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On Aug. 25, PCMA’s nominating committee met in Chicago to decide the final slate of PCMA Board of Directors open officer and director positions. Unless there are additional petition nominations from the membership, the roster offered by the committee (see press release) will be elected and take office immediately following PCMA Convening Leaders 2018, Jan. 7–10, in Nashville.
Claire Smith, CMP, Vancouver Convention Centre’s vice president of sales and marketing, said she’s excited to become the first-ever supplier and non-U.S.-based chair of the PCMA Board of Directors next year. Breaking new ground in both respects is “a natural evolution of our industry,” Smith said, reflecting a growing sense of globalization and the value of partnership. “I think we’re less siloed now as an industry,” she said. “We’re all business-events professionals and we have to work in close collaboration for mutual success. The lines are less definitive than they ever were.”
Smith is also pleased about the new additions to the board: Neil Brownlee, head of business events for VisitScotland; Carolyn Pund, CMP, CMM, senior manager, global SMM and event business operations at Cisco Systems Inc., Kathleen Ratcliffe, president, Explore St. Louis; Megan Tate, CMM, DES, vice president, meeting and events planning manager, Wells Fargo Bank; and Christine Trimmer, executive director, International Society for Infectious Diseases. “I think their different points of view makes us stronger as a board and as an organization — and also as an industry,” she said. “We have to really not look inward but look outward and I think those different perspectives will really help us to position PCMA for the future.
“The business events industry touches all business,” she continued, “and so it is so important that we don’t limit our thinking. Really what we want to achieve is that business events are recognized as the critical business tool for success that they are. By bringing in senior association and corporate individuals, we just get those different lenses on the role that business events play within their organizations — so that we’re not looking at it necessarily from the functional side but that strategic perspective of where an event fits into the lifecycle of an organization.”