MPI

The city which took meeting design as the center of its positioning with the concept Meetovation showcased how meetings can be different. More than 400 registered attendees (+27% compared to EMEC 2015) enjoyed two days of connections and education with other members of the MPI community.

The educational programme featured more than 30 education sessions, including general, certificate and campfire sessions. Most of them were about meeting design topics, from “play the meeting design game” to using dramaturgy for events or integrating neurology in your events. But most of all it was about showcasing it: the event included moments of play, a lot of interaction with other delegates, open and informal room setups. So we participated in an original orchestra with plastic pipes as instruments, really fun by the way, in a battle of papers snowballs, in a one-to-one fight of grabbing the other one´s finger. The event even started with an exercise of pairing with another participant and get to know them enough to write the page of description about them, a good way to start the conversation, from the opening session.

Meetovation facilitators Bo Krüger and Ann Hansen changed a normal conference into the challenge for delegates of creating and telling their own story. All delegates were given a storybook partially drawn, with several pre-defined sections related to the story theme (description of the hero, the challenge, the cliffhanger…).

The event leveraged social media, and generated 8.4 million impressions with the #EMEC16 hashtag: nearly 3,000 tweets sent by 400+ people, reaching an estimated 884,000+ people. Tweets were written in English, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Haitian, Indonesian and Portuguese, reflecting the global nature of our MPI audience.

Meetovation facilitators Bo Krüger and Ann Hansen leveraged social media to capture audience suggestions for the best title for the #EMEC16 book they were co-writing with the audience during the conference.

And for the first time, MPI livestreamed general session content via @MPIinEurope´s Periscope channel; the opening general session attracted 400 live viewers and generated more than 1,000 hearts (viewer likes) from remote viewers worldwide.

The MPI Global Event App had 375 total device activations, was opened 15,000+ times and was viewed 32,000+.

Finally the event also fell into the current craze for hosted buyers and included an intimate version of the second annual MPI Hosted Buyer Programme in Europe, with 21 suppliers and 24 planners.

Next stop of this story and journey: Granada, Spain was announced as the host destination for EMEC 2017.