IABC World Conference rescheduling is a disservice to Canadian IABC members

Here’s an unfortunate situation. The International Association of Business Communicators has rescheduled its annual World Conference to the same weekend as Canadian Public Relations Society National Conference.

The CPRS announced some time back that the 2009 CPRS National Conference will be held in Vancouver June 7-9, 2009. Now, I’ve received word in the IABC’s member newsletter that the IABC World Conference has been rescheduled to overlapping dates, June 7-10, in San Francisco.

Canadian Public Relations SocietyLike many Canadians, I belong to both the IABC and the CPRS. The principal benefit I receive from these associations is the opportunity to attend their professional development conferences. By attending these conferences, not only do I have a chance to keep abreast of the latest thinking about communications, but I also have a chance to meet and discuss these ideas with other communication professionals from across Canada and North America.

Scheduling these conferences to occur on the same weekend is a terrible waste of resouces and potential.

In this case, it appears to me that the party responsible for this conflict is the IABC, which changed its conference date. Now, some might say that this doesn’t matter. They may see IABC as primarily a US-based organization. But to those, take a look at the number of active IABC chapters in Canada, including the largest IABC Chapter in the world, Toronto.

So, here’s my call to the leaders of the IABC: Serve your members better. Coordinate your conference dates with the CPRS so that your Canadian members can have the opportunity to participate in all of the professional development conferences that you offer.

Update:

I wasn’t alone in my annoyance at IABC’s move. PRWeek reports that “Derrick Pieters, director of communications, Department of Justice Canada, Prairie Region and the North in Edmonton, and CPRS president, said they were surprised, and not initially warned, of the date change. “It is unfortunate there is a conflict, but it was just an unfortunate set of circumstances as to how it happened,” Pieters commented. The article quoted me as saying that “the IABC, as the bigger, international organization, has ‘not played nice in Canada.’”

  • http://trafcom.com Donna Papacosta

    Well said, Joe. I hope the IABC leaders are listening.

  • Todd T. Hattori, ABC

    Joe I don’t mean to belittle this unfortunate situation, and I hope you will read my response with this in mind. IABC conference staff begin negotiating conference facilities several years in advance. IABC leadership and staff did not decide to change the dates to conflict with the CRPS conference or for any other IABC reason.

    The date change occurred because another client of our scheduled hotel/conference facility impacted availability of the guest and meeting rooms that we need. To attempt to maintain the original conference dates and look for a new hotel/conference facility that could accommodate the number of guest and meeting rooms required with less than a year to do so would be impossible.

  • http://www.propr.ca Joseph Thornley

    Todd,
    Thanks for the explanation. I wasn’t suggesting that you decided to change the dates in order to conflict with CPRS. However, as you looked at changing the date of the IABC conference, it would appear that you did not exclude the dates that conflicted directly with the CPRS. That’s put many of IABC’s Canadian members in a position of having to decide between IABC and CPRS. With 52 weekends in the year, this seems avoidable if you would only have excluded that weekend from the weekends you were considering.

  • http://www.iabc.com Julie Freeman, IABC President

    Joseph-

    Making a decision about when and where to hold a conference is one of the most tricky decisions that IABC–or any association–has to make. And while we are indeed sorry that the 2009 IABC conference will overlap with the CPRS conference, it was a decision made in the best interest of the majority of IABC members.

    IABC really does not have the choice of 52 weekends. For many years, maybe forever, our conference has been in June. Our members plan on that, and we feel we need to stick with June.

    We also do not have unlimited choice of hotels. In San Francisco, for example, only two hotels have the kind of space we need for our event. The same is true in all major cities.

    So, that’s why, when we learned that the Marriot may not be able to provide all the space we need, we had to consider whether the original dates would provide for the quality of conference our members expect.

    Then there was another, important factor. Marriott offered us a significant discount on the food and beverage costs. Since that is a major cost in running a conference, receiving a discount means that IABC can maintain competitive (and hopefully, affordable) registration fees.

    Does that mean we do not care about our Canadian members? Of course not. But as a practical matter if IABC maintained the original dates, there would have been only a week between the CPRS conference and the IABC conference. It seems unlikely that joint members would have chosen to go to both conferences. They would have to make a choice.

    I am happy to hear that you make the decision to attend both conferences, but our research indicates that we do not have a significant overlap of CPRS/IABC members and that only 5% of the Canadian attendees at this year’s conference also attend the CPRS conference.

    Does that mean IABC does not care about cooperating with CPRS?Again, of course not. We will be in contact with CPRS to be sure that their leadership knows that IABC will return to Canada for its 2010 conference, when we will be in Toronto from 6-9 June.

    IABC does not like to force members to make difficult choices. But some times we have no choice.

    Thank you for letting us know your concerns.

    Julie Freeman, IABC President

  • Erin Anne Beirne, MAPC

    Well, the scheduling conflict continues. CPRS’ 2010 Regina conference is being held June 6-8.

    I am a member of both IABC and CPRS. Sadly, I can’t figure out a way to be in both Regina and Toronto at the same time.

    Any ideas on how I can clone myself?

    ea/