Local lure:
International
attendees flock to
Camden, Maine, for the annual
PopTech conference.
Twenty years ago, a
group of retired CIA officers and other foreign-service workers
decided they needed to enliven Camden, Maine. Each had moved to the
postcard harbor town independently, attracted to its cozy village
with a population just shy of 5,000. But, during the snowy winter
months, after the seasonal shops had locked their doors, Camden
tended to be quiet. Very quiet.
In February 1987, the group took
advantage of their federal government contacts and organized a
conference to discuss foreign affairs. The first Camden Conference
was held at a local congregational church and attracted only a few
dozen people, but it grew steadily and eventually moved into the
500-seat Camden Opera House. This year’s conference sold out in 36
hours and, to accommodate overflow from the opera house, organizers
were compelled to open up satellite venues linked to the
proceedings via a video feed on the town’s cable-access channel.
The influx of people to Camden, notes Mac Deford, treasurer of the
board for the conference, made the town “look like summer in the
middle of winter.”
Such a transformation points to a
simple fact: Away from the city lights and high-season crowds,
meeting planners can enjoy the run of small towns, spreading a
group across a cluster of inns and bed-and-breakfasts and offering
a refreshing environment for meetings while getting great deals
from small business owners who are thrilled to fill their inns and
restaurants during the low seasons.
The success of the Camden Conference
paved the way for the creation of the Camden Technology Conference,
or CTC, in 1997. Some prominent residents, including Robert
Metcalfe, who founded 3Com, a Marlborough, Mass.-based provider of
voice and data networking solutions, and who shares four patents
for the Ethernet; and summer resident John Sculley, former CEO of
both PepsiCo and Apple Computer, decided to organize a three-day
event that would focus on the intersection of technology and
culture and draw an international audience, as opposed to the more
regional crowd that attended the Camden Conference.
The CTC had the full support of the
town. In fact, a committee recently had been formed to study how
Camden could generate more business during the “shoulder seasons”
of early spring or late fall. “One of [the committee’s]
recommendations was to capture the idea of ‘Campus Camden,’ to use
existing infrastructure, both public and private, to attract
meetings,” says Roger Moody, who was town manager at the time.
Nothing new had to be built. “We
realized that we had a convention center -- there just wasn’t a
roof over it. It was downtown Camden,” says Perry Gates, president
of the Camden Downtown Business Group.
Despite the fact that none of Camden’s
hotels had more than 45 rooms, the town was well equipped to handle
meetings of up to 500 people. Eighteen inns and B&Bs combined
to offer 279 guest rooms within walking distance of downtown, and
hundreds more were a short drive away in Rockport and Lincolnville.
The opera house received a $1 million overhaul in the early 1990s
and could serve as the main meeting venue. Local harbor-view
restaurants would host meals, and the village green could be tented
to host a cocktail reception or ice cream social. Everything was
within a radius of a few blocks.
The founders of the CTC, which was
later renamed PopTech, discovered that visionaries in various
scientific fields were eager to flock to Camden, despite the
two-hour drive north of the airport in Portland, to ponder the
future of ideas and technology while enjoying a weekend of Maine
hospitality. But no one was happier than local business owners, who
have made a ritual of hanging “Welcome PopTech Attendees” posters
in their windows each October.
Matthew Levin, general manager of the
Lord Camden Inn, one of PopTech’s “headquarters” properties, says
he offers the conference a few complimentary rooms each year as a
sign of appreciation for the business it generates.
“We would love to entertain three or
four more conferences similar to PopTech or the Camden Conference
between Columbus Day and Memorial Day,” adds Levin. “We’re pretty
packed in the summer, but we would make quite a good destination in
the fall for meetings -- a boutique conference, that would be a
good name for it.”
Both the Camden Conference and PopTech
were outgrowths of the Camden community, but the conference
organizers say nothing would prevent an outside meeting planner
from following their model to host meetings in any number of quaint
towns.
Headquarters:
The Otesaga Resort Hotel
in Cooperstown, N.Y.,
is a central venue for
“townwide” meetings.
Going townwide
“People in Albany or New York, they
call it a ‘citywide.’ Here we call it a ‘townwide,’?” says Robert
Faller, director of sales and marketing at the 135-room Otesaga
Resort in Cooperstown, N.Y. Faller says 25 or 30 meetings each year
in Cooperstown incorporate the “campus” concept, anchored by the
Otesaga Resort, which is the largest in the village and has a
2,625-square-foot main dining room that’s often used for
meetings.
Ashland, Ore., a few miles north of the
California border, is best known for its Oregon Shakespeare
Festival, which runs annually from February through October, and
for its large network of B&Bs. But Ashland also is a meetings
town. The 70-room Ashland Springs Hotel operates as a base for
groups that can spread out among the 20 B&Bs within 10 blocks
of the theaters, and the Historic Ashland Armory, two blocks from
the hotel, can accommodate groups of 450 people for receptions.
In Bristol, R.I., a half-hour from
Providence, groups take over the 40-room Bristol Harbor Inn and
overflow into the six B&Bs within a mile radius, as well as to
the nearby Mount Hope Farm, which divides 11 guest rooms among
three buildings on 200 acres of land. Groups tend to stay in the
historic downtown area and gather in the Bristol Harbor Inn’s
waterfront meeting space, suitable for nearly 200 people, or at the
farm.
Planners often discover small towns
with meeting facilities coincidentally, by attending a wedding
there, for example, or by visiting a friend who has a summer home
in town. “Sometimes it amazes me that people know we’re around,”
says Jim Farley, president of the Mount Hope Trust, which operates
the farm.
Local chambers of commerce, though not
full-fledged convention and visitor bureaus, are trying to get the
word out. “Over the past four or five years, we’ve really started
to market ourselves,” says Betty Pleacher, president of the East
Bay Chamber of Commerce, based in Bristol. “We’re trying to bring
in -- not conventions, because we don’t have that much space -- but
certainly larger meetings.”
Like CVB representatives, chamber
employees are planners’ liaisons to the towns. They’ll know what
else is happening in the area on the meeting dates and can help
secure cooperation from local business owners. Involving area
businesses to provide anything from floral arrangements to coffee
breaks is “mutually beneficial,” says Janea Kelley, administrative
director of the Camden Conference. That way, the event feels like
less of an invasion, and business owners “aren’t walking around
grumbling about you taking all of the parking spots.”
Farming out: In Bristol,
R.I.,
groups stay at downtown inns
or here at the Governor Bradford House
at Mount Hope Farm.
Off the beaten
track
One of the greatest challenges of a
small-town meeting is getting everyone there, which can involve
hours of driving, sometimes after a flight.
“Whatever small volume of folks look at
the location as a drawback is more than offset by those who think
otherwise,” counters Matt Ovington, producer of PopTech. “People
wouldn’t come back eight or 10 years in a row if they thought it
was too out of the way.”
Towns like Camden, Ovington continues,
can do more than physically accommodate everyone; they have quality
facilities and restaurants and even offer benefits major cities
can’t provide.
“I’ve lived in big cities and I’ve gone
to conferences and conventions,” says Richard Anderson, one of
PopTech’s original board members. “And, OK, so you don’t get to go
to the big-name restaurant in New York or the Broadway musical.
There are plenty of opportunities to do that. There are very few
opportunities to get to experience Camden.”
One of PopTech’s objectives is to
stimulate networking, and the intimate setting of Camden
facilitates that aim. In addition, and as a way to spread the
wealth among local restaurants, registration includes lunch tickets
to a specific eatery on a given day, forcing attendees to expand
their contacts over meals.
PopTech also recruits local volunteers
to be “speaker hosts” who act as concierges for the conference’s
lecturers and who know “where to go in the evening to see the best
sunset,” Ovington says. Those who make it all the way to Camden
often take an extra day or even a week in the area and rely on
locals to suggest activities or nearby destinations.
Not every group will thrive in a
small-town setting, but for many -- from homegrown associations to
major corporations like Waltham, Mass.-based Raytheon Co., which
holds high-security meetings in Bristol -- small towns can be an
attractive alternative to a conventional meeting destination.
For PopTech and the Camden Conference,
at least, the novelty of the experience has become inextricably
fused with the event itself. “Could we move to Boston and get 2,000
people in a convention hall?” asks Tom LeVine, CEO of PopTech.
“Probably. But it wouldn’t be the same event anymore.”
Co-founder Metcalfe agrees: “Let other
conferences move to cities to grow into civic center expos,
providing revenues for hotels and taxes for bloated city
governments, and let PopTech stay small and effective and
enjoyable.”