Making Travel Part of Event Engagement

One member of PCMA’s Catalyst online planner community shared about how meeting attendees arriving by train used social media to coordinate informal meetups along the way, engaging with fellow conferencegoers while on the road.

PCMA’s Catalyst community offers members a platform to ask each other questions, share ideas, or, as the website says, “communicate and collaborate.” Here’s a sampling from a recent Catalyst discussion.

Ellen Snipes, Director, Meetings and Exhibits, AOCS (American Oil Chemists’ Society), posted on the PCMA Catalyst forum: “A fantastic article in Convene caught my eye today: Building a Circular Economy in Events: How Two Major Meetings Reimagined Sustainability [One particular strategy stood out:] The World Circular Economy Forum (WCEF) informs attendees about lower-carbon transportation options and turns travel into an extension of the event experience.”

Tuula Sjöstedt, who serves as communications and public affairs lead of international programs for WCEF’s parent organization Sitra, told Convene that WCEF compensates or offsets the carbon footprint of all its speakers’ travel “and we encourage other participants to do so on their part as well,” Sjöstedt said. “Also, when we’re informing people of how to come to the forum, we bring up alternatives.” For instance, at last year’s event, registrants were guided that “if they can come by land, there are nice train routes leading to Brussels from everywhere in Europe,” she said, “and we managed to encourage many people to do so.”

That travel recommendation became part of the WCEF experience — participants who came by train used social media to organize informal meetups with others attending the forum, using the travel time to engage with them at different stops along the way, Sjöstedt said.

Snipes was impressed with how such a simple idea helped attendees to meet “even before stepping into the conference. What a brilliant way to build connections!” she wrote.

The article got her thinking, Snipes said, about how to extend the relationship-building opportunities at events to include the travel time. Convene Deputy Editor Barbara Palmer shared that a Melbourne, Australia–based grassroots group, CANIE (Climate Action Network for International Educators) uses LinkedIn and social media to encourage those going to conferences to connect with one another, to carpool, to share train rides, and offset emissions using the hashtag #TravelWithCANIE. The initiative, according to its website, is to challenge business as usual and create behavioral change.

Read previous Catalyst discussions in our Catalyst Questions Archive.