In a recent survey released by PCMA on the State of the Meetings Market Survey, 88% of respondents said it was more difficult for international travelers to obtain a visa to travel to the US for conferences in 2018 vs 2017. If this trend continues, Associations that serve the international community will need to look at alternative ways of reaching their international members.
Many Associations have already started addressing this concern by live streaming their educational sessions to a global audience of attendees who are unable to attend the conference physically. “We have many medical Association clients live streaming their events successfully”, says Jim Parker, president of Digitell, a leading live streaming company. “Several of our clients have more international members attending virtually than they do physically, which just reinforces this survey”, adds Parker.
With Digitell’s live streaming model, all virtual attendees are paying the full registration price, allowing the Association to not only recover any lost registration fees, but, is actually creating a windfall of revenue, without any cannibalization of their physical event.
Digitell is also streaming conferences in different languages to help their Association clients reach their international audience in their native language. The demand for this is steadily increasing as technology makes this easier to pull off and Associations see the upside of delivering content in their members native language.
Live streaming 7 languages at once for the MDRT Annual Meeting
