CIM: You turned your PCMA Annual Conference in Las Vegas into a hybrid event for the first time last year. Why?
Deborah Sexton: In previous years we had webcast some of our content during Convening Leaders and our members really enjoyed being able to watch sessions remotely. In 2010, we knew, based on changing consumer behaviours and mindset, that the meetings industry needed to embrace virtual extensions and hybrid events. Webcasting our content wasn’t enough. We realized that we needed to really showcase the energy, community and excitement that people experience at a face-to-face event. We believed that there was no real concern about hybrid events cannibalizing face2face events and this would be the perfect opportunity to extend our global brand and open our meeting to new audiences that might be persuaded to attend a future face-to-face meeting.
This year at your Annual Congress “PCMA Convening Leaders” in San Diego from 8 – 11 January you expanded the virtual part. To how many and which sessions did you give free access?
We gave free access to not just members, but anyone who might be interested in our education and meeting. We expanded the event to include concurrent sessions that targeted our vertical markets, segments from the Learning Lounge, virtual only sessions and we allowed our attendees a choice of 2 sessions during most of the time slots. We also engaged not only a virtual “face” with a moderator for the event, but also worked with 3 social mediators who engaged the audience in text chats to increase the feeling of community and networking. It was met with great success.
How was the virtual delegates’ feedback?
It has all been extremely positive. Many expressed gratitude that we offered the hybrid part as they could not travel due to budgets or workload. Some of the best comments were that they wanted us to form a meet-up onsite in 2013 for the 2012 hybrid attendees to connect face-to-face. I think that speaks volumes about the power of these types of events.
How many members travelled to San Diego, how many logged in from home?
We don’t have final San Diego face-to-face attendance numbers yet; we are still completing our audit. For the hybrid, over 600 unique logins were used remotely. Oftentimes we have groups that attend in conference rooms, so the final number of actual attendees can be much higher than the actual log in numbers.
Are you happy with the hybrid delegates’ numbers compared to the years before?
We are very pleased. We were able to expose this audience to our organisation and the high-level education we are known for. Now that those attendees see the incredible experience we offer onsite, I am convinced we will have past hybrid attendees in Orlando in 2013. That’s what happened in 2012; more than 300 Convening Leaders registrants indicated they were influenced to attend by their previous participation in a PCMA virtual or hybrid meeting – of those, 112 had either never attended Convening Leaders or had not done so in the past 6 years. This proves our hybrid strategy is working.
