Column

Foundation Focus: Supporting Europe
Preparing Meeting Professionals for the Future


By Eric Rozenberg, CMM

During the past two years, MPI has made its most significant strides in Europe since the association’s European expansion in the early 1990s.

Most recently, MPI developed and implemented a European business plan that supports the association’s strategic plan, Pathways to Excellence, and takes into consideration the European meeting industry environment. This plan will increase the educational and business opportunities for the association’s more than 1,200 European members, will help strengthen MPI’s global presence and will promote the strategic value that meetings—and meeting professionals—bring to organizations.

MPI’s European office in Luxembourg has also recently undergone some significant changes. Titta Rosvall was named European chapter relations manager—a position that will support MPI’s European chapters—and a third staff member will soon join Rosvall and Didier Scaillet, director of European operations and global development, to support MPI’s European membership, leadership and marketing efforts.

During MPI’s recent Professional Education Conference-Europe (PEC-E), held in Edinburgh, Scotland, more than 500 meeting professionals gathered for impressive educational sessions and networking opportunities. The event established itself as the European conference in the meeting industry.

Finally, the MPI European Foundation is now operational. The foundation will raise funds in Europe and invest them into programs to benefit MPI’s European members and the European meeting industry.

I think it’s quite a change from the past—and it’s only the beginning! MPI has built a solid foundation in Europe and now must execute the European business plan, develop the European membership and help cultivate the meeting industry in Europe. We must continue to provide develop-ment opportunities to our members with superior educational programs and networking at the chapter level and at PEC-E. We need to recruit more meeting professionals and help provide them with full, diverse and motivating careers in the meeting industry. We should target members of the business communities in each country and inform them about the meeting industry and its economic impact. And we must develop tools to measure meeting ROI.

The MPI European Foundation was created to address those needs and to identify additional areas of development—and to raise the funds needed to support these objectives. Our goal is to raise €500,000 by the end of 2005, and every euro raised will be spent in Europe during the next three years. At press time, the European Foundation had raised more than €200,000. Moreover, thanks to the commitment and support of David

DuBois, CAE, CMP, executive vice president of the MPI Foundation, a 2005 European fundraising campaign will be launched to support the challenge.

Every European meeting professional should take a moment to decide how much he or she will contribute to the new foundation. And while the donations are important, what matters most is that European MPI members and chapters get involved and support the European Foundation. It’s a major investment in your future and in the future of our industry in Europe.

ERIC ROZENBERG, CMM, is managing director of Ince & Tive, a meeting planning company in Brussels, Belgium, and president of MPI European Council. He can be reached at eric@inceandtive.com.