When Avon, CT-based scrapbook enthusiasts Sandy Jarem and Becky Blankenbicker were looking to arrange their first weekend scrapbooking summit (an event in which scrapbookers work on their personal albums), they weren't sure where to hold it. "We knew we'd need lots of space to spread out all the materials and do our work, and we wanted it to be private, like a retreat," says Jarem. "We knew we wanted to be pampered, to be taken care of, and to have nothing to worry about except enjoying what we do." So the duo approached the Interlaken Inn Resort and Conference Center in Lakeville, CT.
Fast forward six years. Jarem and Blankenbiker now hold three "Scrapbook Summits" annually at the Interlaken Inn. Each summit buys out the entire property and includes a trade-show component, in which vendors set up tabletops and booths in breakout rooms and sell scrapbooking supplies to attendees. Meanwhile, attendees set up their scrapbooking workstations at large tables in other meeting rooms. "We use all the Interlaken's meeting space," she says, adding that the conference center is a perfect home for her group because they can take over the entire property. "Scrap-bookers tend to work all night, and being the only group there, we can leave everyone's materials just where they are overnight and through the day."
Groups like Jarem's are fast becoming a mainstay
of the conference center business, which has traditionally been built upon training and educational meetings. "In the past five years, we've seen a pretty consistent decline in [traditional business]," says Dan Bolognani, the Interlaken's director of sales and marketing. "We've looked for ways to adapt the property for a different clientele, we've sought out different markets, and we've had success in doing so." Increasingly, planners of these other types of meetings and events—including such summits as Jarem's as well as social events and mini-trade shows—are taking their groups to conference centers.
ROOM TO MANEUVER
"The center is seeing more and more unusual events," says Shelley Tomberg, vice president of Seattle, WA-based hospitality management firm Columbia Hospitality, of Seattle's Bell Harbor International Conference Center. "In fact, in the past year, we've seen at least 15 percent more planners using the center for that kind of thing, whether bringing in more displays and exhibits or buying out the whole center to transform it into something of their own."
In December, for example, the Christian relief organization World Vision, headquartered in Federal Way, WA, used 3,000 square feet of the Bell Harbor Center to build a life-sized replica of an African Village in an effort to spotlight aspects of the continent's plight on World AIDS Day 2005. The exhibit raised AIDS awareness by inviting the general public to walk through and "experience what families and children experience when they're diagnosed with AIDS," says Tomberg. "They brought in the dirt, the tires, and the wood shacks, and there was this rustic, very earthy smell. They really transformed the space into the village." And it was a far cry from the usual training meetings conference centers have usually hosted.
Tomberg says centers like Bell Harbor are also hosting more trade shows, which traditionally have been held in larger hotels or convention centers. Maureen Takaoka-Harlow, director of business development for the Washington Biotechnology and Bio-medical Association, uses conference centers for her organization's annual investor conference. The conference brings together publicly-traded and privately-owned companies together to present their business plans to prospective investors and the media. "It's a two-day event in which we have approximately 52 exhibit tables for our sponsors, and there are some 600 people who mill through," she says. Her group can take over the entire center and use all its space at the same time. "While we are using the auditorium, we can also use the meeting rooms for back-to-back sessions, presentations, and panel discussions, as well as use the promenade for the general sessions during lunch."
Like many planners of this new crop of conference center events, Takaoka-Harlow says the scale of conference centers is their most important draw: "We use a conference center because they bridge the gap between a hotel, which is better for a smaller meeting, and a convention center, which is so immense that we would just get sucked in."