Do the math. The
American Association for Cancer Research has approximately 26,000
members in 70 countries worldwide, and its last annual meeting,
held in Los Angeles in April, attracted 17,000 people. That means
at least 35 percent of the association’s membership wasn’t present
at the conference and therefore missed all of the education
sessions led by influential doctors and scientists. Then consider
the thousands of nonmember cancer researchers who didn’t attend and
that each attendee had to miss at least one session of interest
because of scheduling conflicts. The impact of the annual meeting
begins to look limited.
That’s why nearly 100 hours of AACR’s
annual meeting education sessions were recorded and posted online
this year so that anyone can watch the material, complete with
slide shows, for free.
“We consider it a service to our
members who attended the meeting, those who did not attend the
meeting and the cancer research community in general,” explains
Jeff Ruben, director of program development for AACR, based in
Philadelphia. The price tag for that service exceeded $100,000, and
Ruben says it was money well spent.
A growing number of associations are
coming to the same conclusion, that meeting content can be captured
and repackaged to serve a number of important objectives, including
fostering widespread education, generating additional revenue
streams, enhancing the brand of the association within its
industry, or attracting new members or meeting attendees.
“I would say if you’re an association
and not repurposing the educational content and putting it online,
you’re out of touch with the marketplace,” says John F. Nawn, vice
president of education for the Professional Convention Management
Association, based in Chicago.
The challenge for associations looking
to distribute their education sessions online is to figure out what
exactly they want to make available (all content or only
highlights), to whom (attendees, members, subscribers or the
general public) and how to pay for it (pay-per-view sessions,
subscription packages, increased registration or membership fees,
or corporate sponsorships). “There are as many different strategies
as there are associations,” says Ellen Moore, vice president of
education and program services for Chicago-based SmithBucklin.
“Everyone is grappling with this.”
Web ready: An audio
recording
of this session at the AACR annual
meeting was synched with the presentation
slide show and packaged with photos
and other information.
What capturing
means
Although associations have been selling
audio recordings of their meetings for years, recent advances in
technology have transformed the meaning of capturing a session.
“We’ve moved beyond an audio file being sufficient,” says Brent
Rogers, national director of digital services for AVW-TELAV Audio
Visual Solutions, a Freeman company based in Dallas.
The new standard for archiving meeting
content is to synchronize PowerPoint slides or other images used
during the live presentation with an audio recording of the
session, so online viewers see and hear roughly the same thing
attendees did in person. Many digital service providers go further,
allowing viewers to skip through the presentation from slide to
slide like chapters on a DVD and search session transcripts with
keywords in order to find all relevant material in a meeting
archive.
Additional options abound: Some
associations record sessions on video; others, who record only
audio, add photographs of speakers to show who’s talking; some even
allow viewers to type notes as they watch the session and e-mail
the text to themselves.
The content can be streamed on the web
or made available for download. Many associations, in addition to
online efforts, still offer data CDs of the meeting content for
purchase.
GIVING IT AWAY
College prep:
Students using
the MIT course
archiveHow are entities outside of the meetings and conventions industry giving away education that used to be available only to paid audiences?
One instructive case study is OpenCourseWare (OCW), an online publishing initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which makes available course syllabi, reading lists and other materials for virtually all of the university’s courses for free online (
ocw.mit.edu).
By November, the OCW archive will house 1,800 courses dating back to 2000, including more than 30 that have complete audio or video recordings of lectures.
The MIT committee that hatched the OCW concept initially set out to devise a money-making venture but couldn’t come up with a profitable model, says Steve Carson, external relations director for OCW. And making the material available for free undoubtedly has enhanced the program’s impact. Since October 2003, there have been some 20 million unique visitors to the site.
About 60 other universities currently publish course materials for free as part of the OCW Consortium, which counts among its affiliates nongovernmental organizations and, at press time, one for-profit company: Waltham, Mass.-based software developer Novell, which makes its employee training programs available to all.
Roughly half of the universities in the United States use Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple’s iTunes U, an alternative distribution vehicle for free audio and video recordings of courses, which launched in May.
The upshot: Free models reach the widest audiences and best accomplish the nonfinancial goals of organizations that want to share their educational content.
The only catch, of course, is someone has to pay the bill. -- T.I.
Charging for content
Most associations that record sessions
try to monetize the material, if only to cover costs of providing
the service. Education programming directors generally feel the
education has an inherent value, and if in-person attendees have to
pay, online viewers should, too.
“It’s a fine line,” says Dean Russo,
group vice president for U.K.-based Reed Exhibitions, of the
balance between free and paid content. Russo has helped develop an
online archive for ISC, the International Security Conference and
Exposition, and says other Reed shows have plans for similar
archives. “You want to put the best content out there for free to
attract people, but you also want to hold back the most popular,
premium content to encourage people who have explored what’s free
to purchase the rest.”
Russo says ISC365.com extends the brand
of the show beyond the event itself. He expects it will turn a
profit someday, not only through subscription sales for the
education material, but also through additional online advertising
opportunities, if traffic is strong enough. He hopes the site will
help generate interest in the live event, as well.
Russo set the subscription price for
approximately 100 sessions at $295. Half of the material is
available at no charge to those who register for free on the site.
The most popular recorded sessions are behind the subscription
wall, and what Russo considers to be the premium ISC sessions
weren’t made available at all Ñ they have to be witnessed in
person.
Approximately 1,200 attendees paid
about $700 each to attend education sessions at ISC West, held in
March in Las Vegas. In April, the first month that the content was
available on ISC365.com, the website had 12,000 visitors, and the
number steadily increased to 17,000 unique users by July. Most
users did not attend the event in person.
PCMA has a similar subscription model
for its “Live Learning Center,” a digital archive launched in
January and created by Richmond Hill, Ontario-
based Content Management Corp., whose clients also include Meeting
Professionals International and ASAE & The Center for
Association Leadership. But PCMA gives all paid event attendees
unlimited access to the material for free and offers discounts to
members (non-attendee members pay $99 for access to more than 50
sessions; non-attendee,
nonmembers pay $149). Roughly 40 percent of the recorded sessions
are available for free.
PCMA’s John Nawn says that in the first
week the archive was available, 30 percent of PCMA’s membership
logged on. In subsequent months, as is typical, traffic dropped
off. From June to August, for example, the site received slightly
more than 1,000 unique visitors; the median length of stay on the
site was six minutes, indicating that many weren’t sitting through
entire presentations.
Like many who create digital archives,
Nawn believes users need time to become comfortable with the
technology and the process of electronic learning. But he says the
site has started to generate revenue, and he expects the service to
become profitable.
Still other associations have tried
different models: Two years ago, the American Academy of Neurology,
based in St. Paul, Minn., recorded 40 hours of sessions, offering
some of it for free to all members -- not just attendees -- and
charging a subscription fee for the rest. The archive was not well
marketed, however, and its use was paltry. Operating under the
belief that the archive had to be bigger and more visible, Kris
Fridgen, associate director of AAN’s center for education and
science, ordered the capture of 200 hours of sessions last year.
This year, 240 hours were taped. “It requires a leap of faith,”
Fridgen says.
In the first half of 2007, thanks in
part to a successful marketing campaign, the archive received
58,000 hits. Most users, however, were viewing only the free
content, and Fridgen says she’s not convinced the archive will
remain a priority for AAN if it doesn’t start generating more
money.
The American Heart Association, based
in Dallas, which captures an even greater amount of material --
more than 2,500 presentations -- tried yet another approach. Leigh
Ann Stockard, vice president of meetings for AHA, decided exclusive
online subscriptions were not flexible enough, so the presentations
also were made available for individual purchase. Furthermore, AHA
offers subscriptions that include both online access and a physical
copy of the material, on CD or DVD because, as Stockard notes, “Not
everyone is computer savvy and not everyone around the world has
access to a computer or to high-speed Internet,” especially those
in Third World countries, an important sector of AHA’s target
audience.
All agree there’s no definitive model
of how best to handle packaging online content. Tom LaLonde,
partner of Arlington, Va.-based Capital Reach, a digital content
provider, says the associations that are most successful at
generating income with their archives are those that align
themselves with professional development or continuing education
programs, which require people to pay for education sessions.
Larger organizations tend to be more successful financially, he
adds, because they have a larger pool of potential users who will
pay for the content.
GOOD NOW, BETTER LATER
David AngelettiOnline archives offer a number of immediate and long-term opportunities for associations, depending on how the content is distributed. The material can be provided as a benefit for attending a live event or simply belonging to an association -- a “value-add.”
David Angeletti, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Johnstown, Pa.-based Conference Archives Inc., says selling the content to institutions is another opportunity that associations, until now, largely have left unexplored. His company is working to aggregate the medical education content it records and license access to the material to different universities or governmental agencies around the world. Conference Archives currently is testing its new software solution, Ekatius, which will enable subscribers to search all of the archived medical content by keyword, subject, date of the event, the association that produced it and other categories. Associations get a cut of the earnings.
There’s a lot of talk about how forthcoming technological advancements soon will render all of this material portable and, potentially, even more attractive to users. Thanks to mobile digital devices such as iPods or phones with video capabilities, people will no longer be tethered to computers to experience sessions online. The technology isn’t good enough yet for widespread mobile use, says Tom LaLonde, partner of Arlington, Va.-based Capital Reach, a digital content provider. “It’s still working itself out,” he says. “The challenge is taking it beyond a novelty to become a valuable service.” -- T.I.
Giving it away
AACR is in the minority as an
association that gives away all of its recorded meeting content for
free. “We talked about it but never seriously considered charging
for it,” says Jeff Ruben, who adds that the decision was
philosophical. Making the material free best aligned with the
association’s mission of providing education to the global cancer
research community.
Another organization that’s making all
of its meeting content available for free is New York-based TED
(Technology, Entertainment, Design), which produces an exclusive
conference each year in Monterey, Calif., a showcase for some of
the world’s most innovative thinkers on a wide range of topics.
Attendance is capped at approximately 1,000 people, and even with
registration fees set at $6,000, TED has additional thousands on
its attendee waiting list.
When TED first offered a few free video
podcasts from its conferences last year, “it was a radical move,
because until that point TED was the ultimate closed system. It was
invitation-only,” says June Cohen, director of TED media. “What
happened at TED, stayed at TED.”
Cohen acknowledges that TED could
easily charge for online access to its hundreds of session videos,
but it won’t. “In my studied opinion, free-content models are far
more powerful,” Cohen argues. She would know: In 1994, she was part
of a team that launched HotWired.com, which was the first
professional content site to use banner advertisements, a method
that has enabled websites to generate revenue while providing free
content ever since. When websites begin charging for access,
audiences drop precipitously, Cohen warns. Reducing all access
barriers and allowing the ideas expressed in the videos to be
spread around the Internet in a viral manner has dramatically
raised the TED’s profile and demand for its conference, she says.
Traffic on TED’s video archive (www.ted.com/talks) has jumped from “the low
thousands to many millions,” Cohen says. The videos also are
available on iTunes, YouTube and other websites.
The free model has even created an
opportunity to generate revenue: Cohen says she’s fielded many
requests for DVDs of the talks, despite the fact that they are
available for free. The organization may choose to make DVDs
available for purchase in the future.
TED is a unique conference, owned by
The Sapling Foundation, a private, nonprofit entity, with dynamics
that aren’t easily applicable to member associations. And TED can
afford to give its content away for free because BMW is
underwriting the service. But many of TED’s goals -- to share
knowledge, to raise the profile of the conference, to publicize
ideas that can make the world better -- are also the goals of many
associations, who could, Cohen believes, benefit from making their
educational programming free to anyone.
Common concerns
The most frequently cited, and
apparently unfounded, concern among associations is that packaging
content online will cannibalize meeting attendance.
Those who have done it say this just
isn’t true. “Everyone talks about it, but I haven’t seen [any
drop-off],” says AAN’s Kris Fridgen. “I don’t think the two
necessarily tie to each other. You’re never going to replace the
social interaction that takes place at an annual meeting.”
Jim Perry, vice president of business
development for Blue Sky Broadcast, a San Diego-based supplier of
digital content management, believes attendees come if they are
able. “Most people who attend conventions and conferences go
because someone else is underwriting the costs,” he says. “If you
can afford the time away from the office or your family, you
come.”
Conversely, there are always going to
be some people who, no matter what, won’t be able to attend in
person and could only benefit from having access to the meeting’s
content. “If you can cast a wider net, and reach a wider audience,
I think there’s value there that needs to be considered,”
SmithBucklin’s Ellen Moore says.
Other common concerns that vendors
hear:
* It’s too expensive.
Vendors point out that many associations set up revenue-sharing
agreements, which require relatively little money up front, and the
vendor and association split the proceeds from subscriptions or CD
sales. Or, associations can find sponsors to help cover
expenses.
Those who pay out-of-pocket for
capturing and distributing the content online generally do complain
that the service is expensive. Prices vary, but Martin Copeland,
managing director of Content Management Corp., estimates a typical
bill to record 50 sessions with the highest-quality synchronized
audio package is between $20,000 and $50,000. However, less
expensive packages are available. “If done correctly,” Copeland
says, “this can work for any association of any size.”
* No one will use it.
Associations should try to gauge interest before capturing a lot of
material, vendors warn. “The worst assumption an association will
make is if you put it up, people will buy it,” says Beth Ziesenis,
multimedia education manager for Blue Sky. Marketing efforts, ease
of use and navigability, and the quality of both the content and
its recording all directly affect how successful an archive will
be, she says.
* Speakers won’t like
it. Associations that do record content will have to be
mindful of legal issues -- permission from speakers, whether
presentations used copyrighted images or music -- but most planners
say most speakers have no problem being recorded for the web. If
necessary, vendors can easily omit a slide or two from the online
presentation.
“I don’t see a downside,” asserts
Moore. “You’re enabling a new service and creating a delivery
option that maybe didn’t exist previously.”