I was reading the Association Meeting article about how the economy is effecting the association meeting industry. It is an informative article and if you have not read it, you can view it here. The highlights (or really the low lights) from the article are:

• 72% surveyed are concerned that the economy will reduce attendance by more than 5% in 2009.
• 55% surveyed say they are concerned that the economic crisis will reduce sponsorship revenues by more than 5% in 2009.
  

Our own experience with the clients that we work with is that attendance will be down far more than 5%. So the question you have to consider is if we know attendance will be down, how can we stay a valuable part of our member’s lives if they don’t attend the conference?

One aspect you may want to look at is your website. The internet has made disseminating information and connecting with peers easier than ever. If you are not investigating social media and the use of it in your organization, you should be. In fact the double punch to associations is that when attendance is down, so is exhibitor sponsorship dollars. Again, your website can come to the rescue with valuable new revenue sources for your organization and new marketing opportunities for your vendors. To see a list of revenue generating ideas through your online community see my recent post.

One recent example of "social tools to the rescue" is we helped a customer generate a webinar series to members of their online community. Their conference attendance looked like it would be down a fair amount this year and they were looking for new revenue and ways to give the benefits of the conference for those that could not attend. We chose an initial topic and lined up a vendor to give the first presentation. In just over a day from making the webinar announcement we have over 450 people registered and ended up with over 650 members registering total. The interesting thing is that over 2/3 of the attendees were NOT registered for the upcoming conference. So by using a simple cheap webinar service and wrapping it with good content, we were able to help them create a great new benefit to their members. Oh, and we started getting a lot of requests from other vendors wanting to give presentations as well, which will help with the conference revenue shortfall.

That is just one example. The key is that there are ways to keep your members engaged even if they cannot come to your conference. However, if you only look to your conference for networking and information sharing for members, you may need to start broadening your horizons.