The International Congress and Convention Association’s (ICCA) new five-year strategic plan, launched at the General Assembly before the ICCA 2015 Congress in Buenos Aires, focusses on improving the success and value of association meetings and on increasing the effectiveness of ICCA’s relationship with association executives and meeting planners.
The plan includes a new vision to shape the future and value of international association meetings’ in a move which positions the association much closer to the aspirations of its members clients.
“ICCA should not simply be an observer or an extractor of data from what’s going on in the international association field,” says ICCA CEO Martin Sirk. “This vision places us as a key actor at the heart of what’s going on in the sector.
“It implies that we will be much more active in helping international associations extract value from their events and to help those meetings deliver the outcomes that the associations are striving for.”
The plan also includes a new mission statement, which sets out ICCA’s position as the “global community and knowledge hub for the international association meetings sector”.
“As in previous plans we are focused entirely on this sector, on international associations, it is our unique area of expertise,” says Sirk. “What’s changed is that instead of focusing purely on business opportunities and competitive advantage for our members, we are now concerning ourselves with generating better outcomes from the international association meetings themselves.”
“We can’t simply look at this from the supplier side of the equation. To be a true community for this sector, we have to embrace change, and get closer to the international associations themselves.”
