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With Lake Erie as a backdrop, sustainability expert Leor Rotchild shared case studies of sustainable business events held in Canada during the ASAE day trip.
Earlier this year, when the team at Destination Canada brainstormed how they could add “oomph” to their brand activation at the 2024 American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) Annual Meeting & Exposition, they had an epiphany: Canada’s Pelee Island is just 20 minutes by air from Cleveland, ASAE’s host city. Instead of talking to planners about how great Canada is, they thought, why not take them there and show them?
Virginie De Visscher
Cut to the afternoon of Aug. 12, when Virginie De Visscher, Destination Canada’s executive director, business events, found herself boarding a light aircraft along with 13 ASAE attendees who won a drawing to attend “The Breakout Breakout Session,” a five-hour, round-trip visit to the island on the final afternoon of the conference.
Pelee Island, Ontario — Canada’s southernmost populated point — is a lush, green slip of land in Lake Erie, covering just 16 square miles and home to a little more than 200 permanent residents. The island is known for the 700-acre Pelee Island Winery and Vineyards, and visitors also come to bask in its undisturbed natural beauty — birding is big here, along with fishing and wandering the walking trails that wind through its many acres of nature preserves.
The island is an idyllic backdrop, De Visscher told Convene a few days after the ASAE meeting, and a living, breathing example of what she said are Canada’s greatest selling points: it is inspiring, welcoming, and conscientious. Although Canada is well known, especially with the U.S. audience, “we wanted to bring that little oomph,” she said, “that we are special, we are different, we’re unique.”
Destination Canada arranged for a trolley to ferry ASAE attendees around Pelee Island.
Activities on the afternoon-long agenda included a walking tour around the 158-year-old Vin Villa, Canada’s first commercial winery, where crumbling stone remains “feel like Roman ruins,” De Visscher said. The walk ended at an underground wine cellar, where the group gathered around a communal table for a wine tasting and tapas prepared by a local chef. Next, attendees took a short stroll across the estate to the lakeside, where remnants of an amphitheater made a perfect setting for a conversation with Leor Rotchild, a Canadian sustainability expert and author of the recently published How We Gather Matters. With the blue expanse of Lake Erie behind him, Rotchild shared examples of how events in Canada have been successful in their sustainability efforts.
The Destination Canada team chartered a light aircraft for the 20-minute flight from Cleveland to shorten travel time, which is accessible by ferry, along with a vintage open-air trolley to shuttle the group around the island. “We probably had, I don’t know, five plan B’s, depending on weather,” De
Visscher said, which luckily cooperated — it was a perfect, sunny day. The biggest worry? Hoping attendees remembered to pack their passports.
The underground wine cellar at the 158-year-old Vin Villa, Canada’s first commercial winery, set a cozy mood to enjoy wine and tapas.
The Destination Canada team chose those who attended the Pelee Island excursion randomly, via entries submitted on site at their booth during the first two days of the meeting. To get the word out, the team advertised on digital walls at the conference, placed ads on kiosks and other high-profile locations around the Huntington Convention Center, and ran ads in Ubers around Cleveland so that attendees knew to visit the booth. That effort created a positive byproduct: a buzz.
There were approximately 80 entries for the excursion’s 13 spots, but De Visscher estimates that more than 200 attendees visited the booth out of curiosity. They anticipated that kind of reaction, and they staffed accordingly, De Visscher said — more than 40 representatives from 22 destinations within Canada were present.
“We like to go narrow and deep, because that’s the beauty of relationships,” she said. “Those 13 individuals, now we’re friends for life, we have a shared experience and that’s fabulous.” But the “impact is much, much broader than the individuals who actually got to go on .the trip. And that was the intent behind it, to reach that number of people.”
Destination Canada displayed examples best sustainability practices and case studies from its “Sustainability Storybook” in large scale on the walls of a Sustainability Story Pavilion installation.
Connecting the (Green) Dots
Chief among Destination Canada’s goals at the 2024 ASAE Annual Meeting & Exposition, according to Destination Canada’s Virginie De Visscher, was to relay its commitment to sociocultural and environmental sustainability.
To illustrate that on site in an engaging way, Destination Canada collected best practices and case studies of events held across Canada in a “Sustainability Storybook,” displaying them in large scale on the walls of a Sustainability Story Pavilion installation. On Canada Night, the country’s Indigenous culture took center stage with a live performance from traditional hoop and powwow dancer Notorious Cree and a fashion show featuring Anne Mulaire, a Metis fashion designer from Winnipeg, Manitoba.
The hope, De Visscher said, was that those “shared stories … would be inspirational for planners to take home, [for] how they can incorporate sustainability in their events.” That kind of experiential activation — a first for Destination Canada on the business events side — felt more authentic to their messaging instead of the more traditional tactic of giving out swag. “It’s more [about] how you make them feel,” De Visscher said.
On the Web
For more information on The Breakout Breakout Session, visit ASAE website.
Jennifer N. Dienst is senior editor of Convene.