AIHA: AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE ASSOCIATION 2009 American Industrial Hygiene Conference and Exposition (AIHce)—May 30–June 4, Toronto www.aiha.org/aihce09
The recession com- bined with the weak dollar forced AIHA to shake things up for AIHce 2009.
Peter O’Neil, CAE, AIHA’s executive director, usually says that AIHce 2009 lost a million dollars, but that’s something of an exaggeration. In reality, it was only $890,000. Attendance, which is usually around 4,400, came in at between 3,300 and 3,400. And O’Neil considers the meeting a raging suc- cess, in part because AIHA could have lost so much more, but mostly because it forced the organization to shake things up. “Not that we loved losing almost a million dollars,” O’Neil said. “It’s just
that it forced the team and I to think differently—not better, but differ- ently—to really reach out and leverage the partners we had in Toronto, who also in turn learned a lot and really stepped up their game.” It became clear early in the planning process for AIHce 2009 that,
thanks to the foundering economy and the weak dollar, attendance was going to suffer. AIHA tried to stay ahead of that by doing some things it had never done before, including: Buying Canadian dol- lars. Nine months before AIHce 2009,“We played the currency funds in order to buy low and use that money while we were [on site in Toronto] to pay bills,” O’Neil said. “I think we probably would have lost another $110,000 or $130,000 if we hadn’t done that.”
Renegotiating room rates. AIHA had room blocks at about 10 hotels, and worked with TourismToronto and the Metro Toronto Convention Cen- tre “twice, possibly three times,” O’Neil said, to get room rates lowered. Said Dawn Eagleton,Washington, D.C.–based citywide director for Tourism Toronto: “As hard as it was for the hotels, we just all knew we were going to take a hit, and we had to work together to create the least impact for all of us.” Asking attendees to switch hotels. “We did go to attendees [regis- tered at hotels] where we were over our block and asked them to move to hotels where we were under our block,” O’Neil said. “I’m not terribly proud of that, because you don’t like to hurt a hotel, but at one point we were looking at $620,000 to $650,000 in attrition.” Offering U.S.-based shuttle service. “People could fly to Buffalo, which was much less expensive,” O’Neil said, “and we chartered buses and drove across the border. And then after the meeting we drove them back to Buffalo.” Throughout the planning process, O’Neil said, “We had the best partners
we could have asked for or hoped for to go through this with.…Associa- tions need effective partners to truly serve their members, and in this case, Tourism Toronto went above and beyond what a partner would do.” —Christopher Durso
SL: So much of what we talk about is looking past the creative constraints that meeting planners find themselves in, which is what happens inside the four walls of a ballroom or conference room.We did an event in 2005 in Keystone, up in the mountains of Col- orado. At the very end of the event, Pine and Gilmore led an exercise called One Big Idea, as in “What’s the one big idea that you came away with?”We gave every- body Tibetan prayer flags, and everybody took a Sharpie marker and wrote their One Big Idea on this Tibetan flag. We had people tie
their flags together themselves, and took 90 people outside, into the resort, and waiting for them was this giant weather balloon that we had pre-filled with helium, and we tied this string of One Big Ideas to it and lofted the balloon, as a visible representa- tion of the great ideas that had inspired them. BD: The reality is, a lot of these things are not all that expensive, they’re not all that crazy—they just require kind of an out-of-the-box look at the environment and the content that you want to convey, and for you to try not to just do things the way you’ve always done them. —Hunter R. Slaton
ON_THE_WEB For more information about Strategic Horizons and thinkAbout, visit www.strategic horizons.com /SHthinkAbout.html. To watch a PCMA webi- nar on this topic that Bob Dean and Scott Lash presented last month, visitwww.pcma.org /Education/Online /Webinars.htm.