As you know, Lisa, Rhode Islanders pack an overnight bag if they have to drive more than 2 towns away... (my mom and dad and nearly all of my extended family are Rhode islanders
)... so it's always been tough to plan an event in the Ocean State.
To your original question re: what are the conferences.
Well, that definition is changing a bit. Traditionally, our conferences have been one or two day, full-blown trade shows and conferences with keynote speakers, breakout sessions, lots of networking and celenration and a large exhibt hall area. Importantly, the exhibit hall and all the speakers are 100% focused on the work of school parent-teacher group leaders. Example: eve though nearly all of our attendees are moms, there are no sessions on the best minivan or how to teach your child to read or get your child into college; it's all parent group leader stuff specifically. They're great, if I do say so myself. We ask for feedback reports at every event and they come back with really high ratings, which is gratifying.
What's changing? Well, when our new site goes up in two weeks, you'll see a category called "events" rather than just conferences. We're still going to hold several of our traditional full-on conferences. Likely 4 cities for those this coming year. But we're also going to host several new-type events in an effort to serve even more people in person.
We're going to host one event that is a big 'ol huge exhibits-only event. Kind of a shopping mall for parent group leaders with some entertainment and celebration thrown in.
Added to that, we're going to host several (as yet unnamed) "mini-conferences" or the like, where we bring our content out to folks, probably for half a day or so and without the exhibit hall. We're confident that this mini-model will allow us to get around and see far more people over the course of the next few years. This model is also more flexible date-wise, allowing us to get out of the just-spring calendar.
A lot more to come. No matter what we do, you can trust that all of our events will continue a hard-earned tradition of celebrating your work and helping you do that work even more effectively.
Tim