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Bring your meeting home to MadisonBy Jay Rath
Your product? The City of Madison. The Greater Madison Convention & Visitors Bureau is reviving its 1996 "Bring your meeting home" campaign. If you're a member of a group that holds conventions or other meetings, all you have to do is refer it to the Convention & Visitors Bureau. Its staff does the rest, working with the group's representatives to make the meeting in Madison happen and to ensure its success. "Local residents are in a position to impact the growth of our area's economy simply by extending an invitation to others to experience what we enjoy every day by living here," says Deb Archer, president and CEO of the Convention & Visitors Bureau. Many mid-sized cities have put their citizens to work with similar "Bring your meeting home" campaigns, including Anna-polis, Md.; Joplin, Mo.; Kalamazoo, Mich.; Reno, Nev.; Sonoma County, Calif.; and Iowa's Quad Cities. Council Bluffs even themes its annual campaign. This year, tying into the community's history, it's "After 200 years ... we've got it perfected." Madison's campaign began 11 years ago as a big push for the new Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center. "It was wildly successful. We had billboards and radio and TV spots," says Archer. "We were extremely successful in having many citizens self-identify, and (it) helped us identify other people in the community who could lead us to very prestigious and lucrative business that we were able to confirm for the destination." For example, around 1,500 members of The Wildlife Society, a national scientific and educational nonprofit, met at Monona Terrace in 2005 as a result of the campaign. It was referred to the Convention & Visitors Bureau by Scott Craven, chair of the UW-Madison Depart-ment of Wildlife Ecology. Craven is also well-known to listeners of Wisconsin Public Radio as a UW-Extension wildlife specialist. He was so pleased with the experience that now he's referring another group, the National Association of Extension Re-source Professionals. "There's some professional currency involved in hosting a national conference," Craven says. "If you're involved in the organization, finding a venue for the conference is always an issue. And volunteers don't always step up to the plate." However, he has nothing but praise for "Bring your meeting home." "Those people just made the whole thing very easy," Craven says. "Every time there was a step we would have found very awkward, or it's not the kind of thing you do routinely, the Convention & Visitors Bureau people were there. It's what they do. They were able to facilitate anything we needed, from getting buses, to arranging Monona Terrace, to interfacing with caterers, to signing hotel contracts - all of that." "Bring your meeting home" can be a lengthy process, sometimes lasting years from citizen tip to convention. The Convention & Visitors Bureau breaks the process down into four steps. During the sales and negotiation stages a site visit may be staged for the potential client. "A lot of clients are not familiar with our destination," says Archer. "We oftentimes compete with destinations that are much more familiar to people: Chicago or St. Louis, Kansas City, Dallas." During the service phase, the visiting group is matched with local vendors, such as caterers, printers, florists and such. Then, following the meeting, hopefully a re-booking phase signs the group up for a future visit. "It's a long product sales cycle for us," says Archer, but the payoff is considerable. "We confirm about $25 million in future business every year," divided between around 85 to 100 groups. "For a destination our size, that's pretty substantial. They utilize our public meeting facilities, purchase services from area businesses and spend money in accommodations, restaurants, retailers and other businesses." What's in it for you? Why should you recommend your group come here instead of sunny Orlando or another destination? "You might be a professor or a company trying to preview a product or research that you've recently uncovered, and you want to bring colleagues here who can either help market that, or build off the knowledge base that some new discovery has created," says Archer. "So a lot of times it's to grow a product or expand an idea. It might be personal prestige in terms of moving yourself up in some sort of strata within a professional society or discipline. It might be that you are really interested in having an economic impact on the community. It can be a variety of things that really excite people to do it." Or it could just be to share the city. Says Craven, "Among Midwestern venues I'd like to think that Madison - especially now with Monona Terrace and so forth, and related hotels and proximity to Downtown - is an attractive site. And it seems to be, because the meetings I travel to don't seem to gravitate to Chicago or other sites in the area." Jay Rath is a Madison freelance writer. jayrath@gdinet.com madison.com ©2009 Capital Newspapers. All rights reserved. |
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