Brainstorming new ways to serve

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/12/2020 (1946 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The pandemic has devastated the hospitality business with the end of trade shows and conventions, but there’s another sector that relied on those events that’s hurting just as much.

Annual conventions have provided as much as 50 per cent of revenue for many professional organizations, revenue that’s all but gone under COVID-19.

Jonathan Strauss, of Winnipeg’s Strauss Event & Association Management, said diversifying those revenues had already been a topic of conversation for several years, especially among not-for-profit organizations such as the Pedorthic Association of Canada (Strauss’s first association management client).

Now it has become a matter of survival.

Strauss’s own business has had to learn to diversify and it has pivoted full time to association management.

“Thankfully we don’t only manage events,” Strauss said.

As a young (teenage) entrepreneur, Strauss bought the Computer Post magazine as a way to promote the 1996 Winnipeg Computer Expo.

He moved out of publishing, to focusing on large-scale events, and now manages national associations with a staff of 15 (all of whom he has been able to retain with the help of the federal government’s wage and business loan subsidies.)

Strauss’s model was to show associations the cost benefits of closing their own association management offices and pay a monthly fee to Strauss to run it all.

But now that their traditional sources of revenue have dried up, it’s up to his office to figure out how to maintain the respective communities and add value for its members to justify their fees. For Strauss that has meant more communication like getting summaries of new government support programs as they pertain to respective associations out quickly, sometimes within six hours of their release.

“We have never worked as hard or as long as we are these days,” he said.

Strauss took over managing his largest client association, the Promotional Product Professionals of Canada Inc. (PPPC) almost three years ago when it was having financial and technical challenges.

Max Baer, the current chair of that organization, said Strauss’s management has provided the professionalism it needed.

“Since Jonathan has taken over it has become like night and day,” said Baer, who owns an automotive and first aid kit supplier called Justin Case.

In September Strauss ran a virtual trade show for the PPPC with about 800 participants.

“We had never produced full online events like we’re doing now,” said Strauss. “There has been a lot of learning for all our staff. People are starting to call one of our team the ‘Zoom concierge.’”

Among other things, they now counsel their clients that regardless of how great the content is they can’t charge the same as in-person events, and that for free events, they have to anticipate attendance will be about half of the registration numbers.

But with all the uncertainties over physical-distancing guidelines and the disappointment with overly optimistic experiments with reopening the economy too early, Strauss has decided not to book any in-person events until next September.

“We needed to have a sense of control back. Earlier we were just reacting and were just getting disappointed,” he said.

In the meantime that means, among other things, cranking up the webinar machine — his shop has produced more than 30 so far this year for one client that typically send out about five or six per year.

As for the future return of in-person events, Strauss believes that professional development events, for instance, will become more regionalized and more specialized, especially in the early post-pandemic days.

“When the time comes, people will be begging for some small in-person events,” he said. “And if you have a smaller audience you have to make sure it’s the right audience.”

Corporate travel budgets might take a while to come back as well as corporate budgets for association memberships.

That mean associations are going to have to start getting serious about alternative revenue sources.

“Older generations joined because that is what you did,” he said. “You blindly paid dues, went to annual conferences, because that’s what everyone did.”

But now the job of association managers like Strauss is to figure out other ways to add value like finding partnerships or affinity programs that bring discounts to association members or figuring out different kinds of events and different venues for professional education and some associations are expanding the base of who their members are to widen the pool of potential dues-paying members.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca