ICCA is using its worldwide membership to help turn Global Meetings Industry Day into a truly global campaign, by raising awareness of the fact that the campaign needs to have strong local roots to succeed in every market.
To support this effort, ICCA has started a campaign to identify “Meetings Mean Business” equivalent slogans in every language used by its members.
ICCA CEO Martin Sirk says: “This year is just a start, by 2017 GMID, we hope to have every language covered, and we can then also encourage all members to share their local advocacy campaigns whenever they take place, using GMID itself as a platform for further communication and sharing of success between countries.”
He explains the thinking behind this initiative: “Meetings mean Business” is a great English language slogan, because it works on multiple levels, enabling us to communicate that meetings generate direct spending, that the business impact of meetings goes far beyond this into knowledge creation and economic development, but also that we as an industry mean business, we’re serious about what we do."
"However, when literally translated into other languages, the hard-hitting verbal impact of the slogan and all these subtleties of meaning are lost. Once we let loose the creativity of ICCA members to find local language slogans with at least as much power and meaning, we ended up with a wonderful range of word-plays, as is shown by their literal English translations: the Norwegians claim “Meetings create Value”, the Germans go further with “Meetings create Added Value”, whilst Spanish-speakers want to draw attention to “Meetings Industry, the real Renewable Energy for your Community”. For the Italians, “Congress is Progress”, the Maoris in New Zealand can now communicate that “Gatherings are Business”, and my personal favourite has to be the wonderfully esoteric Chinese slogan: “Convergence Possibilities”! Each new slogan works in its own language, with double meanings, well-known cultural references, or simple verbal rhythms, and each will help our industry get the same hard-hitting message across to the politicians and officials we want to influence, from Korea to Argentina, from Denmark to the United Arab Emirates.”
Record number of association meetings in 2015
On Global Meetings Industry Day, ICCA announces that it has collected information of almost 12,000 international association meetings in 2015; the largest number of association meetings collected in the year after the meetings took place ever.
Exponential growth
As part of ICCA’s 50-year anniversary, ICCA conducted a study of 50 years of association meetings data as the centrepiece of its publication, “A modern history of international association meetings”, which is publicly available on icca50.com
Looking at aggregated figures for each five year period (to remove annual fluctuations), this report shows that the number of regularly-occurring, internationally-rotating association meetings is increasing by 100 per cent every 10 years, and has been consistently doing so for the last half century, with no signs of a slowdown. The record number of association meetings taking place in 2015 supports this trend.
