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A DRAWN-OUT MEETING: After
viewing the PCMA Greater Midwest
ChapterWebcast in his Orlando office, Jay Smethurst of Illumination
Galleries created an “IdeaBoard” that
outlined the event’s content. (See side- bar below.)
live and online elements into seamless shows for meeting professionals, who attended in person and remotely. It’s hard to say who had the richer experience—the atten-
T
dees who were physically present, sitting next to colleagues and making eye contact with speakers, or the ones who built the meetings into their office routines, logging intoWebcasts, tweeting their feedback, and generally participating on their own terms. Maybe both options were equally fulfilling, which means these meetings were hybrids in every way except the results they delivered.
SPINNING A WIDER WEB
Meeting: The PCMA Greater Midwest Chapter (GMC) quarterly meeting, Sept. 30, 2009, McCormick Place, Chicago
WhyWe Like It: Chapter leaders jumped in with both feet when planning and presenting the chapter’s first- ever meeting blending live and virtual attendees.
ON_THE_WEB
Find a list of tips for presenting a meeting to a virtual audience —prepared by Midori Connolly, the CEO ofPulse Staging, which provided Webcasting services for the GMC meeting —at http://pulse staging.com/news /?p=273.
Among the goals that GMC 2009 President Michael McCurry, CMP, and his fellow chapter leaders set was to increase the number of attendees at the chapter’s quarterly meetings. Fewer than 20 percent of members usually attend the events, which are always held in Chicago. Much of the reason is simple geog- raphy. “For the most part,” said McCurry, a strategic account man- ager at Experient, “members who reside…outside of Illinois and
outside of the greater Chicago area don’t get to come to our face-to-face events.” But last fall, the economy made it more difficult even for
58 pcmaconvene March 2010
he events we spotlight in this issue’s Meetings We Like make up their own trend: hybrid meetings about meetings. Both the PCMA Greater Midwest Chapter and the Virtual Edge Institute have blended
members who lived near Chicago—particularly planner members—to find the time and money to attend. So increasing the number of planners attending meetings, rela- tive to suppliers, was also on the chapter’s wish list. And McCurry had yet another goal: to roll out new tech-
nology. “[2009] has kind of been the perfect storm, if you combine the economy, with [the growth of] social media and the evolution of technology,” he said. “Put it all together, and it’s kind of a ripe time to raise the bar on the technology side.” Last March, McCurry saw his firstWebcast at an Experi-
ent event, and knew immediately that the technology had the potential to help GMC reach its goals.Webcasting, he real- ized, was a way to make the chapter’s meetings accessible to
Picturing theMeeting
The GMC meeting used yet another layer of tech- nology-assisted communication, with the addition ofan online “IdeaBoard” created by Jay Smethurst, a founder of Illumination Galleries, an Orlando-based meeting-design company. Smethurst, an illustrator, watched the liveWeb- cast ofthe event in his office, created a schematic ofits content, photographed it, and posted it on the company’s Web site:www.illuminationgalleries.com/blog/ uploaded_images/draft-ideaboard-784626.jpg. (See illustration above.) Smethurst described the process and its live and virtual
uses: “Normally, we send a team ofillustrators to events to capture all ofthe big ideas in the keynotes, panels, breakouts, and discussions.We then build a gallery of these colorful illus- trations in a central space at the face-to-face conference. “Meanwhile, we can also quickly digitize these illustra-
tions and post them to aWeb site to enable virtual attendees to review the IdeaBoards from the sessions they attended, or see the notes from sessions that they missed. These tools both reinforce learning and retention, and stimulate great discussions about the content ofthe ses- sions at an event like the PCMA session in Chicago.”