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The Union of International Associations (UIA) launches its 2018 Survey on the meetings of international associations
By Clara Fernández López, External Relations Manager of the Union of International Associations and Member of the Executive Board of the International Youth Library Foundation
More than 25,000 organizations listed in UIA’s Yearbook of International Organizations and known to have any kind of international meeting or event activity are invited to participate in UIA’s seventh edition of theSurvey on International Meeting Issues to uncover how they organize their meetings and conferences.For this purpose, the association is asked to invest 10 minutes and to complete a Survey with 21 questions with multiple choice answers. While only the association’s individual login will allow it to enter the Survey site and to respond to the questions, no personal and no associations’ details will be processed or published in the final Survey Report. The Report will be released in November 2018 and be freely available to the public on the UIA’s website.
The UIA conducts the Survey every three years, and it is the largest survey looking into the meetings behaviour of all the diverse types of international associations representing civic, charitable, commercial, or industrial interests around the world. By conducting the Survey on a regular basis, those involved in the process of organizing international meetings can get a sense of changes in needs, habits and challenges over the years as well as the challenges of the current environment.
The comprehensive Report will describe, in text, graphics and tables, how associations organize and manage their event activities, including details of the decision-making process, preferred time of year, periodicity of the meeting, sources of income to cover the cost, number of delegates and length of the event, preferred locations and destinations, interactivity with Convention and Visitors Bureaus, trade shows and the meetings industry.
The very first version of the Survey was conducted over 30 years ago in 1985 when everything was on paper. Conducting the Survey online has made the analysis a lot easier. Postal invitations are nevertheless still sent to 15,000 organizations alongside 25,000 emails. Reaching so many international associations is a major challenge. For the 2018 Survey the UIA is being supported by its sponsors Seoul Tourism Organization, the Monaco Convention Bureau and the Singapore Tourism Board.
The most recent edition of the Survey was held in 2015. It revealed that 93% of respondents hold at least one major international meeting every three years. Another revelation was that associations prefer the months of September and October for their events above all others.
The Survey showed that only 12% of international associations regularly attend trade shows on travel and meetings, while another 20% attend such shows occasionally. And only 7.3% are familiar with, and have profited from, “hosted buyer” programmes. Most astonishing was that 51% of international associations worldwide are not familiar with the services offered by a Convention Bureau and only 14% used the services of a Convention Bureau between 2011 and 2015.
The 2015 Survey also revealed that as many as 21% of international associations organize their events without any outside professional help.
The forthcoming Survey 2018 will disclose how the interaction between the meetings industry and international associations has developed since 2015, and will show the fields where associations and industry still can aim for improvement in order to make association congresses, meetings, conferences, etc. a success for the association, for the delegates and consequently for the destination.
The UIA was founded in 1907 in Brussels with the aim of researching the life of international associations, regardless of location or field of activities. Today the UIA is the world's oldest, largest, and most comprehensive source of information on global civil society. The UIA collects, hosts, and provides up-to-date, reliable information on global civil society and maintains the most comprehensive source of information on international associations, their activities and concerns, and their meetings activities.
The UIA also promotes the work of international associations by organizing surveys such as this one, and educational activities such as the – very popular – Round Tables.
The UIA publishes the Yearbook of International Organizations which includes detailed information on over 37,500 active and approximately 38,000 dormant international organizations from 300 countries and territories. Approximately 1,200 new organizations are added each year.
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