Signed this morning at MEETINGS in Rotorua, the partnership will see PCOA share its current and archived educational content with the whole BEIA community.
“This MoU has been 12 months in the making,” said PCOA president Barry Neame.
“I think we met at MEETINGS last year in Wellington and discussed how we could collaborate, how we could share experiences, how we could grow our industry sector in an educational context but also in a collaborative way that leads to a greater professionalisation – if we’re not already there – of our industry sector, particularly the younger people coming into our industry that we’re really urging…to take up senior management positions,” he said.
The PCOA will open up its networking groups for different parts of the sector – from PCO owners to in-house PCOs – to BEIA.
“It’s also good I think for our PCOs to hear from Australian PCOs and vice versa,” said BEIA chief executive Lisa Hopkins.
“There’s some shared learnings…and we are each other’s biggest source of international conferences, so really understanding each other and those nuances I think is going to be really beneficial and everyone is going to win out of it.”
The partnership means buyers from MEETINGS will have access to PCOA’s opportunities even if they’re not members of BEIA.
The special interest networks will also give some organisers who work in isolation – often embedded into businesses and associations across various industries – a chance to be part of the wider business events industry.
For PCOA, the partnership is intended to grow their community, which already extends across Australia and into New Zealand.
“Our objective is to bring more people from New Zealand into our community,” said Neame.
“I was impressed last year when I went to Wellington of how many PCOs there are in New Zealand but also how many people seem to be in government, in association sectors, in different industry sectors.
“Some of those people working inside associations are single practitioners so they don’t have the opportunity to network, to collaborate with someone, or knock an idea around the room and hopefully this will give those people that opportunity to elevate their experience,” he said.
