our own separate identities — except for the expo, which we jointly co-sponsored with shared expo hours for lunches, receptions, etc. The result was an even bigger expo than we would have had on our own, and some very happy exhibitors and attendees. There was a sense of “bigness” and excitement that exceeded what we could have done on our own. Tip #3: Who aren’t you working with that you should be?

Finally, I just have to say how great it was to get outside of the Beltway and spend time with our members, who are so much happier than the current media attitude suggests they have any reason to be. Yes, I said happy — our conference was a HAPPY event.

The members who were there seemed ecstatic to be breaking out of their same-old same-old. A columnist for our industry’s weekly trade newspaper wrote in his blog, “Incredible. Just got back from the ACCA National Conference; crowds were LARGER this year than last, very little moaning about ‘you know what.’ I can actually report optimism … Actually had 4 people in our seminar report record years in 2008; one admitting a 28 percent increase, another reporting 24 percent, neither slowing down. All in all, a good if exhausting week.”

For my part, their optimism was a much needed boost. I was as happy to spend time with them as they were with each other. In the end, isn’t their happiness why we do these things in the first place?