Meeting Professionals International (MPI)

Creating connection and belonging for others is critically important for event professionals. What does your research say about the human values that might drive people toward this kind of work? I’ll have a real answer to this on stage in Vancouver at theEVENT (Sept. 14-16). Right now, we’re surveying the meeting and event profession across Canada, and the results will be shown for the first time at theEVENT.

David Allison spent 20 years in marketing before he started a research company, and he could describe a target customer in enormous detail: age, income, where they went on vacation, what car they drove.

Live events give us an extraordinary opportunity to create the conditions for belonging, according to Caitlin Krause. “There is something powerful about sharing physical space, sensing the energy of a room, making eye contact, laughing together, moving together and discovering something alongside other people,” says Krause, a globally recognized experience designer who bridges timeless wisdom with modern technology. “Our bodies are part of the experience. That embodied dimension matters.

The budget proposal that gets cut is usually the one that just lists expenses. Meanwhile, the one that gets approved connects these expenses to outcomes that the business wants to achieve. Event industry statistics are the bridge between those two variables. Planners who learn to use data rarely walk out of a budget meeting empty-handed. However, not every statistic carries equal weight in front of a finance team.

Caitlin Krause, a globally recognized experience designer and who bridges timeless wisdom with modern technology, will present the keynote session “Empowered Connection in a Digitally Layered Landscape” (sponsored by Visit Anaheim) during MPI’s Smart Monday in Las Vegas on Oct. 12, the day before IMEX America begins.

Ask someone to share a fun fact about themselves. Then, watch the entire room check their phones. That gap between what the facilitator hoped and what actually happened is where many icebreakers at meetings fail. It’s also when good facilitation design can shine. Discomfort in the room isn't necessarily the activity’s fault. It’s often a design problem, and design problems have solutions. None of them require a budget or a new tool.

Technology in the meeting industry rarely arrives quietly. Every new platform, tool or capability comes with bold promises about engagement, data quality and stronger returns. The question event professionals actually need answered isn’t whether modern tech works, it’s whether the application makes a measurable difference for the people sitting in the room. That’s where the definition of return on investment (ROI) in events is getting rewritten.

Most event teams walk away from a conference holding more information than they know what to do with. Badge scans, session check-ins, app taps, survey replies and post-event sales notes pile up fast. Collecting it all is the easy part. The real work of event data analytics is turning those scattered signals into defensible choices. That work has to happen before your next event opens its doors.

The Events Industry Council’s (EIC) 2026 Global Economic Significance of Business Events Study positions business events not simply as a hospitality or tourism activity, but as critical infrastructure for economic growth, workforce development, innovation, investment, knowledge transfer and business performance, according to Kevin Kirby, executive director of the MPI Foundation, a Global Visionary Sponsor of the study, along with PCMA.

Ask a planner what their job title means today, and the answer looks nothing like it did five years ago. The digital event strategist has emerged as one of the most in-demand roles in the meeting and event industry. This person blends logistics, technology and audience psychology into a single job description. What a digital event strategist actually does A digital event strategist is not simply the person who manages the streaming platform.