Attendance declines
20-35% at some (not all) conferences
How do you get pubcasters to come to your annual meeting when their travel budgets were vaporized during their first round of budget cuts, months ago?
The marketing experts at pubradio’s nonprofit DEI have a chance to show off their persuasive skills, intensifying promotion for DEI’s Public Radio Marketing and Development Conference, July 8–10 in San Diego. DEI announced its early-bird registration discounts will be honored until the event instead of ending weeks earlier.
NPR meanwhile is planning a “virtual” annual meeting of authorized station reps. Though there will be a physical meeting June 9, from 1 p.m. to about 2:30 p.m. (or possibly later) in NPR’s boardroom in Washington, D.C., many A-reps are likely to participate through an online system. The system,
WebEx, enables them to vote, share documents and speak, according to NPR Vice President Joyce McDonald. “We expect to have a quorum for the first time in years,” she said in an e-mail.
Registrations for the NON-COMMvention, the annual event for Triple A music programmers, scheduled May 28–30, are “in decent shape,” says Roger LaMay, g.m. of Philadelphia’s WXPN, which holds the event. “We just passed the break-even point, which is our goal for the conference,” he tells Current. Though NON-COMM is heavy on entertainment, it’s cheap, with an $85 registration and optional dorm-style housing available.
Will Public Radio News Directors Inc. cancel its annual conference June 11-13 in Portland, Ore.? “Absolutely not,” replies President Jonathan Ahl in boldface on PRNDI’s website. “If we cancel the conference, it’s telling people that [pubradio news] is not important,” he says. “I don’t want to make that decision for them.” If the event loses money this year, PRNDI has reserves to cover it, he says.
Attendance at the NETA Conference in January was down about 20 percent and at PBS Showcase this month in Baltimore was down 35 percent, from about 700 to 460. PBS expects a similar drop for the PBS Development Conference at Orlando in July, according to spokesperson Jan McNamara. PBS will scale down the number of sessions to fit a smaller turnout and has been trimming the number of sleeping rooms it guarantees to fill.
NETA had been conservative in reserving rooms more than a year before the January conference and didn’t have to renegotiate, says Skip Hinton, president. While the hotel may allow renegotiating the number of reserved rooms, it will raise room rates or food-and-beverage rates. If a conference planner gets a break on one rate, the hotel will raise another, Hinton has learned from long experience.
Registration is “way down” for the Public Broadcasting Management Association conference in Tampa, according to Hinton. NETA manages the event for PBMA, whose members are the same people who are writing budgets for fiscal year 2010 right now.
NETA and DEI say registrations are coming in later than usual this year. Deborah Lein, DEI’s chief operating officer, says the organization didn’t want to penalize attendees for late decisions.
DEI is trying a variety of incentives to bring members to San Diego. Its drawing for a Yucatan vacation resulted in “a very nice spike” in registrations last month, Lein says. DEI also suggested that stations approach especially supportive donors to pay for several fundraising staffers to attend PRDMC and add to their fundraising skills.
“We know we will take a hit, but we think not a terribly deep one,” Lein says.
One event whose attendance was up this year was the Community Radio Conference, held last month in Portland, Ore. About 350 attended, a gain of about 100 over last year, says Ginny Berson, v.p. of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters. Some attendees came from groups that got new full-power FM channels from the FCC last year. Forty from those groups, including 13 from future Native American licensees, came before the conference for a daylong seminar on starting a station. Another factor is that NFCB people just like to visit Portland, Berson says.
A reader writes: Celebration of Teaching & Learning is growing
Looking at my May 26th Current, I see an article, Attendance declines 20-35% at some (not all) conferences."
I'm wondering why you don't cite the Celebration of Teaching & Learning in the article.
Not only did our attendance go up this year, but among the more than 8,500 attendees, people came from all 50 states, D.C., and three Canadian provinces! (We've never had more than 32 states before.)
The Celebration continues to be the largest public television conference in the country, and has gained a national reputation among all education conferences.
Ronald Thorpe
Vice President and Director of Education
Thirteen/WNET
New York, NY 10001
Web page posted June 10, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC