Shifting to Digital: the MPI World Education Conference
If your annual education conference attracts only 20% of your members what are you doing for the other 80%? How do you create and deliver education for them? How do you bring your community together?
Meeting Professionals International is making some bold moves in 2011 to tackle some of these challenges. Have a look at what they are doing at their annual world education conference and let me know what you think.
Rolling Out the Hive
The Hive is designed to be the hub of digital buzz for MPI’s 2011 WEC (see sketch above). It’s a physical space in the global village. The Hive combines the cyber cafe, info desk, interview studio, device recharge point, twitter wall, social media aggregator, lounge and a stage (for quick tech lessons) all in one place. The idea is to give attendees multiple ways to connect to the people, content and ideas at WEC. Digital Rookies can connect with Digital Allstars. Groups can hold tweetups. It will be so much more than a cool place to recharge your phone and hangout.
Transforming MPI Website into a Virtual Hub
In another bold move, the MPI website will become a funnel for all social media during the conference. It will aggregate the tweets, photos, videos, blog posts, etc into a single place. In addition, sessions will be streamed live to the MPI website. Some content will be free and others will be available to members only. The rest will be uploaded into MPI’s on demand program. This is a major shift from 2009’s $300 virtual access pass experiment and a good evolution.
Crossing the Pond
The UK chapter (a large european chapter) is working on an initiative to run a parallel event. They will get UK members together and have a viewing party. Some of the sessions from Orlando will be streamed live to the UK chapter’s viewing headquarters. If this comes together – it will be a first for MPI and could open the doors for other viewing pods in other regions with heavy membership around the world.
Bottom Line
If 80% of your members are not attending your annual conference, consider other ways to connect them with the people, ideas and content from your event. Meeting Professionals International is shifting to digital with a multi-pronged approach.
What are you doing?
Written by Samuel J Smith
Samuel J. Smith is the Managing Director of Interactive Meeting Technology, LLC. He wakes up every morning to save the world from stuffing attendees in chairs for hours on end at events. Oh, and he has small children who usually want some breakfast.