Preventable food waste and high food costs are a combination that no budget-challenged event professional wants on their plate. But research demonstrates that when planners and venues work together, the result can be a win-win-win: less food waste, improved efficiency, and better bottom lines all around.

We live in a polarized world. How can events bring people together and restore civility without glossing over our differences and challenges?

How planners who participated in our annual Meetings Market Survey are bearing up in an uncertain geopolitical and economic environment and what they think the new year will bring.

We look into the question of whether event organizers are compensated well enough for their efforts, skills, experience, and contributions, using our Annual Salary Survey as a guidepost.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion remain central to the work of events professionals. You just need to read between the lines of session titles and marketing campaigns.

Results from our recent pulse survey of event organizers reveal a lack of clarity about what sweeping U.S. policy changes may mean for events, what comes next, and how best to move forward. Here’s what some event industry professionals are seeing — and anticipating.

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.