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A recent economic impact study, conducted by the MPI (Meetings Professional International) Foundation Canada, underlines the economic importance of the conference/meetings industry to the nation as a whole. It showed that 69.8-million participants spent $23.8-billion at an estimated 673,400 meetings across Canada in 2008 alone, creating 552,300 full-year jobs and raising $14.2-billion in tax revenues.
Kim George is immediate past president of the Atlantic Chapter of MPI Foundation Canada and founder and owner of Limelight Communications Group, a speaker and entertainment bureau based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. George has worked in the industry for 20 years, 14 of those as manager for Pete Luckett, the gregarious English grocer of Pete’s Frootique fame. She describes the region’s event planning industry as “alive and well” despite last year’s economic downturn. In fact, over the past four years, George’s firm has expanded 40 per cent.
Roberta Dexter took over the reins of the MPI’s Atlantic Canada Chapter from George on July 1. She owns Canada’s first Plan Ahead Events franchise, a full-service event planning firm, located in Halifax. As a former event planner for a large corporation, she knows the challenges of doing event planning “on top of the desk”. The job isn’t getting any easier, either.
The future holds considerable challenges and exceptional opportunities for event planning specialists like Dexter. Increasingly, businesses want their events to be environmentally friendly and socially responsible, with a hybrid of live and virtual meeting formats. They want extra learning and networking opportunities added to the line-ups, web capabilities to do email marketing and registration online and built-in metrics to measure the returns on their investments. And they want a wide range of tourism options included in event schedules.
As the emerging trends of the trade illustrate, it takes a lot more than a glue gun and a flip chart to pull an event together. Still, the results from the convention floor clearly indicate that well planned corporate functions are worth the effort and expense.
