ASAE Toronto Redux — Lessons for Our Own Meetings

I’ve just gotten back from the generally enjoyable and productive ASAE Toronto convention, and while it’s still fresh I thought it might be worthwhile to share some of my impressions.

Overall, I would rate it as an 8 on a 1-10 scale and, like many of my colleagues who are involved in some way with hosting association meetings, I am a tough grader. I appreciate that ASAE’s staff does a good job of listening to its members and tries new ways to make the conference better for attendees. Whether or not they always hit the mark is less important to me than the fact that they are trying hard. (And they do manage to hit the mark fairly often).

One reason I enjoy going to the ASAE Convention is that it gives me the opportunity to actually experience a large meeting as an attendee and use those observations to help improve the experience of the people who attend meetings I help to produce. With that in mind, here are some impressions I took away from Toronto:

I was disappointed that so little time in each of the first two general sessions was actually given over to the keynote speaker. I expected more. I left on the last day before the closing session, but based on the tweets I read waiting for my flight, more than an hour was given over to association business.

We tend to lose sight of the fact we’re not the real reason people come to the general sessions. Yes, it’s a critical platform for getting out the association’s key messages and is an important and necessary part of those sessions. That said, we need to be careful to not overstay our welcome. We sell the speaker in our marketing materials, not the association business aspect of the session. How many people would show up if that were reversed? I’ve overseen quite a few ‘main tent’ sessions at conventions, and regardless of the quality of the production, the good vibrations quickly head south when the opening act runs too long. For most of our members, we aren’t as interesting to them as we think we are.

I thought ASAE’s use of new media tools added a great deal to my convention experience. For that matter, how they used ‘old media’ tools like email was excellent also. They did a nice job of integrating all of the marketing and communications tools in their arsenal. I particularly liked their integration of platforms like YouTube, Slideshare, Flickr and Twitter to build interest and provide meaningful input. For example, they pushed out most of the speaker slide decks on Twitter. One click took me right to Slideshare and two more clicks let me save it to my computer. The email communications and printed collateral provided lots of useful information and were effective in drawing attention to the many channels through which one could experience the conference. With so many organizations feeling the budget squeeze, this provided a good template that I think most associations can emulate for far less cost (not free) when the IT budget precludes more customized options.

Equally helpful was seeing first-hand the limitations of Twitter when the stream becomes a torrent. There were somewhere between 4-5,000 tweets on the ASAE hashtag. It was somewhat helpful prior to the convention when the feed was a trickle, but once the conference got under way, there were way too many to try to keep up with them. It made for an interesting diversion (I especially enjoyed many of Joan Eisenstodt’s tweets) and occasionally I found a good nugget, but it wasn’t an efficient way to keep up with what was going on. (Maybe there are apps that I’m not aware of to somehow filter the tweets within the hashtag.) My point is not to diss Twitter or ASAE’s use of it — it definitely provides value. Rather, I simply want to point out that it’s not the best way to ensure that important or useful information gets out to a wide audience, particularly as the number of users and tweets multiply.

One other point worth noting is how tolerant ASAE is of independent podcasts, the ‘unsessions’ and so forth. Jeff deCagna did all sorts of stuff off the ASAE grid, as did others. Trying to prevent or limit such indie voices is pointless, and convention planners need to get over thinking there’s anything they can do about it.

The education sessions were a mixed bag, as conference sessions so often are, and not just at ASAE. It reminded me how important it is to provide guideposts to help attendees find appropriate educational offerings. At a minimum, labeling sessions as advanced, intermediate and basic would have been nice. I liked that there were video previews of a few sessions but more would have been helpful (as would linking them to session descriptions on the website).

Also, in most time slots there were too many choices. I would trade a somewhat tighter schedule for more education session blocs. Do we really need a half hour between education sessions? Start a few minutes earlier, shave some minutes off of the session breaks and another session could easily be included. More education sessions would make this event more valuable to those of us for whom the learning element is a major reason for attending (I’ve got to think that’s most of us).

One more note about the ASAE staff. They were uniformly helpful, well-informed and accessible, as were the temps hired to support the staff. Based on my own interaction, they set a high standard to emulate.