Seattle, Washington
An association client sponsors a meeting every year in a major U.S. city to bring together the suppliers, dealers, end-users and manufacturing entrepreneurs to share valuable education and market solutions. The meeting offers both buyers and sellers educational courses, exhibits, awards, and lectures as well as networking activities to explore issues and solutions that make a sustainable difference in our world.
A strategic approach
Experiential architecture offers a strategic “look” into the organization, its members, and potential risk factors. There are a number of ways to uncover obstacles to success and devise solutions to overcome them, as well as creating new opportunities for growth:
Evaluate the reasons for shrinking attendance
Assess specific values attendees place on the current program layout
Determine the potential financial risk involved with all possible options for change
Implement a plan with clear goals, key tasks, allocation of resources, including milestones and benchmarks
Uncover additional revenue streams
Gain more flexibility for the future, revealing opportunities or obstacles not identified before
Implement recommendations based on findings
Create a formal process for establishing initial and secondary list of targeted speakers
Fewer panel discussions and individual speaker sessions
Shorter, more interactive, peer-to-peer sessions
Change the meeting room sets and meal functions to facilitate interaction with buyers and sellers
Re-evaluate the sponsorship levels and booth pricing, as well as the benefits for each
Designed an exhibit space that was interactive allowing for informal discussions and one-on–one interaction
Reallocated funds within the conference budget to offer more value-added opportunities for networking
In partnership with the client, we utilized experiential architecture and applied our strategic approach to the organization’s challenges. As a result, we revitalized their meeting for success and implemented a set of working tools to use moving forward on the planning and execution of their annual meeting.
We developed a program that featured content on a diverse range of topics and delivery methods using the data gathered during the strategic phase of our engagement. As project managers of this extensive process, we were essential to cultivating change to include:
Offering compelling content creation and delivery
Providing robust feedback methods for members related to their conference experience
Showing value and ROI to retain previous exhibitors and sponsors while attracting new companies
Increasing revenue and bottom line profits for the association
Achieving highest rated results ever from post conference survey