What should your organization do to carry your meetings forward?

A blog post from Association Headquarters answers that question by sharing several highlights from a recent Association TRENDS on-demand webinar, “The Evolution of the Association Conference.”

To start, identify the top three to four target markets and focus on serving them first. Is it industry veterans or newcomers to the field? What would help this group professionally? These targeted groups “are the key to profitability.”

To actually deliver a “wow” experience, you need to be fearless. “The only way that meetings will change is if we as the association professional experts are brave and courageous enough to see ourselves as experience designers who view our registrants as co-creators,” writes Kristy Cohen. She points to a rule of thumb that says that a quarter of your conference should be new and different each year.

In the past, conferences were all about educating attendees, but with the internet, that’s just not enough. “Instead, [attendees] are looking for understanding of the issues and wise application of takeaways,” says Cohen. Advance your conference by providing more wisdom and understanding, instead of staying heavy on data and information delivery.

Innovative Inclusion

Y'all, we're LIVE!!!!!!! Head to https://t.co/dF4OdUkL8H to see the world differently. Thank you for the love, support and patience!

— TONL (@TONL) August 23, 2017

TONL, a culturally diverse stock photo company, just went live today. We wrote about it back in June, and we’re happy to see it up and running. It’s a great solution for association marketing and content pros looking to addmore diversity to their collateral.

The company aims to expand the “voices and visibility” of people from all over the world. “Photography and storytelling can help humanize and hopefully diminish the stereotypes and prejudice against black and brown people, especially,” says the TONL site. “We wanted to challenge the stale, homogenous look of traditional stock photography by showcasing the many ethnic backgrounds of everyday people.”

Other Links of Note

Start your training meetings off right. Beth’s Blog shares a few icebreakers that will help your team relax.

Speaking of productive meetings … Meetings Imagined reveals eight ways you can make internal meetings more mindful.

Are you a naturally curious person? Here’s how to leverage that trait to make you a better leaders, according to Forbes.

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