Syndication 
Rising costs and falling attendance are plaguing association meetings.
“Either you’re not affected at all or you’re super affected. I don’t think that there’s a middle, it’s very binary.” That’s how Erin Fuller, FASAE, CAE, sees the events industry in relation to the current U.S. administration’s policies and changes.
As the global head, association solutions, at global engagement agency MCI and chief strategy officer at MCI USA, Fuller has a window into a broad swath of MCI’s association clients. She gave Convene a glimpse into how much of an impact those changes are having on events, depending on their sector — health care, she said, has been highly affected.
Visa Issues and International Travel
There’s a higher than usual visa denial rate from Asia-Pac regions to enter the U.S., which resulted in a financial loss for one of the medical associations MCI works with, Fuller said, and affected its outlook: “While the meeting would normally look to return to the U.S. in ’27, at this time, they’re not considering a U.S. destination.”
Erin Fuller
‘To me, Q2 is the canary in the coal mine right now.’
A biennial global disease summit that took place in L.A. in March, which rotates between the Americas, Europe, and APAC, experienced a 40-percent reduction in participation due to a number of reasons, Fuller said. Among them: travel bans from the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services; a high visa denial rate from APAC and African regions to enter the U.S.; and the U.S. intent to withdraw from the World Health Organization. At the same time, the event had to contend with a 20-percent increase in costs.
Outside of the U.S., a global professional services meeting in Singapore that relies on a significant number of mostly West Coast U.S. delegates, also held in March, saw 30-40 percent fewer of those delegates attend, Fuller said. Which points to another troubling trend: “We’re also seeing Americans potentially not traveling, because people are concerned” about challenges they may have entering other countries or returning back to the states, she said.
The toll of massive cuts to federal funding and jobs was felt by two MCI clients in the health-care sector that held events in late April and early May, she said, with both “seeing a 30-percent largely domestic attendance drop,” when we spoke in early April.
Looking for a Trendline
It’s hard, Fuller said, to look at the current situation “in a vacuum. Being asked for trends right now when we don’t have a rule book or any kind of comparison about what’s going to happen — or what’s going to be said next about another country — makes it very, very challenging.”
It will be interesting, she said, to see whether there will be a resulting shift to regional events, similar to what happened at the end of the pandemic, which may represent opportunities for some non-hub destinations. Or perhaps there maybe more of a return to hybrid or virtual events.“ Part of me thinks it’s really smart” to provide an online component of your meeting, Fuller said. “If you’re going to have continued erosion of your reg base and you can’t predict it with your weeks-out report or whatever, then at least you’ve invested in this option so you don’t lose all the revenue. But the investment for hybrid is expensive. I think people have learned that you’re basically double-staffing the event. But once you meet those fixed costs, then the margin can become great if you’re able to market it and monetize that.”
As far as “really pulling legit trend data,” Fuller said, “I feel like we’re going to have to be, unfortunately, a few months” longer into the year. “Some folks are saying, ‘Oh, Q1 was great. We didn’t see a significant impact to events.’ That’s a false economy, because everybody makes those purchasing decisions before all this started happening. Anytime someone throws a March event at me” as an example, she said, “I’m like, ‘No, no, no. That’s not what we should be looking at. We should be looking at April, May, and June.’ To me, Q2 is the canary in the coal mine right now. There’s just so much economic uncertainty and volatility,” including the impacts of tariffs.
“My job is to think about what statistics can I look at and pin to some of this. I’m struggling. As both chief strategy officer in the U.S. but then also globally overseeing our association work, people are asking me for answers. I don’t have concrete ones, but I don’t feel great about how this is rolling out.”
Nonethless, Fuller is trying to see “a glimmer of hope” for associations. “I think there are always areas of opportunity during any change,” she said. “The example I give is The Skimm, the news aggregator targeted to young women. They took over the abandoned reproductive health website pages from the government and they privatized it. They didn’t do that to monetize it. They did it as a service, which I thought was great. How many abandoned events, portals of information, etc., will be out there that associations may be able to take over and own?”
Navigating Changes
While the business events industry has “weathered storms,” Fuller said, including the dot-com bubble burst, the recession, and COVID, they used to be a decade — not 18 months — apart. “I think associations are risk- and change-averse,” she said.“ It takes a lot of time. They’re not nimble, and our industry doesn’t support being nimble. We’re booking things three, five, seven years out. The ability to change a model of a conference or to go from every year to biennial or co-locate — those decisions take so many years to implement. And that means that there’s a lagging indicator of how this will have an impact. Are we going to feel this in ’27, ’28? I think so.”
The more profound impact of all this upheaval for Fuller is “the shutdown of the marketplace of ideas, because we all know the really critical role that the government plays in so many of these data sets. When you stop reporting new cases of a certain disease, then no one’s talking about that disease,” she said. “Researchers lose their baseline. Then no one’s presenting on it. That whole scientific process and the curiosity that drives so much of the work and the content that gets produced by associations — that loss, I think, you can’t quantify.”
Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene
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