What’s in a name?

In the meetings industry, acronyms abound — MPI, CIC, PCMA, CMP, ASAE are just a few. Here at Connect, we’ve been struggling with SMERF, long used in the hospitality industry as a convenient abbreviation for a market segment for Social, Military, Educational, Religious and Fraternal special markets.

We have several problems with the acronym. First, it bundles a very diverse mix of associations and special interest groups. (MPI does too, but its members have signed on to belong to a group that they feel serves their common interest.) Second, many of those groups and the planners for those groups aren’t even aware that they have been defined (and often treated) as a sub-category by the hospitality industry.

Third, it’s just outdated. Take a look at what’s happened on the magazine stands of your local big box book retailer. There’s been a proliferation of special interest publications  — for quilters, doll collectors, raw foodies, jewelry designers, woodworkers, scrapbookers, etc. The people who buy these magazines are also getting together with other people who share their interest more than ever before. And some of these get-togethers are huge. Their requirements vary widely as well.

We thought about all those publications on those shelves and all the different meetings we heard about from friends and colleagues in the meetings and travel business. We applied what we had learned (and continue to learn) from our experience with Rejuvenate Magazine and Rejuvenate Marketplace, both dedicated to planners and suppliers of faith-based meetings. And we decided we wanted Connect to be different — to stand apart from all those other meeting planning publications that serve an industry.

Connect is about people — people who plan events for their special interest group or special association. People who want information about places and resources that can help them put together productive, interesting, fun meetings for their membership. Planners who want to meet and share ideas with other planners like them.

 We like the word connect. It’s what we do. We connect you to others in the world of meetings so you can learn from their experiences, get their insider tips, find out how they energize their members, involve volunteers, etc. We want to hear your meeting stories. And, boy, we have already uncovered some interesting ones. Read about the “big draw” developed by the planner for the annual meeting of the Sword Swallowers Association International in the July issue of Connect Magazine. We’ve got quite a line-up of planners we want you to meet in our “Closer Look” profiles.

We’d like to hear from you, too. To us, you’re not a SMERF.