The National Award of “Meeting of the Year, more than 500 Delegates” was immensely satisfying to all our team and one we are delighted to be sharing with the Alice Springs Convention Centre and the Northern Territory Convention Bureau.

If ever there was a meeting which required teamwork, this was it.
Unlike most large international conferences which are run in the five-star surrounds of metropolitan convention centres or luxury hotels, the International Symposium on Pneumococci and Pneumococcal Diseases (ISPPD) is held in remote locations where this killer illness of children is prone to occur.

We organise and manage many medical meetings and are careful never to lose sight that these meetings can have profound impacts on the lives of many people around the world. In today’s time-poor society, meetings need to focus on achievement of real objectives that meet the needs of the society and the delegates.

For ISPPD5, the success of the meeting could be measured in ways beyond the clinical issues under discussion. The pneumococcal diseases mostly occur in deprived circumstances where there is limited access to First World medicine, with more than one million children worldwide succumbing a year.

We set out with a determination to meet every financial target, knowing that any surplus funds would be invested in raising medical standards where they were most needed. We ramped up the sponsorship and marketing for this event to the extent we nearly doubled our delegate numbers and did the same with our sponsorship target, returning a healthy dividend to the organising committee.
Achieving the targets was gratifying, though it did create some headaches for our accommodation and transport teams.

All the partners came away from this project with a strong sense we’d helped make a difference, which is surely what our industry can really facilitate and be proud of.

Roslyn McLeod is the founder and managing director of Tour Hosts, a Sydney-based conference and event management company.

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