MACE! 2013: A Record-Breaking Year!

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If you attended MACE! we hope your experience lived up to the promises we made to you in the months leading up to the conference. Our promises to you were outstanding education for everyone, opportunities to network and connect with business partners both old and new, at an affordable price and at an accessible location. Let’s see if we lived up to our promises to you...drum roll, please.

Record-Breaking Attendance
 A record breaking 315 planners and suppliers participated in MACE! Our conference home this year was the Washington Marriott Wardman Park and we believe this new partnership had something to do with our successful attendance not only for its accessible location, but also the product and staff really lived up to our expectations to create a successful event!

Record-Breaking Networking Opportunities
Wow! The 6:30 Club was an amazing success! With over 250 attendees (our largest ever for a pre-MACE! reception) and artistic direction by Tina Bettina & Co a great time was had by all who attended. Prior to the reception, 70 suppliers hosted 55 buyers at the Flipped Marketplace. The Flipped Marketplace was also record setting as over 50% of the buyers were first-time attendees at the marketplace. Huge thanks to the Strategic Events Committee and the Flipped Marketplace Committee for making these two networking experiences such an amazing success!

Record-Breaking Sponsorship
We cannot have a successful MACE! without our committed and generous sponsors. In total we secured 31 sponsorships including cash, table-top, and in-kind sponsors. This is double what we’ve been able to secure in the past and as a result we exceeded our overall sponsorship goal. We look forward to partnering with our sponsors again to make next year’s MACE! an even greater success!

Ground-Breaking Education
While we have not calculated all of the evaluations yet to determine if we broke any content records, what we can say is that our education was certainly a ground-breaking MACE! experience. In total we hosted over 25 total hours of education content which included advance workshops, five separate tracks for concurrent breakouts, and a fife and drum rockin’ Colonial Williamsburg-style general session featuring a former White House staffer. The feedback we’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive with regard to the quality of the session topics chosen, expertise of the speakers, and effectiveness in delivering the content. We promised that we would make it possible for everyone to take advantage of the educational offerings by placing the Flipped Marketplace on the first day. We did this and as a result, everyone had the opportunity to participate in professional development.

Thank you to the entire MACE! Committee and all of the volunteers who worked tirelessly to produce such a successful and record-breaking event! Your dedication to PMPI and MACE! is unparalleled.