COVID-19 has disrupted many things, including our sense of time. While the period of quarantining might seem interminable, our current reality and attempts to plan for the future have never been more fluid. The business events landscape used to take months and months to change. With the pandemic, it changed overnight and continues to evolve, but even “evolve” doesn’t do our current environment justice because it implies a gradual rather than rapid shift.
When PCMA (Professional Convention Management Association) Convene sent out its first COVID-19 survey on the last day of March and closed it after several days to analyse the results, it realised there was a need to frequently check in with the business events community. Here are the results of the first biweekly survey of 1,500-plus professionals during the week of April 20th, which can help explain in as nearly real time as possible how the coronavirus is changing the work of business event designers and suppliers, and get a sense of what a post-COVID-19 – or more precisely in the absence of a vaccine or effective treatment, what a “living with COVID-19” – business events landscape could look like.
COVID-19 Recovery Dashboard (April 20th – 23rd): Survey and Analysis (PCMA website)
How is COVID-19 Changing the Business Events Industry? (PCMA survey)
