Meetings, Made Personal

Author: Barbara Palmer and Jennifer N. Dienst

This article and those listed below are part of Convene’s August 2026 issue. Find the turn-page versions of this and past issues in our digital library. Illustrations by Margherita Caspani

“How scared should meeting planners be?”

Convene asked that question in 2013, at a moment when new digital education courses were enrolling millions of learners in free classes, content creators were uploading 100 hours of video to YouTube every minute, and ever-expanding social media tools were connecting people directly — not just with one another, but with massive audiences. When anyone with a computer, an internet connection, and a little expertise could reach a global audience, what would happen, we asked, to the need to get together in person?

No one we talked to in 2013 thought that a future filled with almost limitless access to content and information would make meetings irrelevant. And they understood something that’s become even more clear over time: The growth of online communication makes face-to-face experiences more valuable, not less.

But meetings would have to change, the experts and meeting professionals we interviewed agreed. Sheer quantity of information — “15 meeting tracks and tons and tons of content” — would no longer be the measure of a successful meeting, educational consultant Jeff Cobb told Convene in 2013. The new challenge, he said, would be to design meetings “where people can easily connect with experts and their peers.”

Today, event organizers are going back to the drawing board as they recognize that, for many attendees, much of a meeting’s value lies in the quality of the connections they make. In 2026, there’s so much online content that it’s impossible for humans to consume it all, noted digital strategist Mark Adams on Convene’s podcast. Meanwhile, opportunities for in-person interactions, professional and otherwise, have grown rarer, as remote work and digital media have reduced the time we spend working and socializing face to face. Attendees come to events, not merely to passively consume content, but to participate in experiences that can’t be replicated online. “Human beings no longer get the hit that they used to get from content,” Adams said. “Now we want not just to experience content but to experience the community around the content.”

According to the May 2026 Maritz report, “NextGen-Proofing Your Events,” meeting attendees now look to in-person events to find things that are harder to get virtually, “like building trust, feeling inspired, forging relationships, collaborative problem solving, and unique experiences.”

We talk with three meeting professionals — an event founder, a creative experience designer for a 13,000-person technology conference, and a director of events and membership for a 3,000-member association — about how they are rethinking and redesigning meetings to deliver the kinds of connections and experiences attendees say they value most.