From Thoughts & Observations on Business Events with Kai Hattendorf:
Today is the 10th “Global Exhibitions Day”. It was launched in 2016 by UFI to bring together many actors across the trade show ecosystem that had been mulling a joint advocacy activity for a while. Now, every year, exhibition professionals in more than 100 countries and regions around the world are active on this day, promoting and explaining our industry to everyone willing to listen. (You can still join in – see here). It is not the only such endeavour.
A few days ago, 170 US colleagues met in Washington, DC for a day of government advocacy on Capitol Hill – a record number. It is the most visible activity of the “Exhibitions & Conferences Alliance” with Tommy Goodwin at the operational helm, and kudos to him and the ECA leadership with Chair Hervé Sedky, CEO of Emerald, on having re-vitalised and re-designed this industry outreach.
The ECA is partly modelled after the “European Exhibition Industry Alliance” (EEIA), an organisation set up in 2012 by UFI, The Global Association of the Exhibition Industry and EMECA European Major Exhibition Centres Association, and managed by Barbara Weizsäcker. It represents the exhibition industry in Brussels, the power centre of the European Union.
Recently, at IMEX in Frankfurt, Ray Bloom and Natasha Richards led the annual IMEX Policy Forum, uniting 100 destination representatives and 20 policymakers from 30-plus countries to discuss and learn how to influence the future direction of business events through policy making and strategic destination management.
In the US, the U.S. Travel Association set up “Global Meetings Industry Day” in the mid 2010s, aiming to activate planners and bureaus every April. This year’s edition reportedly “generated thousands of social media posts, hundreds of media hits, and landmarks across the world lit up blue” with a predominantly North American activation.
And back in February, Destinations International, a U.S.-based industry association for destination bureaus, launched their initial “Destination Professionals Day”, aiming to “gain recognition for the important contributions of the sector and those who work in it”. The association reports 400 hashtag uses, more than 3,000 social media engagements and a media reach of 4.8 million as key success metrics.
| Initiatives based on our industry DNA: hands-on and operations-driven
All these initiatives are good, and they bring awareness and sometimes success on policy issues. They are based on our industry DNA to be hands-on and operations-driven. Having been instrumental in its launch, I am personally proud of what GED has become over this past decade, of course.
Yet they also showcase our weakness in approaching this most critical issue of industry advocacy more systemically and strategically.
We are still not really seen as a relevant industry (or sector, or however you wish to describe what and who we are. Disclaimer: In my view we have every right to present ourselves as an industry, so I am sticking with this term in this article).
If we are indeed, as the Events Industry Council says, a “1.6 trillion USD global industry” – how come we struggle to get any attention? There are many answers to this:
- The fact that we are at odds in defining who we are.
- The fact that we are good in “doing” operational advocacy, but not as good in doing it strategically.
- The fact that we still work and operate in silos across the events industry on industry-wide issues, with only organisational “band aids” connecting our “tribes”.
Examples? At the IMEX policy forum, one association executive just spoke up again about his desire to reopen a debate about whether or not we are an industry, or what else we are. Years ago, the attempt failed to bring together the two umbrella networks that gather most of the global or relevant regional industry associations – as one of them preferred to still go it alone. Just overcoming that has taken years: Last month’s (still somewhat vague) announcement at IMEX that EIC and JMIC agreed to talk about collaborating is a small step forward, rightly welcomed by all those who care about our industry uniting more.
How to move on from here?
Many say that for advocacy to succeed, it needs to be both focused and local. They are right – see the ECA’s success in pushing for anti-spamming rules enforcement through the FEC in the US, or the reinstallment of pre-pandemic federal funding levels to support German exhibition pavilions abroad. Look at Singapore, Thailand, and Australia for other examples.
But that is only half the story: Single-issue achievements here and there remain drops in the ocean for an industry as global and connected as ours. We should, and we could, do better.
Yet there is a void on that global level.
Some are trying to fill it by bringing their passion and energy to the matter. Point in case: The tireless team around ‘The Iceberg’, which – with very limited support from main parts of our industry ecosystem – have succeeded to build what is our best repository of case studies and industry showcases.
| To be accepted at the famous decision-making table, we need to do our organisational homework.
No other industry has succeeded in this without uniting on the global level. I know from working with ISO – International Organization for Standardization, the OECD – OCDE , and the United Nations’ UNFCCC on issues from standards to sustainability that they need global institutions to interact successfully.
Our current answer is ‘One Message – Many Voices’, or what I call ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’, with JMIC’s Global Industry Manifesto (see an introduction in an earlier edition of this newsletter) as the foundation for our presentation.
But to succeed, we need to travel the long road of enshrining our profession and industry in nomenclature and definitions, in statistical codes and standards.
One example: When we (UFI and JMIC) worked with the OECD on recommendations of how to capture and report economical, social, and environmental legacies of ‘global events’ – we convinced this policy-shaping organisation to expand their understanding of ‘global events’ to include international trade shows.
Now we exist in their system. And all the local and national advocacy work can build on this expanded definition.
The learning from this:
| To move from today’s operational advocacy level to the strategic one, we need to re-think and re-build how we approach it. This is not an afterthought, it is foundational.
And it will need funding. Right now, adding the investments into ECA, EEIA, awareness days, topical work like the Net Zero Carbon Events initiative, and everything listed in this article, our industry crowdsources an estimated 1.5 million USD annually into global advocacy.
A useful rule of thumb, particularly among large corporations benchmarking their government‐affairs and public-policy functions, is to allocate roughly 0.5 percent of annual revenue toward advocacy activities (including in-house government affairs staff, external lobbying, coalition building, and related outreach). In practice, the typical range runs from about 0.1 percent at the low end up to 1 percent for very active stakeholders, with 0.5 percent often cited as the “best-in-class” target.
If we’re really a 1.6 trillion USD industry, that would be 800 million annually, with say 1/3 of that going to global work.
Honestly, it won’t take that much, only a fraction of it even. But a few million USD globally, annually, dedicated to building and running the global share of industry advocacy, will be what it takes to solve this for good in collaboration.
Call it the ticket price for a real seat at the global decision-making table.
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