Creating consistent quality from year to year
The American Dental Association (ADA) faced a puzzling problem: the ADA’s Annual Scientific Session and Marketplace Exhibition, which attracts up to 50,000 attendees and visitors annually, is held in a different host city every year. The quality and consistency of the event staffing varied wildly from city to city. And in each city, ADA’s management had to train a new team of temporary event staffers on the specifics of the annual meeting. ADA’s management wanted not only consistency, but quality they could count on from one city to the next — and they wanted to get out of the repeat training loop.
“So we hired ProShow about five years ago,” says ADA Associate Executive Director Alison Owings-Cinelli. “ProShow understands the complexity of staging a big meeting like ours. We don’t have to train them every year. They understand us inside and out, and it sure makes life a lot easier.”
Alison says that the ADA Annual Session has a volunteer staff of 500 to 600 people, as well as temporary event staffers. ProShow trains the event staffers, making sure that everyone is briefed on the specifics of the event as well as in the principles of ProShow’s Industrial Strength Client Service. “Our members see the temporary staffers as part of the American Dental Association,” notes Alison. “ProShow makes sure that everyone staffing the show is a positive reflection on us.”
Since hiring ProShow, Alison says that the show has run more smoothly, and the ADA staff has experienced fewer problems. She thinks this is because of ProShow’s expertise in planning, and because the ProShow managers are proactive in identifying issues before they become problems. “If you don’t have good temporary staff in place, It becomes a terrible experience for us on-site,” says Alison. “No matter which city we’re in, ProShow always manages to get the cream of the crop in event staffers. It’s had a positive impact on our work, and our members definitely perceive that the Annual Session is a well-run meeting.”
From San Francisco to Orlando to Philadelphia, the quality and consistency has been at a consistently high level, according to Alison. She comments, “ProShow has become part of our operational team. They are a strong and reliable component that is key to the success of our whole meeting.”