Unsplash photo by Austin Schmid

For 47 years, MPI and its members have been shaping, advancing and defining the meeting and event industry—imagine the stories they could tell! For “Storytellers,” 4-5:15 p.m. on June 17 at the 2019 MPI World Education Congress (WEC) in Toronto, we’re giving the stage to our community members who stopped planning meetings and started designing experiences. General session sponsored by Wynn Encore. Marc and Craig Kielburger presented by National Speakers Bureau.

A case can be made that the most effective learning happens when peers share their experiences with each other. That is the concept behind “Storytellers,” a dynamic general session at MPI’s 2019 World Education Congress (WEC) where a roster of innovators will relate real-life scenarios that helped them create extraordinary events with impact above and beyond what many could have thought possible.

Melissa Majors

“I’m trapped in an educator’s body, but I’m naturally wired as an innovator,” says Melissa Majors, who will set the tone for the session with a TED-style talk called “The Story of Us.”

Majors has pushed the boundaries of peer-to-peer learning not only during her 20-year career in the meeting industry, but stretching back into her Ohio childhood.

“I’m the youngest of nine kids and masterminded the art of doing the opposite of what my older siblings did to land them in trouble,” she says. “I gained a tremendous amount of wisdom without earning it myself. They paid the consequences—I learned the lessons. Learning from others’ successes and failures has served me well over the course of my career.”

Majors, who launched her own firm, Melissa Majors Consulting, earlier this year, got her start in the financial services industry where she pioneered a digital education learning program for Nationwide Insurance. After moving to Dallas-based HD Vest Financial Services, she quickly fell in love with a new responsibility: event planning.

“It was then that I really learned the value of peer-to-peer learning,” she says. “We had a strong constituency of members who had built successful practices by learning lessons from their peers. So we involved members in workshops and were able to genuinely enable people. I found that the lessons you can learn from those who have walked in your shoes are better than anything else.”

After a stint with the tech firm Ellucian where she designed their global education program, Majors joined MPI as director of global education. Although she left the organization earlier this year to form her consultancy, MPI remains a major client.

Majors drew on her belief in the power of shared experiences among peers when organizing the Storytellers general session, which is emphasizing the actual situations planners have faced.

“At live events, there is much that can be learned in the classrooms, but there is even more to be learned in the hallways,” she says. “The fact is difficult to admit, given that I’m a professional educator, but the truth is, the insights I need reside in the heads of others who have tackled similar challenges. Unfortunately, this goldmine of actionable insights is rarely shared with the ‘masses’ given the ‘big stage’ being reserved for hired speakers, VIPs and entertainers.”

Along with stories from the speakers, a mic will be passed among the audience for planners to relate their own experiences. Majors hopes the impact will be lasting.

“I hope that planners become inspired by the experiences of people just like them,” she says. “Inspired to stop planning meetings and start designing experiences. I hope they find the courage to tell their own stories for the purpose of enabling each other’s greatness. Last, but not least, I hope they learn to deliver unforgettable stories.”

Marie-France Watson, Tim Whalen, Ryan Young

When Marie-France Watson, Tim Whalen and Ryan Young, leaders of the Montréal/Québec, Toronto and Ottawa MPI chapters, pooled their resources and ingenuity to launch an annual gathering of the three chapters called the EVENT, extraordinary experiences for attendees and sponsors alike were the result. The three Canadians will tell how it all came about in “The Conqueror - Collaboration, Cultivation, Elevation: The Story of the EVENT.”

Watson, Whalen and Young not only represent different metro regions in Canada, but different sides of the industry as well. Watson is manager of academic and international conferences for Concordia University in Montreal, where she leads a team of nine in coordinating 1,500 meetings and events each year. Whalen, executive meeting manager for the Fallsview Casino Resort in Niagara Falls, Ontario, has come up through many levels in the resort world, starting as a busser at the age of 14. Young, director of sales for Ottawa’s Brookstreet Hotel, says he fell into the hospitality industry by accident after preparing for a career in finance.

The three leaders all saw the need for a regional event that would serve a different purpose than an international or local chapter meeting.

“I had attended WEC and our chapter meetings many times, but I felt there was a gap that needed to be filled,” Whalen says. “I felt we needed networking opportunities that went beyond the local level, but that didn’t involve the whole world.” 

For Watson, collaboration on a regional event with the Toronto and Ottawa chapters was a goal she had when taking on the presidency of the Montréal/Québec Chapter.

“I saw a lot of strength in collaborating with the other chapters and combining our resources for better education and better quality,” she says. “I feel we have all benefitted. We know we have members who live in Montreal who choose to be members of the Toronto chapter because that’s where their markets are. We were listening to what our members need. They wanted to expand their network and have a Canadian voice as well.”

While not the first MPI chapter leaders to collaborate on a regional meeting, their shared vision for the EVENT created something above and beyond most such events, one where immersive experiences replaced many traditional conference elements. Sponsors of the event were encouraged to unleash their creativity—instead of banners and logos they created entire environments evoking the grandeur of the Canadian Rockies and other destinations. Breakout spaces featured everything from Edmonton’s custom-built escape room to Red Deer’s hockey rink and Caesars Windsor’s speakeasy.

“We wanted to make it as creative as possible and push the limits,” Watson says. “We wanted to get rid of the fourth wall and make it a disruptive event with no trade shows, no talking heads. We even pushed the envelope with the speakers, including a scavenger hunt as part of the presentation. Nothing was cookie-cutter.”

Encouraging the sponsors and supplier partners to get creative with the room setups turned out to have multiple benefits, according to Young.

“Getting the sponsors engaged in the conference experience by designing various breakout rooms at their own expense proved to be a great way to have an interesting conference without spending a lot of money,” he says. “We wanted to show planners how they can offer something different while saving money at the same time.”

Janet Traphagen

Janet Traphagen will draw on her nearly 30 years of planning experience in presenting “The Veteran: The Power of Experience.” Like so many seasoned meeting and incentive professionals, Traphagen “stumbled” into her career even before it was fully recognized as a profession.

“I started in 1990 on the client side,” recalls Traphagen, president of Creative Group, a global meetings and incentives firm. “I was in the sales and marking department at Cardinal Health when I was asked to lend support for a huge sales incentive.”

It proved to be a perfect fit for Traphagen, who describes herself as a detail-oriented extrovert with no inhibitions about diving into a project, reaching out to external partners and traveling anywhere. In subsequent years, she married a man from Chicago with three sons, moved there to join them and then shifted to the third-party side in executing meeting and incentive programs.

“As I look at my journey, I’m glad I had the experience through the client’s lens first,” she says. “It gave me empathy for the pressure they face with programs that are highly visible and a big area of spend. Most of these programs get the attention of the C-level, so there’s tremendous pressure to be on budget and stay creative. It’s also a very emotional process.”

Traphagen joined Creative Group in 2008, starting on the sales side and becoming president in 2015. Along the way, she worked with team members to develop a human-centric design methodology called i|xperience®, which emphasizes “I” in six ways—intrigue, influence, impression, interruption, immersion and inspiration.  The “I” in i|xperience stands for individual.

“Even if you have 200 people at the same event, they will experience it as individuals,” Traphagen says. “So we make sure all the elements of the methodology are present. We need to understand the client’s overall objective—what behavior are they targeting, what will they want to achieve? And then we create a thematic that ties to that objective.”

As an example, Creative Group developed a “blended” theme for a client who had just acquired another company and was in the process of merging two sales teams of different ages and experiences levels.

“We needed to bring them together and blend their talent and best practices so they would walk away more enriched,” Traphagen says. “We took them to Napa where they blended their own bottles of wine, made their own label and then had a new launch party for their new blended wine. Every single experience was informed by the theme and the strategies were not isolated from each other.”

According to Traphagen, the biggest trend shaping today’s meeting and incentive industry is that much of it is now driven by marketing rather than sales or human resources departments. An objective of her presentation is to show why understanding this shift is important.

“It means stepping up the creativity even more, which starts by understanding the company and their brand,” she says. “It’s why the i|xperience design model really resonates with marketing buyers.”

Marc & Craig Kielburger

Humanitarians, activists and social entrepreneurs, Canadian brothers Craig and Marc Kielburger, who will present “From Event to Movement: The Power of WE,” have a remarkable journey to relate. Over 20 years ago, the Kielburgers set out on a bold mission: to work with developing communities to free children and their families from poverty and exploitation.

“We wanted to make caring cool and changing the world possible for young people,” Marc says.

This philosophy is behind their numerous humanitarian organizations, including WE Charity, which provides a holistic development model called WE Villages that has helped to lift more than 1 million people out of poverty in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In the U.S., Canada and UK, WE Schools and WE Day provide comprehensive service-learning programs to 10,000 schools. Through their ME to WE organization, the Kielburgers also created an innovative social enterprise that provides products that enable people to change the world with their everyday consumer choices.

“Over the years, we’ve discovered that it’s far more important to reach as many people as possible—especially youth—and empower them with the knowledge that it’s not up to anyone else, it’s up to them to make a difference,” Craig says. “If you give kids the inspiration and tools to change the world, it will change their own lives in the process.”

As the brothers have matured, their endeavors have taken on more personal significance, according to Marc.

“I want to leave the world better and now I have the added incentive of wanting to do that for my two little girls,” he says. “I want their opportunities and legacy to be built on the knowledge that the world is heading in a positive direction.”

Their work has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show, 60 Minutes and the BBC, and both have authored numerous New York Times-bestselling books. Among their many rewards and accolades, the Kielburgers were named Canada’s “Most Admired CEOs” in the public sector in 2015.

Along the way, the Kielburgers also mastered the art of event planning, growing a single WE Day event into an annual series that fills 19 stadiums across the U.S., Canada, the UK and the Caribbean, where tickets aren’t sold, they’re earned. During WEC, the brothers will explain how they accomplished this, along with their vision and unique approach to global engagement and empowerment.