generally we have seen some ‘spring cleaning’ around content design, delivery, and programming. But significant change could yet prove elusive. Despite pledging ‘material changes’, almost two thirds of my interviewees said that their onsite experience in 2022 would be ‘broadly similar’ to what they delivered in 2019. And while the shift to online showed us that some things can only really be delivered in-person, 42 per cent of respondents said that their aim was to provide their online and onsite audiences with a ‘broadly similar experience’. It remains to be seen if associations have fully understood the different needs of virtual and onsite audiences, or if they have too easily accepted an ill-defined ‘hybrid’ model as the way forward. Resistance to significant change is not always conscious or deliberate, it may have as much to do with staff capacity and expertise than anything else, but across all respondents by far the single biggest barrier to a thorough redesign of the onsite experience was board level reluctance. This was cited almost twice as much as the next single biggest factor – internal resources (time and skills). In our own internal deliberations, we might
also have been prevented from a more thorough overhaul by other factors such as too much focus on meeting technology, a reliance on the promise of technology rather than a quest to better understand what delegates want, a lack of real data on what pre-covid delegates really valued before it was taken away and a disconnect of perceptions of leadership and rank and file delegates. Being overly influenced by anecdote and group think rather than market focused analysis of properly collected data, could be another sting in the tail. As a result, it might be that in terms of programming we will still see too much copy and paste, not enough sunsetting of outdated formats, not enough focus on curating high performance faculty, not enough inclusion of our newly won `new` digital audiences, and not enough distinction of what should be asynchronous and/ or online only. As typically academic and understated institutions it might also be that we have not fully appreciated the brand, community and showcasing opportunities that only live, in-person events can deliver. Indeed, such concepts remain almost entirely alien to some.
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