President’s Message – Catherine MacNutt

Dear Members,

As CAEM moves into the New Year, our goal is to re-calibrate and focus our priorities. In a few short days, your CAEM Board of Directors will meet for a Strategic Planning session.  The plan is to do a facilitated, deep dive into our industry’s predominant issues, concerns and opportunities. From there, the session, led by RZultz will identify CAEM’s best direction forward.

While we are eager to explore new value propositions for CAEM’s membership, it’s good to reflect on the work accomplished in 2019. Redstone, our association management company took on the heavy lift of reworking our entire sponsorship experience. The resulting annual sponsorship program brings relevant and specific deliverables to our sponsors who have worked with us to align their priorities with ours. This program is so important because CAEM depends upon sponsor partnerships to ensure our growth and sustainability.

We have been busy updating our existing Signature Events and developing new ones. The newly-minted Power Education Day allowed CAEM members to learn new strategies and expand their industry knowledge. Feedback from the membership has been extremely favourable so we’re looking forward to having this become an annual part of CAEM’s event lineup. We are grateful to Beanfield Centre for hosting and sponsoring.

December gave us another chance to gather and we thank The International Centre for hosting and sponsoring the Holiday Lunch which has become the unofficial kick-off to the festive season for our industry. We hope you’re planning to attend the upcoming Awards of Excellence, where many of our members and our industry will be recognized. I look forward to networking with you in February and thank Metro Toronto Convention Centre for supporting, sponsoring and hosting.

We have re-established the Health & Safety Task Force which will help to address the on-site safety inspection process at trade and consumer exhibitions. The goal is to position CAEM as the industry expert and to gain new recognition of the existing Health and Safety Best Practice Guidelines for the Exposition Industry in Canada.  In addition, the Membership Task Force has been working on opening up fresh avenues for new membership opportunities, including mentorship and speaking at the grass roots level in Universities.

A big thank you goes out to all of our committees and volunteers for their diligence, engagement and hard work.  I am proud to be affiliated with each and every one of you.  Thank you for your membership.

Yours in CAEM,

Catherine