The botched terrorist attack on Christmas Day has raised the tension levels once again among those who would normally travel on airplanes. That tension is created more by the prospect of long lines and delays at security checkpoints than it is by the threat of additional attacks. The most recent incident comes at a time when, according to Y Partnership and U.S. Travel Association research, only 18 percent of U.S. adults are planning to take an overnight trip for business purposes between now and the end of April (down from 23 percent a year ago). Given this as the backdrop, it has never been more important for association executives to create compelling reasons for their members to travel to association meetings, conventions and trade shows.

State and regional associations tend to have it a bit easier in this regard than do associations that are national and international in scope. That’s because attendance at a state or regional association meeting typically requires a shorter trip. Indeed, as we’ve seen in the past, the mere expectation of an increase in time spent waiting in lines at airports is enough to send many meeting-goers to their cars, even for meetings that are as far away as 500 miles. But whether attendees are expected to fly or drive, association leadership must still make a compelling case for why the trip is necessary in the first place. Here, then, are some basic suggestions that can help your association make that case:

1. Attendance at the association meeting will provide professional education not available elsewhere. Whether or not your association runs a professional certification program, be sure your meeting’s agenda includes unique and targeted educational content that your attendees will find practical and germane to their profession. Look at ways to enhance your meeting’s educational component so that members will be less likely to view it as the same thing they always get at your meetings. This will make it less likely that they will skip a meeting.

2. Attendance at the association meeting is a unique networking opportunity not available in any other setting. In your promotional materials, be sure to highlight the types of attendees and the networking opportunities that will be available. As you formulate your meeting’s agenda, be sure that ample networking opportunities have been included. Every break or off-site activity has the potential to be made more valuable if planned with an eye toward helping attendees meet and visit with people they might not otherwise get to meet.

3. Remember that one good idea or one new relationship that results from your association meeting is often enough ROI to keep a member coming back. If, however, attendees leave your meeting feeling like they didn’t learn anything, were not exposed to any new ideas or didn’t meet any new people, you really have no right to expect them to attend again. Search out members who have had success at your meetings and find out what made those successes occur. Review attendee surveys from previous years and speak with attendees who have had positive experiences to learn more. Build upon those successes and you’re sure to create additional compelling reasons for your members to attend your events.

Tim Schneider
Schneider Publishing Company

Writing recently in The New York Times business section, media columnist David Carr reviewed the successful career of Oprah Winfrey, who has announced that she’s ending her popular daytime talk show in 2011. While at first blush, Oprah may not have much in common with the typical association executive (among other things, Forbes has estimated her net worth at more than $2.3 billion), there are lessons from her 25-year run that all managers can apply to the way they run their organizations. In Carr’s column, most of these lessons take the form of the things Oprah did not do in order to become a success:

Oprah never put her name on merchandise or licensed her name to be used by others. As Carr points out, these are things that many of her contemporaries such as Martha Stewart, Donald Trump and a host of other would-be moguls have done with decidedly mixed results. Association executives are also often tempted to put their organization’s names on products that may not be central to their group’s membership value proposition. As Carr points out, Oprah made her brand stronger by refraining to have it plastered in all the obvious places.

Oprah never made deals just for the sake of synergy, never made investments that put a strain on her core business and never let office politics boil into public view. In this list, Carr includes those things that have undone media power players such as Barry Diller, Sumner Redstone and Michael Eisner. Here, the lesson of bringing a high level of discipline to the management of an organization is something that association executives can take from Oprah’s experience.

Oprah never got involved in businesses she didn’t understand and she never rose past her level of competence. In this instance, Carr draws a comparison between Oprah and Edgar Bronfman, Jean-Marie Messier and “just about everybody else in the media world” who have violated what should be basic tenets of organizational management. Recognizing and playing to your strengths is just as fundamental for an association executive as it has been for Oprah.

Oprah never felt constrained by conventional wisdom. Carr points out that Oprah turned down numerous movie roles following her debut in “The Color Purple” because she “knew her talk show was the thing that would butter her bread.” Carr also points out that as tabloid television gained popularity, Oprah moved in the opposite direction and built an even bigger audience by promoting good books and providing an uplifting experience. In this instance, managers who think they can only move their organizations in directions that others expect should consider what might be accomplished if conventional wisdom is turned on its head.

Of course, while Oprah is ending her talk show while it’s still on top, she won’t exactly be fading from the media landscape. She has spawned several other talk shows now in syndication and she will launch her own cable channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network, in 2011. In concluding his column, Carr quotes Oprah as saying, “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know who holds it.”

On behalf of all of the people at Association News, best wishes for the holiday season. Here’s wishing you all the success you envision for yourself in 2010!

Tim Schneider
Schneider Publishing Company

The role of generational differences in a person’s propensity to join an association is a topic on which we’ve written frequently in the past few years. Now, the Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) has produced a large-scale generational study focused on the exhibitions and events industry. Associations that organize trade shows or conferences will find many of the findings of the CEIR study of interest.

The importance of getting off to a good start with Millennials (ages 18 to 27). The CEIR study found that exhibitions and events can win or lose this enormous generation with their all-important first impressions. The core values and attitudes of Millennials were found to be a dedication to excellence along with a passion about the contributions they make to society through their careers. According to CEIR, exhibitions and events represent a very good opportunity to nourish and satisfy those passions. However, it is important for event organizers to view Millennials not as once-a-year visitors to a single event, but instead as valued customers and as members of a professional club—a community—that gets together on an ongoing basis to learn together, advance their careers together, and secure their futures together.

Understanding the members of Generation X (ages 28 to 39). Generation X was America’s first generation of latchkey kids who often came home after school to an empty house since both of their parents were working. Now in adulthood, they are oftentimes called the “Family-First Generation.” According to the CEIR study, Gen Xers do not want to become workaholics whose work hours intrude into their personal lives, especially their time with their children. In many ways, Generation X is an “island generation,” very unique in its core values from all other generations and almost certainly the toughest sell for exhibitions and events. Exhibition organizers therefore need to give customized, generation-specific attention to Generation X.

Do not overlook Boomers (ages 45 to 63). Boomers are the career-driven generation and define themselves by their work, by their “contribution.” According to the CEIR study, they possess virtually all of the core values essential for a positive predisposition toward exhibitions and events. America is a Boomer-led nation. For the next decade, America’s executive suites will be occupied by a Boomer majority who will make the decisions about budgeting for and on attending exhibitions and events.

The CEIR study concludes that it is vitally important to train your association’s personnel in generational strategy. Each generation of prospective attendees is unique and each responds differently to various sales and marketing appeals. As a result, generational considerations must be included in the upfront design and planning of your association’s trade shows and events, in marketing and advertising efforts, and in post-event follow up. For more information on incorporating generational planning for your exhibitions and events and on “The Power of Exhibitions in the 21st Century,” please visit www.ceir.org.

Tim Schneider
Schneider Publishing Company

During this past year of economic recession and attacks on the value of business-related travel, the symbiotic relationship that exists between associations and the cities that host their meetings, conventions and trade shows has only become clearer. Both association and convention bureau executives can find new ammunition to defend the value of business travel in a first-of-its-kind study released last month by the United States Travel Association and Destination & Travel Foundation. (Disclosure: I serve on the executive committee of the Destination & Travel Foundation.)

Titled “The Return on Investment of U.S. Business Travel,” the study was completed by Oxford Economics and found that for every dollar invested in business travel, businesses experience an average $12.50 in increased revenue and $3.80 in new profits. The study also concluded that reducing business travel has a negative impact on corporate profits: The average U.S. business would forfeit 15 percent of its profits in the first year of eliminating business travel.

The study covered 14 economic sectors and its findings were verified through a combination of three separate surveys of corporate executives and business travelers and a broad review of related research. For the purposes of the study, business travel included sales trips, meetings, conventions, trade shows and incentive trips. Other key findings of the study include:

• Business executives estimated a four- to six-time return on every dollar invested in conference and trade show participation.
• Business executives and business travelers estimated that 28 percent of their current business would be lost without in-person meetings.
• Business executives and business travelers estimated that roughly 40 percent of their prospective customers are converted to new customers through in-person meetings compared with only 16 percent without such meetings.
• More than half of business travelers stated that as many as 20 percent of their company’s new customers were the direct result of trade-show participation.
• Eighty-five percent of corporate executives perceive web meetings and teleconferences to be less effective than in-person meetings with prospective customers, and 63 percent believe virtual meetings are less effective with current customers.

According to the study, U.S. business travel is responsible for $246 billion in spending and 2.3 million American jobs; $100 billion of this spending and nearly 1 million American jobs are linked directly to meetings and events. In the first six months of 2009, total business travel spending was down 11.9 percent. The study estimated that a 10 percent increase in business travel spending would increase the Gross Domestic Product of the U.S. by between 1.5 and 2.8 percent.

There is no question that business-related travel is critical to the economic well-being of the United States and encouraging your members to travel more may well be the best “stimulus package” for getting the economy back on track. For the complete version of the study and a tool kit with suggestions for using its findings, please visit the U.S. Travel Association website at ustravel.org.

Tim Schneider
Schneider Publishing Company

The conventions and trade shows organized by trade associations and professional societies are typically an important source of revenue for those organizations. With the economic recession and the downturn in
corporate travel, the need for associations to make a better case for the importance of their conventions and trade shows has never been more urgent. Thanks to new research from Tradeshow Week magazine, association executives have several additional data points to help them get that point across.

Tradeshow Week magazine surveyed a total of 323 executives and managers, which included a cross-section of respondents in a range of industry sectors. The survey found that 96 percent of CEOs and other senior executives said they are attending their industry’s most important events this year despite—or perhaps because of—current business conditions. A series of questions on the value of events received highly positive responses, including:

• A significant 89 percent of the survey respondents said they are going to the most important events in their industry.
• Eighty-seven percent agreed that conventions and tradeshows are essential for comparing products and meeting suppliers in person.
• Fifty-four percent said that smaller crowds at events this year have enabled them to be more efficient when at the show.
• Fifty percent of attendees said that missing key events may negatively impact their future personal or organizational performance.

Although travel budgets are under scrutiny in nearly every industry, 59 percent of the respondents to the Tradeshow Week survey believe their travel budgets will rebound within a year after seeing an economic or sales turnaround, and 42 percent say their travel budgets will rebound even quicker—within six months—of a turnaround in the economy.

Even with tighter exhibitor budgets, 84 percent of the respondents say they will participate in more or the same number of conventions and trade shows over the next two years. A whopping 88 percent of respondents said that conventions and trade shows will continue to be a critical part of their product sourcing and buying process over the next five years.

According to Tradeshow Week, the findings indicate that in a challenging economy it is even more important to keep up-to-date with industry trends, see new products and services, and maintain and build relationships—all areas in which association conventions and trade shows provide significant value and efficiency. In short, attending conventions and tradeshows during a recession keeps executives informed and competitive.

A detailed report on the findings of this survey along with a 40-slide PowerPoint file that your association can use to help support your convention and trade show marketing efforts is available from Tradeshow Week for $149. For more information or to order, contact Michael Hughes at (480) 483-4461.

Tim Schneider
Schneider Publishing Company

As we have reported many times in this space, convention bureaus face a never-ending task of educating their communities and their funding sources on the value of the work they do. Historically, that education has centered on providing statistics relating to how many visitors the destination marketing organization (DMO) has helped attract. At the just-concluded annual meeting of the Destination Marketing Association International in Atlanta, a new approach to measuring the value of the visitor industry was suggested thanks to research compiled by the Greater Phoenix Convention & Visitors Bureau. The research, released through the Destination & Travel Foundation (the 501(c)(3) affiliate of DMAI and on whose board I serve), gives DMOs another way of proving the importance of keeping conventions and meetings coming to their cities.

Rather than taking the traditional approach of focusing solely on the amount of money contributed to public coffers through hotel occupancy taxes, the Greater Phoenix CVB embarked on a survey of its hotel properties to determine how much each of them pays in property tax and sales tax above and beyond hotel occupancy taxes. What the bureau discovered is that hotel occupancy taxes represent less than half of the total tax contributions its hotels make to city, county and state governments. Surprisingly, the $115 million the 38 hotels included in the survey paid in property and sales taxes in 2008 equates to an astounding $10,123 in tax revenue per hotel guest room annually. If that number does not sensitize political leaders to the importance of travel, I don’t know what will.

“For too long, we have focused and been evaluated by government on just hotel occupancy taxes when in fact it is only half of our impact,” said Steve Moore, president and CEO of the Greater Phoenix CVB. “Keep in mind this also does not identify what hotel employees and vendors spend in one’s local economy nor what the hotel guests spent outside the hotel.” In comparing the taxes paid by hotel owners to the taxes paid by other local businesses and homeowners, Moore also makes the point that visitors don’t tend to use many of the things those taxes pay for, such as schools, libraries, prisons and police and fire departments. “Visitors keep our own taxes lower and we need to make that clearer to our policy makers,” said Moore.

Detailed results from the Phoenix CVB’s study are being provided by the Destination & Travel Foundation as part of the foundation’s Destination Excellence campaign, which Moore chairs. As I noted in our March issue, the campaign set a goal of raising $4 million during this very difficult time for the travel industry. As of the meeting in Atlanta, more than $3.5 million has been pledged by supporters of the Destination Excellence campaign. For more information on the Phoenix study and the Destination Excellence campaign, please call Camille Johnson at DMAI at (202) 835-4088.

Regardless of the goals and objectives of your association, reevaluating the way you make your case has the potential to shift the way in which your key constituencies view the value of your organization.

Tim Schneider
Schneider Publishing Company

As a member of the executive committee of the Destination & Travel Foundation (the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the Destination Marketing Association International, which is holding its annual meeting this week in Atlanta), it’s been my pleasure to observe up closethe management styles and skill sets of several of the industry’s leading destination marketing executives. Since the vast majority of DMOs receive public funding from hotel occupancy tax revenue and nearly a third of them receive some form of state tax dollars, the DMO CEO not only has to manage a paid staff and volunteer board, but also has to manage key funding relationships with the mayor, city council, city manager or state-level funding source. As a result, DMO execs are thrown into a political role by virtue of their reliance on funds controlled by these governmental entities.

What makes all this even harder is that in the case of hotel occupancy taxes, for example, funds that were originally intended to be primarily reinvested in marketing to stimulate additional visitation are increasingly being diverted for uses other than destination marketing. Because it falls to the DMO executive to be the chief advocate for travel in his or her community, the DMO CEO can, on occasion, end up at odds with the destination’s political leaders. While every savvy DMO executive knows the importance of building support for the DMO among those in political leadership positions, the best laid plans of nonpartisan political education are often not enough to make DMO funding sacrosanct.

For more information on the important role of the destination marketing industry, click here to access the digital version of “Why Meetings Matter,” which we recently published in conjunction with DMAI.

Tim Schneider
Schneider Publishing Company

Several hospitality industry leaders we interviewed recently regarding the state of the travel industry agreed that association meetings and sports-related travel are two of the few bright spots on the travel-industry horizon. The roundtable session featured Loews Hotels Chairman & CEO Jonathan Tisch; Roger Dow, president & CEO of the U.S. Travel Association; Michael Gehrisch, president & CEO of Destination Marketing Association International; J. Stephen Perry, president & CEO of the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention & Visitors Bureau; and Maura Allen Gast, Executive Director of the Irving (Texas) Convention & Visitors Bureau.

The comments of our roundtable participants echo those of many people in the travel industry that we have spoken with during the past six months. In times like these, destinations and hotels need to target the markets that are most likely to produce business for them and two of the best markets to be targeting right now are association meetings and sports-related travel.

The complete roundtable discussion will appear in the July issues of SportsTravel and Association News magazines as part of a special section produced in conjunction with Destination Marketing Association International titled Why Meetings Matter. To request a copy of this special section, please e-mail me.

Tim Schneider
Schneider Publishing Company

President Obama recently announced an ambitious plan for a new system of high-speed rail service that would run on 10 corridors across the United States, connecting many population centers. The planned routes would have the potential to change the way large numbers of people travel, much like the construction of the interstate highway system did a half-century ago. High-speed rail is defined as a rail line that reaches at least 90 miles per hour. There is currently only one such line operating in the U.S., Amtrak’s Acela Express, which runs between Boston and Washington.

For state and regional association executives and sports-event organizers concerned about the ease with which people can travel to meetings and events and for destinations that have suffered reductions in air service, high-speed rail may be a godsend. For more information on the proposed high-speed rail routes, visit www.fra.dot.gov.

A final reminder: The July issue of Association News and SportsTravel will include a special section titled Why Meetings Matter: Everybody Wins When Groups Travel. Produced in conjunction with Destination Marketing Association International, this special section will be distributed at numerous industry events during the coming year. For more information or to advertise in this special section, please e-mail me or call us toll-free at (877) 577-3700.

Tim Schneider
Schneider Publishing Company

The July issues of both Association News and SportsTravel magazine will include our annual special section produced in conjunction with the Destination Marketing Association International. This year’s special section will be titled “Why Meetings Matter: Everybody Wins When Groups Travel.”

This special section will include:
• The importance of face-to-face meetings at a time when the convention industry is under siege
• Successfully combating the diversion of hotel occupancy taxes to general fund purposes
• An exclusive Q & A with industry leaders on the future of the travel industry

The meeting and event planners who will receive “Why Meetings Matter” generate 106 million hotel room nights annually. In addition, this special section will be distributed at industry events throughout the coming year. Extra copies will also be made available for anyone who wishes to use it for their own industry advocacy efforts. For more information on this once-a-year opportunity to reach both the state and regional association meetings market and the sports-related travel market with a single advertising buy, please call us toll-free at (877) 577-3700 or send me an e-mail today.