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For Professional Associations running conferences for their members or other interested parties (or for anyone running an educational conference), it is important to remember that they constantly need to have a deep understanding of why their delegates are attending and what they are looking for in their professional education.

In our marketing consulting division, we are continually reminded that organizations can easily get caught up in the conference educational content and quality of speakers (which are both important) while ignoring other aspects.

Two critical trends that conference organizers need to be aware of:

1: Quality of networking is of critical importance to delegates around the world, particularly now that technology (e.g .webinars) can take care of many basic educational needs of delegates (e.g., credit hours/courses). A recent white paper published by The National Conference Center titled ‘The Future of The Meetings Industry – Why Certain Conference Innovators are Winning,’ illustrates this perfectly. In fact, an estimated 10% of Associations in Canada are already offering online educational programming to their membership, and this is likely to increase in the future.

2: In the field of education, the importance of informal education is increasingly recognised as an important component of lifelong learning. In fact, much of how we learn comes through non-formal means. For example, according to the ‘Princeton University Learning Philosophy’ learning can be broken down as follows:

• 70% from real life and on-the-job experiences, tasks and problem solving. This is the most important aspect of any learning and development plan.
• 20% from feedback and from observing and working with role models.
• 10% from formal training.

For Professional Associations, the implications are that while formal sessions (where information flows from the speaker to the audience) are important, creating greater interactivity (both with speakers and amongst delegates) within the educational  program can provide a more effective and meaningful educational experience that can’t be easily replicated by technology.

Both of these trends boil down to the fact that conferences need to give delegates a reason to travel beyond basic educational topics or travel locations, and networking and interactivity in the educational program are likely to become increasingly key parts of executing a compelling conference.

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