While meeting organizers understand the primary role that emotional engagement and experiential factors play in their events, they find those things difficult to measure. We’ve set out to explore how to define, design and how to quantify emotional engagement and make meaningful improvements as a result.

Meetings have long been designed with this one-off/single-use mentality. How can we adopt more of a reduce, reuse, recycle approach to create truly sustainable events?

By providing participants with a sense of trust, the feeling of belonging, and the satisfaction of socially connecting with others, events become more than places to learn and network.

Planners share how they are being more intentional about helping their event participants make more meaningful connections.

We asked event professionals to open up to us about the deeply ingrained ways in which the industry does business that need rethinking — and to consider: If we eliminate those sacred cows, what should we do instead?

How does the maker movement intersect with business events and how can we tap into it for more meaningful experiences for our participants? Convene cast a wide net to find ideas for weaving more of what makes us human into our events.

WorldatWork’s Courtney Mesmer developed a speaker coaching program to improve the participant experience at her organization’s annual conference. That initiative not only transformed the conference but rippled throughout the organization.

Listening is a skill essential to the knowledge exchange that takes place at business events, but how can organizers cultivate better listening behavior among our audiences? Convene reached out to four listening experts and one of the world’s top experts on coaching for their advice.

The Olympic Games, the largest sporting event in the world, is aiming to make next year’s edition in Paris its most sustainable ever. What can the events community learn from its plans and its progress?

For this year’s Industry Forecast, we’ve culled the latest research on business events and the sectors that support them — travel, event technology, lodging, and the workplace — asking experts to provide insights about what to expect next. Here are some of those insights.

As face-to-face events return in full force, organizers and venues are assessing additional new risks, like potential disruptive behavior, that can make their events feel less safe and welcoming.

Empathy is not just a soft skill that’s necessary to cultivate to lead teams and design events post-pandemic, it’s practical and effective.