Responding to attendee and exhibitor input is key; new tool enables association to respond immediately instead of after meeting

Ledoux

With meeting and trade show attendees becoming more demanding in all industries, ASAE is trying to respond to questions and concerns more quickly with a real-time experience-mapping tool at its Annual Meeting & Exposition in Nashville, Tenn., Aug. 9-12.

"We will be getting feedback from the attendees and exhibitors throughout their meeting experience and we can evaluate where are the gaps in their experience and have the opportunity to change that experience at the meeting and not after the meeting," Amy Ledoux, ASAE's senior vice president of meetings and expositions, told CEO Update.

"This is a total game-changer. We are working on capturing how people are feeling right now," she said. "If you can't find education that meets your needs, we can reach out to you and put together with our education team one-on-one help," Ledoux said.

ASAE piloted the tool—which is integrated into the mobile app for the event—at its Great Ideas Conference in Orlando, Fla., in March. At the annual meeting, the association plans to enlist about 500 volunteers to participate.

"We are not opening it to everyone. We're not sure we have the staffing we need to respond to 6,000 people," she said.

ASAE CEO John Graham said attendance will be strong this year.

"Our registrations are significantly ahead of the last two years at this time," he said. "Nashville has a strong buzz about it. Some of our hotels already are sold out."

More than 5,400 people attended last year's ASAE meeting in Atlanta. The group said registrations this year are tracking ahead of San Diego in 2008, one of ASAE's most widely attended annual meetings with 6,266 attendees.

Some things will be different at ASAE this year, and some will be the same, Graham said.

"What we have found is that people really don't like major shakeups of the program," he said. "People get into a pattern and when you change it, it really messes them up."

One change is that Learning Labs have been reduced to an hour. In addition, ASAE will introduce "gamification" to the show floor with a scratch-off card containing a sponsor's name. Attendees who visit that sponsor will be entered in a drawing for a seat at The Classic, the ASAE Foundation fundraiser, which takes place Monday night at Nashville's Schermerhorn Symphony Center.

ASAE also is introducing a new meeting area for first-time attendees, who make up about of quarter of attendance. Since first-timers are "newbies," the new area will be called The Hive.

The annual meeting will have three Game Changer sessions:

• Change—The Demographic Mandate, with futurist Ken Gronbach;
• The True Cost of Free, with speaker Rafi Mohammed, a pricing consultant; and
• The Song-and-Dance of Revolutionary Change with Sarah Trahern, CEO of the Country Music Association.