04/15/2022

Rethinking Data for the Pandemic Era

New kinds of data can fill in the gaps create by COVID-19

For about as long as there have been association meetings, meeting professionals have reflexively used last year’s data as a benchmark. The numbers for your last meeting allowed them to make reasonable surmises about the next one. But with the pandemic upending meeting formats and unsettling attendees’ comfort levels, that data has little predictive power now.

“Historical meetings data isn’t really telling us anything, because people had very different feelings in March, April, May, when numbers were considerably different, than when the new variants come out, or depending on the location that they’re at,” said Kate Pojeta, CAE, CMP, director of meetings and technology at EventGarde.

But there is some good news in all this: Because members and attendees shifted how they interacted with associations and much of that activity happened online, the resulting data can be used to glean useful insights.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Associations Now.