In the spirit of friendly competition MPI President and CEO Bruce MacMillan and his team at MPI’s HQ in Texas issued a challenge today to Kathleen (Kitty) Ratcliffe and her team at the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission.

MPI’s annual World Education Congress arrives in St. Louis, MO July 28-31, 2012 where thousands of meeting and event professionals from around the world will gather for professional development and to enhance business relationships.

“When the Texas Rangers win the 2011 World Series,” said MacMillan, “I want to see Kitty in her home town of St. Louis don a Texas Rangers jersey at our conference’s opening night reception amidst thousands of our colleagues."

Not to be outdone, Ratcliffe and her team in St. Louis, returned the challenge by insisting that after the St. Louis Cardinals win the World Series, and MacMillan arrives for WEC in July, he should be photographed hugging Stan “The Man” Musial’s statue outside of Busch Stadium wearing a Cardinals jersey, and the photo shared at the WEC opening general session in front of thousands of attendees and colleagues.

Early registration is open for WEC at mpiweb.org/WEC2012 and for official online results to Major League Baseball’s World Series, log on to WorldSeries.com.  If you’re heading to St. Louis for the World Series or for WEC 2012, help plan your stay by logging onto explorestlouis.com.

From MPI's Getting Business Done insert distributed to 300,000 US business professionals in 26 US metro areas this week through American Business Journals. Get it here

2011 is going to be a better year for business in the U.S. We’ve just endured a year where it seems everything from volcanoes to snow storms and oil spills to bed bugs impacted our respective businesses in some way. So, we dug in. We improvised. We innovated. We connected. And as a result our businesses are in better shape than they were a year ago, with a more positive outlook for the future. American consumer confidence has jumped 33 points in the past 24 months to over twice what it was in December 2008. The old adage “what fire doesn’t consume, it hardens” has never rung more true.

Through it all, we once again discovered that what would power businesses through the great recovery of 2010 was a steadfast commitment by business leaders to the power of being connected to their people and to their customers. During 2009, research done by Forbes Insight, Oxford Research and George P. Johnson confirmed that face-to-face meetings/events and business travel were critical to driving business performance. Businesses across America paid attention.

Despite the overwhelming temptation to eliminate or reduce sales meetings, customer meetings and business travel during a year of uncertainty, successful businesses made an investment in human connections. The MPI Business Barometer of meeting and event industry business activity more than doubled during 2010. Meetings and events were back and they were helping power the recovery.

Answering the call to innovation in a period of discontinuity, successful businesses redesigned their meeting and event experiences to better drive enterprise performance in a post-recessionary America. We’ve tried to capture some of those stories within the pages of this publication. In (“Building Events Around a Story”), Symantec focused their strategy on storytelling for their 2010 Worldwide Sales and Marketing Conference in order to help educate and engage attendees. The result was greater team communication, delivering transformational sales performance and customer satisfaction growth for each quarter of their new fiscal year.

This emphasis on redesigning meetings and events for the new business reality has spurred additional strategic success stories. Across the human connections spectrum, from incentives (“Re-inventing Incentives”) to trade shows (“The Big, Green Apple”) to regional conferences (“Local Favor”), we’re seeing that events must now deliver more than ever before on business objectives, overall organizational ROI and social responsibility.

What’s the outlook for meetings and events in 2011? According to our FutureWatch 2011 study, the number of meetings and business events is expected to see an 8 percent increase. Additionally, businesses are making an anticipated 5 percent increase in what they invest in meetings and events.

American business has long been a crucible for innovation when conditions are at their most challenging. Instead of retreating to the comfy confines and sterile light of their cubicles, successful businesses in America got out and connected during 2010, and they are not backing down in 2011. It takes leadership courage to take advantage of new technologies and new collaborative community approaches to drive performance from an investment in meetings and events. In the end, perseverance pays off.

The result is irrefutable. Well-designed meetings and events drive enhanced business performance. And that will translate into continued business success and economic growth in 2011 for America. We all need some more of that.

Next Thursday February 17^th Chairman Eric Rozenberg and I will join leaders from 14 other meeting industry organizations and experts from PricewaterhouseCoopers (“PwC”) at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. to release the long-awaited study on “The Economic Significance of Meetings to the US Economy.” PwC was hired to prepare and manage the year-long study, yielding some staggering findings on the magnitude of GDP, employment and taxes generated by the US meeting and events industry.

The study, the first of its kind in the United States, was inspired by the depth and credibility of a study undertaken in Canada. The Canadian study was conducted in 2008 and paid for by the MPI Foundation Canada. The study became a model around which further studies around the world were designed.

Immediately preceding the press conference at 130PM EST, an industry webinar will be held at Noon EST to brief members of our entire industry on the findings in the study. MPI members can get more info here and we encourage you to sign-up online. It's important that our members and all industry stakeholders tune in to understand the powerful national economic story our industry can tell. The study, webinar and other resources will be housed on a website maintained by the funding partners and the Convention Industry Council.

Following the release of the study next Thursday, participating industry organizations through the Convention Industry Council will begin to disseminate tool kits to constituents to support the delivery of key messages at the local and grass roots level. MPI will activate our powerful chapter network to help carry message. We will also work our own business media contacts. Funders are also exploring ways to sustain a long-term messaging program.

As a companion to next week’s announcement, MPI will release our bi-annual Getting Business Done – How and Why Meetings and Business Events Bolster Your Overall Strategy insert , in conjunction with American Business Journals. More than 300,000 business leaders in 26 metropolitan areas across the US will receive this insert in their local Business Journal. The content, provided by MPI's One+ magazine, provides case studies and business insights on how meetings and events drive business performance. It will also be posted on our websites and disseminated through our digital channels.

As you can see, lots of story-telling going on to support the continued recovery of our members and the public understanding of our industry.

Announcement Webinar:
The Economic Significance of Meetings to the US EconomyThursday, Feb. 17
12 p.m./12.00 Eastern Standard Time

Press Conference:
Thursday, Feb. 17
U.S. National Press Club
Washington, D.C.
1:30 p.m./13.30 Eastern Standard Time

The FIFA World Cup uses the storyline: “One game changes everything.” With the World Cup, FIFA is creating incredible national and global communities all around an event. NIKE is even taking it a step further with their “Write the Future” campaign invoking fans and athlete celebrities from around the world to dream their own story of success around the World Cup…and NIKE products of course.

As meeting professionals, we believe human connections are the most powerful forces accessible to mankind—they build community, inspire innovation, activate leadership and create opportunities. That’s why we can confidently say, “When we meet, we change the world.”

There seems to be no end to the challenges facing humans these days: economic crises, volcanic ash, oil spills. But I also believe that connecting people and their ideas are fundamental to finding solutions we could never have imagined on our own. Never have there been so many cultures and perspectives to connect with. Never have there been so many connection channels for people to use (or abuse). The art, science and magic of creating human connections in a complex world has never been more valuable than right now. And meeting and event professionals are virtuosos at creating communities that unleash the energy that proliferates when powerful human connections ignite.

Building community using a meeting as the activation vehicle is not a new idea by any stretch, but its importance as an engagement approach and co-creation engine keeps elevating as our worlds get more complex.

Creating and unleashing community energy is increasingly a powerful and deliberate outcome of a well-designed event in two ways: First, by co-creating innovative solutions to challenges or opportunities, attendees crystallize a powerful spirit of community ownership that almost always results in a greater success rate when the idea is broadly introduced. And for some of the challenges facing nations and organizations at the moment, innovation is essential to their survival. Secondly, meeting attendees develop an enduring common connection to a shared experience, idea or set of values that can be activated at/when needed. Brands such as Apple and Nike use their events by creating experiences to build and activate communities of followers to drive sales and brand buzz that endure well beyond the event itself. The recent iPhone 4 launch event was so successful at driving pre-sales that it overwhelmed the on-line order platform.

Community does not just randomly happen at a meeting or event. It has to be designed by the meeting professional using a balance of provocative inspiration, emotional engagement and attendee participation. Companies such as CISCO are using online games to engage their attendees. TED is so successful at creating community with its attendees (both live and virtual) that the attendees themselves are creating and managing their own TEDx events. A design key to building community at events is unrelenting engagement before, during and after. Resistance is futile. Passive attendance will not change the world.

One game, or meeting, can indeed change everything.