Outgoing CEO Susan Robertson said move will allow group to ‘do new things'

Robertson

ASAE has ended its Great Ideas and XDP conferences, CEO Susan Robertson said Tuesday at a news conference. The briefing was held in conjunction with the group's hybrid 2021 annual meeting, which runs through tomorrow.

"Based on our yearly product portfolio reviews, several programs will be retired," Robertson said on a Zoom call.

"This is always hard for associations, to stop doing things, but in order for us to do new things, in order for us to focus our efforts and energies on our (new) strategic plan, we need to look what we're not going to do anymore.

"One is the Great Ideas Conference, another is XDP. But what's important here is that really creates the space that we need to do new things and to really support the strategic plan. And it also gives us a little bit of flexibility to meet the needs of our members and to shift and change things as our environment changes."

In response to a question from CEO Update, Robertson said XDP—which replaced its Springtime Expo in 2017—was intended originally to run at a loss to showcase new ideas for meetings. Great Ideas was "never a big moneymaker," she said. XDP stood for Xperience Design Project.

"We realized that parts of what we learned from XDP had already been adopted and assimilated into other kinds of programming, and so it didn't make sense for that to be a standalone anymore. However, with some of the programming now geared to CEOs and C-suite professionals, you'll see some of the things that we did in XDP pretty much on display in those programs," she said.

The February Great Ideas conference "was a model that was really popular when it first started," she said. "And over the years, it has been found in other organizations who have done similar things, and great ideas exist in all programs. And quite frankly, people were making choices between attending Great Ideas or the annual meeting, because it felt like a mini-meeting in some ways. So, we were competing against ourselves."

Robertson also said that all 600 seats at ASAE's annual Summit Awards Dinner, to be held Thursday, Sept. 30, at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., are sold out. The fundraising event typically attracted 1,000 attendees prepandemic, but ASAE reduced capacity this year to allow for social distancing.

"We've decided to distance the tables and have eight people per table, because people's comfort level has changed due to COVID and we want to be sensitive to that," ASAE Senior Vice President of Public Policy Mary Kate Cunningham said.

Robertson steps down at the end of the August; Michelle Mason takes over as the group's CEO on Sept. 1.