Meetings and Events Industry News

Limitations remain, but there's a goldmine of data available that can help with sales, marketing, and production.

Conferences and conventions need to be re-imagined as mass-personalization platforms that segment audiences into different sub-groups to provide greater returns for individual attendees.

The purposeful creation of meetings within meetings is important for the continued vitality of large meetings because it offers attendees focused discussions and connections in intimate settings.

Cities across the U.S. are aggressively promoting their civic policies around diversity and inclusion in an attempt to ensure that all meeting attendees feel welcome in their communities. This rise of advocacy at the local level is a direct response to the inane alt-right narrative coming out of the White House.

Bringing more multicultural groups to a destination for meetings and events isn’t just good business. It's also good for local communities and future tourism, too.

Grassroots activism is now the go-to tactic for achieving gender equality in the Trump-era travel industry. Lobbying male executives one-on-one isn’t working, so women are employing their collective influence, reminiscent of recent movements like the Women’s March in Washington, D.C.

Finding the best speakers for a meeting or event involves much more than asking whether they’ll be entertaining or not. What really matters most is whether they’re interactive, sensitive, and most of all, relevant.

This is not your grandfather's keynote. Choosing the right speaker to engage an audience is more complex than ever before. And that's a good thing.