innovative meetings Barbara Palmer

The Meeting Within the Meeting

Million Dollar Round Table added new opportunities for attendee engagement at its Annual Meeting by rethinking the exhibition floor.

W

hen thousands of top- performing financial advisers and life-insurance

salespersons from around the world get together, you might expect there to be more than a whiff of competition in the air. But the opposite was true at the Annual Meeting of Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT), held June 10–13 at the Anaheim Convention Center, where a spirit of openness and mutual support was palpable. It didn’t even seem possible to walk more than 100 yards without hearing a friendly hello. MDRT was founded in 1927 by a group of 32 life-insurance salesmen, all of whom had sold more than $1 million in policies, who began meeting regu- larly to share techniques and ethical standards. And although the group has grown in size and diversity since then — 5,956 high-achieving members from 58 different countries attended this year’s meeting — mutual support remains at its core, said Ray Kopcinski, CMP, MDRT’s director of meetings. Attend- ees who are competitors on a day-to- day basis, he said, “come together to share their success.” MDRT also prides itself on being

innovative. The organization was among the first, for example, to use now-ubiquitous IMAG technology to project speakers onto large, multiple screens, ensuring that there are no bad seats in the house for its trademark “Main Platform” motivational ses- sions, which draw thousands to hear top speakers. Of the many financial- services conferences held globally each year, MDRT’s Annual Meeting “is the meeting to attend,” Kopcinski said. It was almost inevitable, then,

that as attendee engagement on the 38 PCMA CONVENE AUGUST 2012 PCMA.ORG

meeting’s traditional exhibition floor began to sag in recent years — “attend- ees would run in [to the exhibition], grab some tchotchkes, and leave,” Kop- cinski said — MDRT would reinvent the entire experience.

MAKING A CONNEXION A light bulb went off when Kopcinski attended PCMA’s Learning Lounge at Convening Leaders 2011 in Las Vegas. The Learning Lounge, which has since become a recurring element at PCMA’s annual meeting, was both a structural and a design innovation, creating spaces for a series of short, focused experiences

— including TED-style talks, hands-on demonstrations, and unstructured con- versations — that expanded the ways in which attendees engaged with meeting content and each other. It seemed a perfect fit for the MDRT culture, with its emphasis on peer-to- peer learning and innovation. So at its 2012 Annual Meeting, MDRT adapted

the concept, keeping the focus on inter- action and promoting engagement, and adding exhibitors into the mix. Kopcin- ski invited Convene to attend to see the Learning Lounge–style concept at work in the context of a different meeting. MDRT’s modular “ConneXion Zone” replaced its traditional square-grid show floor, and shared the back half of an approximately 140,000-square-foot hall, behind registration areas and the humming MDRT “Power Center Store,” where attendees could buy books, vid- eos, and MDRT-branded merchandise. The ConneXion Zone echoed some of the Learning Lounge’s approaches to configuring space, including using small stages and dividing circular areas into quarters so attendees could move easily between presentations.

Within the greater ConneXion Zone, there were two large circular areas, each divided into three sections for a total of six Speaker Zones, along with a “Big Ideas Theater,” outfitted with a

The Engagement Equation MDRT reinvented the exhibit floor at its 2012 Annual Meeting, adding opportunities for attendees to learn from one another in small groups.

ILLUSTRATION BY BECI ORPIN / THE JACKY WINTER GROUP