The changes that AADE made to its 2010 Annual Meetingat San Antonio’s Henry B. Gonza-
lez Convention Center were the direct result of an initiative at its 2009 event. At that meeting, AADE worked with ethnoMetrics, which set up video cameras to record what was happening in three different areas: regis- tration; AADE’s booth in the exhibit hall, which included a bookstore; and the AADE Education and Research Foundation’s silent- auction area. By reviewingthe tapes,
ethnoMetrics was able to pinpoint the times when the registration area was most crowded. “What came out of that was that we changed our registration hours from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., to 2 p.m. to 8 p.m.,” said Marian Long,CMP, AADE’s direc- tor of meetings. “And [as a result] registration was never really crowded.” In addition, after the first day of the 2010 meeting, AADE turned its registration com- puters into stations where attendees could complete surveys to earn CEUs. When it came to its own
booth, what AADE learned from ethnoMetrics came as a surprise. “Our staff was not engaging people who were walk- ing in,” Longsaid. “We have all these different products, and people were comingin and they weren’t being engaged.” That led AADE to do two things. First, it
provided staff with booth training. In addition, AADE decided to take the bookstore out of the association’s booth space and place it in an area of its own. “Bookstores tend to look sloppy,” Longsaid, “so we took it off the show floor and put it in the hallway near our concur- rent sessions, and added an exit as well as [an] entrance. It had a better flow and better look.”
54 pcma convene January 2011
the foundation’s director and other staff there, to make the space more valuable. Even without analysis of the footage that
ethnoMetrics shot in 2010—11 cameras were positioned on the show floor—Longsaid she already had some idea of the tweaks AADE would make this year: more unopposed hours (dedicated show-floor hours that do not com- pete with session times) and more food offer- ings. “The popularity of food demonstrations at booths showed us that we could set up a culinary demonstration area,” Longsaid, “and sell time slots.”
—Michelle Russell Footage from the 2009 exhibit hall also
showed AADE that its show-floor theater— where 15- to 20-minute seminars on how to change people’s behavior to manage their diabetes are conducted every two hours— was extremely popular and needed upgrad- ing. So the 2010 show floor offered a better presentation area, includinga riser, to hold more people. In the foundation area, AADE worked with GES to redesign its display cases, and stationed
Not only was AADE able to use video footage from ethnoMetrics to provide insight to its exhibitors, but the footage was telling in terms of what was hap- pening in its own booth.