The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) held their 2016 Annual Meeting & Exposition at the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City from Aug. 13-16, drawing about 5,000 attendees.
The meeting -- often referred to as the "Super Bowl of conventions" -- brought an estimated $16 million dollars in direct spend to Utah's state capital. Additionally, 20 percent of attendees are expected to book a meeting in the host city within the next five years, which could translate into $500 million in economic impact for the city.
ASAE president and CEO John Graham noted that 83 percent of the attendees had not been to Salt Lake City in the last 15 years. The meeting included 211 international attendees from 22 different countries. Outside of the U.S., ASAE's largest delegations are from the Netherlands and Australia.
Attendees experienced updated learning formats at this year's meeting.
"Overall we're embracing the concept of self-directed learning and trying to incorporate a variety of learning formats and learning levels so attendees have a lot of choices," said Graham at a press conference.
Along with "ignite" sessions, in which presenters are allowed 20 slides of content and only 15 seconds to present each slide, ASAE debuted 20-minute "express learning" sessions and the "story-slam" format, in which attendees are given five minutes to share management experience with their peers.
"Boomers to Generation Z: Everyone wants to be taught how to do something in five minutes," said Graham. "It's known as a cultural and cognitive shift towards micro-learning and we've embraced it."
Longer education programs included full-day certificate programs, half-day workshops, and 90-minute "deep dive" sessions.
"Learning is increasing social," said Graham. "The informal learning outside the classroom is quite important. So we also created something called 'open space,' which allows conference attendees to initiate learning on topics of their choice." "Open space" works like this: If an attendee doesn't see what they want to learn about covered in the educational sessions, they can post an 'open space' and invite people to come to a pod to have a conversation about something they want to learn about.
ASAE also launched a new conference app, which can be used by attendees at all of their events, not just the annual meeting. The app provides people the opportunity to engage with each other and compete through gamification. Attendees are able to earn points and badges when they check into booths and learning sessions.
ASAE's upcoming annual meetings will be be held in Toronto in 2017; Chicago in 2018; Columbus, OH, in 2019; Las Vegas in 2020; Dallas in 2021; and Atlanta in 2022.