By Kai Hattendorf | Business Transformation, Global Advocacy, Association Management:
What is the one thing every event professional bemoans regularly? Right:
“NOBODY understands what we are actually doing.”
This is why advocacy for our sector matters. So, this week, let’s look at the one document empowering us to change that – giving us a joint industry narrative that shows how events drive growth and transformation for societies and industries. Or – in simple terms – what it means that we build and operate the meeting places and the market places of the world.
Our industry’s “Elevator Pitch”
Many of you will know that I worked as a journalist earlier on in my life. When I joined the events industry, leaving the telecommunications sector for Messe Frankfurt, it was a recruiter who had to “sell” exhibitions to me as a career. He struggled.
To tell the truth, for years I struggled as well, “selling” our industry. We all focus on the products we build and run – the tradeshow, the congress, the corporate event. In quite a few sessions with industry thought leaders, we tried to go beyond commiserating about being an “invisible industry” and to come up with something crisp, clear and tangible.
This matters: If we don’t have an “industry elevator pitch”, then decision-makers cannot “get us”.
The Catalyst Dilemma
The challenge: Our products and services are essential for every industry and every society to progress, but no single event professional “changes the world” – the change gets triggered by the people who meet at the events that we set up and run. WE don’t perform live-saving surgery – delegates at medical conferences push the limits on this. In short: We are catalysts (or, in a phrase coined at a JMIC Conference in Hannover, Germany, in 2017, a “meta industry”, being part of every industry).
In the meantime, however, we had our “Eureka” moment. Through the JMIC Joint Meetings Industry Council network, we gathered input from business and industry association leaders, and we sharpened and focused the description of why we matter. The result is called “The JMIC Global Manifesto”. I prefer to call it “Our equivalent to the United Nations’ Development Goals”.
It describes 15 ways in which business events create multidimensional growth and drive transformations.
- It works for every event that you need to profile.
- It allows every destination marketing organisation to map its mission based on these.
- It allows policymakers to connect investments into our sector with clear policy benefits.
And – it empowers every event professional to find what your work contributes to. Where YOU and your events and activities fit. How YOU are part of something so much bigger than “just” your niche or segment in the events industry.
Again, in other words: It is the songbook of our industry, the global events industry. We can all sing “our parts”, knowing that this pays into the bigger picture.
I am using this “songbook” consistently when I advocate for our industry – locally as well as globally. And: people “get” it. We suddenly become strategically relevant, and we’re getting some serious attention.
Graphic: JMIC
I will introduce these 15 dimensions over the coming editions of my Thoughts & Observations on Business Events newsletter. Connect with me if you want to have the full document. If you have good practices cases that show how your work paid into one of them – I’d be delighted to hear about them!
Reason 1: Innovation & Reinvention
Business events drive commerce, innovation, re-invention, knowledge transfer and transition – all critical requirements for growth and transformation:
The entire purpose of these events is to accelerate progress in every sector they support through communications, information sharing and collective engagement. This naturally facilitates the kind of innovation and re-invention that is always a driver in economic and professional advancement but will be particularly critical in adapting to the demands and expectations that will result from the “new” economies and economic priorities arising in the future.
Reason 2: Multi-sector Impacts
Business events simultaneously advance a wide range of different sectors:
Business events are efficient means of supporting the advancement of a wide range of economic, professional, academic and business sectors. As a result, they can drive activation, engagement, and transformation across the many different sectors that will need to be stimulated in order to deliver a multidimensional growth rather than simply addressing a limited range of these sectors individually. They enable action by others rather than being limited to what they can achieve on their own.
Reason 3: Relationships & Trust
Business events develop relationships and build trust:
Business events efficiently utilize the collective power of group dynamics and thinking to achieve a high level of engagement. They are also about creating and maintaining the collaborative and productive networks which will be critically important in the face of present and future global tensions (economic instability, geopolitical conflicts, public health security).
After doing a podcast a few days back, its host, Jorge Eduardo Quiroz Villa, lobbied for me to share more about the narrative. In our conversation, we discussed the wider role of events as well. You can listen to the pod here:
