She stepped into the elevator on the 20th floor wearing colorful flannel pajamas and fluffy slippers. A huge hula hoop hung over her shoulder. It was 8 a.m. and we were descending to the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Seattle during PCMA's Annual Meeting last month.

"Don't ask," she said.

"Oh, but I must," I replied.

"I work for an assisted living company and we're having our annual meeting," she said. Little could she know that I am part of the industry devoted to putting on meetings. For a moment, I was afraid she was going to tell me that her getup was part of some humiliating team-building exercise forced on her by her company. But instead she was positively gushing.

"Our annual meeting is all about making the employees feel good about what we do, so we can go back to our workplace and share that positive feeling with the residents," she said. "Yesterday we had Deepak Chopra speak to us and the day before it was one of the Chicken Soup authors. We hold a fun theme breakfast and I chose a pajama party theme. And now I am going down to the lobby in front of God and the rest of the world dressed like this."

She was running late for her breakfast and I only had a few flights left before the end of our elevator ride. She surely wasn't carrying her business card in her pajama bottoms, so I handed her mine and asked her if she wouldn't mind following up with me. I explained what I do for a living (yes, that was literally my elevator speech) and that I would love to learn more about how her company puts on its meetings.

I hope she does get in touch with me (and not only because I am curious about that hula hoop). As much as I love to hear about the big ideas -"What if we did this at our next meeting?" - what really grabs me are the real-life examples of innovative ideas that were put into practice … and finding out how they actually went over and connected with attendees.

Not every great idea that works for one organization is even possible for another. Rare is the meeting held in such a spectacular yet intimate setting as the InnoTown conference - a picturesque town on the fringe of Norway's fjords, where residents volunteer to become part of the attendee experience (see "A Meeting With No Safety Net" on p. 60). Innovation expert Charles Leadbeater first clued us in to this remarkable meeting when Convene's senior writer, Andrea Doyle, interviewed him for our September issue. Yet, there are elements of InnoTown's gutsy approach to the standard conference fare that everyone can benefit from (we even spell a few of them out for you in the sidebar on p. 64), its idyllic setting aside.

Sure, InnoTown's success has put Norway's tiny town, Alesund, on the map. But how often is it that one meeting so dramatically affects its host destination? We found another example for this issue. When the American Solar Energy Association came to town, Cleveland's CVB needed to do more than highlight its rates and convention center specs. It had to step up its efforts on the sustainable/renewable energy front. Hosting Solar 2007 actually changed Cleveland's energy policies (see p. 67). This is a real-life story of how one meeting can make a difference, my favorite kind to share in Convene.