RTDNA’s Bold Event Changes and Data to Drive Sponsorship (S2:E4)

Tara Puckey, RTDNA: I think RTDNA is really, really, really good at change. We have done something different every year. So for example, this year, moving into 2025, we’ve eliminated our Expo Floor.

Carolyn Shomali, Host: All right, we’re going to have some fun with this episode today. Do you have a pit in your stomach just thinking about eliminating your conference’s Expo Hall or you may be feeling a little curious, even energized by the idea? Either way, this is an episode you need to hear because if events are differentiators for associations, we need to think and rethink our approach on an ongoing basis, especially when economic and geopolitical uncertainty can impact their outcomes. Welcome to the Association RevUP Podcast presented by the Professionals for Association Revenue. It’s where we explore revenue opportunities through real-world experiments happening inside associations right now.

I’m Carolyn Shomali.I’m the Director of Content for PAR. Today, I’m joined by Tara Puckey, current Executive Director of Rtdna, the Radio Television Digital News Association. Tara is also a 2025 ASAE Fellow, and she’ll lead Rtdna as CEO beginning in January, 2026. Over the next few minutes, we’ll hear about some bold decisions from Tara’s team, and how these choices are creating more meaningful event engagement for their members and their sponsors.

Then we’ll hear from Bear Analytics’ Joe Colangelo and Association event expert Vinnu Deshetty with data-backed tips on how to make your event sponsorship experience even better. Hopefully, that pit in your stomach is gone, and you’re bursting with excitement.

Let’s go ahead and get started.

Shomali: For 20 years, from 2000 to 2020, RTDNA partnered with other journalism organizations for their annual conference. First, as part of the National Association of Broadcasters, a mega conference held in Las Vegas, and later with the Society of Professional Journalists.

Puckey: Those conferences gave us the opportunity to A, reach some new audiences, and B, take advantage of some of the things that are available to you from an education and conference planning standpoint when you have a larger conference. It also led itself to some challenges that partnerships just have, not because of any specific situation, but anytime you have two organizations coming together, there are things that are important to each of them and figuring out how to mesh those and make sure that everybody keeps a hold of the things that are critical for their membership. That’s always a challenge.

Shomali: After years of partnerships and big events, COVID created a hard pause for RTDNA. And with that pause came a rare opportunity to rethink what their members actually wanted from events.

Pucker: I think we emerged from it recognizing a couple of things. One, that we wanted to make sure we were producing an annual conference that allowed our members to get exactly the things that they need and want. And so we really wanted to take some of that ownership back and make sure that we were 100% of the decisions we made were in service to our members. The second piece of that was there are so many different journals and conferences and they all look very different. And the one thing we felt was missing, I guess, across the board was a conference that was super intentional about creating meaningful connections.

Shomali: With those two realities in mind, Rtdna had some important decisions to make and they landed on two big ones that would require intentional change.

Puckey: So we made the decision to A, go out on our own, and then B, to shrink the size of the conference.

Shomali: Yes, shrink the size of the conference.>Tara recognizes that this approach is not a common one in the association community, and she offers this quick acknowledgement about the role Rtdna’s annual event plays in their overall revenue health.

Puckey: Conference for us was never one of the larger revenue drivers for our association.So, we have the luxury of being able to play with it a bit more than some associations who are significantly revenue dependent on what that looks like for them.

Shomali: But isn’t that kind of the point? An overreliance on event revenue negatively impacted the revenue health of so many of our associations in 2020. So reimagining your own association’s event as part of a broader, more balanced association portfolio is a wise strategy.

Still, when Rtdna decided to take ownership of their event and shrink it down to about 300 attendees, they were met with some hesitation, both from members and from the broader association community.

Pucker: I think the association community broadly and members too, by extension of no matter what your association is, define your event’s success by the number of people that attend. That has been a metric we have all lauded and coalesced around for as long as I can remember. So we really were fighting an uphill battle to make sure that we didn’t define our success that way. And we recognize there’s far more opportunities to have a successful conference without that metric.

Shomali: So now they measure things like net promoter score, and they ask people how they feel when they leave the event, or if they’d recommend it to a colleague. Following the changes that took place in 2021, Tara says there was some member hesitation to the change. But as a result, it actually helped the Rtdna team keep the event’s purpose of connection at the forefront of every decision.

Puckey: We had to back up what we said we were going to do, meaning people had to leave with those connections, or otherwise they still didn’t understand what we were trying to do. It meant reducing the number of sessions. It meant changing the way the sessions were presented. So we struck off all panels, everything is collaborative. There’s peer-to-peer sharing in all of our sessions. And so we really wanted to be intentional about the backbone of our education was rooted in allowing people to make meaningful connections.

Shomali: Eliminating panel discussions has allowed Rtdna to incorporate voices from outside the journalism space. From improv comedians who give tips for leading a newsroom and having difficult conversations to sports coaches who touch on attributes of high-performing teams.

Puckey: We’ve tried really hard to consciously select speakers who are not journalists. I think sometimes every industry, associations included, get really caught up in their own echo chamber. And so it’s great to listen to what other people in other newsrooms are doing. But I do think there are really valuable lessons to be learned from folks in entirely different industries.

Shomali: Ok let’s talk about the big one. No more Expo Floor. This is not an endorsement for your association to do the same. But it’s an invitation to think outside the normal constructs of what association events typically look like. Here’s Tara on why they made the change.

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Puckey: Again, if we’re going to put our time, money, effort, energy behind something that is geared to make meaningful connections, people popping through an expo hall and picking up the free stuff on your table, probably not the best way to do it. So we’ve shifted all of our sales opportunities to experiences.

Shomali: One such partnership opportunity is through the sponsorship of a self-care hour. Journalists today face a lot of pressure. Public discourse about their jobs, political polarization, exposure to traumatic events. The impact of AI on job security. These are all things that Rtdna event attendees encounter. And sponsors can now partner with them to address it.

Puckey: Those are the types of opportunities where having somebody engage in conversation when they’re doing things that enrich their life broadly, even more so than just a journalist. We think sponsors are going to get more value and they’re going to make more meaningful connections.

Shomali: This podcast is all about showcasing real association ideas and business strategies to advance their missions. And Rtdna has made some difficult and strategic decisions around their event in order to do just that. You don’t need to eliminate your Expo Hall or completely redesign your event. But I hope Tara’s approach has inspired you to make bold decisions that serve your mission, whether it’s in the form of your events or something else all together. She does leave us with these two final ideas that I think are really easy to consider. First, give attendees the space and the time to connect. And second, rethink traditional panels in favor of more interactive learning.

Puckey: How much better is it to have attendees in a room, and they’re not just learning from two or three people at the front, but they’re learning from 60 people in the room. And if you’re able to be the facilitator of those connections, it will likely come back to you in some beneficial way.

Shomali: In just a minute, we’ll look closer at what exhibitors and event sponsors are looking for in their event experiences. But first, a quick reminder that the insights you’re about to hear came from our very own event, the RevUP Summit. Our amazing on-site event production team, VPC Inc, recorded the audio of every session so we could share it with a broader audience in this podcast format. Simply put, they are the best. And if you have any questions about how they can bring your event to life, reach out to me directly. All right. Let’s shift focus from attendees to sponsors. Because no matter what size your event is, or whether you have an expo floor or not, your ability to connect sponsors with the right audience is what drives real value. And that’s where data comes in, according to Joe Colangelo of Bear Analytics.

Joe Colangelo, Bear Analytics: One of the things that we’ve come to appreciate over the last three, four years in this post-pandemic era when you’re talking about sponsorships and really trying to drive and deliver on that ROI, is folks are intimately, intimately knowledgeable about the eye. When you’re having these conversations, they want to know how much it costs, they want to tell you what their budgets are, so on and so forth. And what they’re getting more aggressive about in terms of prospects and clients is help me quantify and understand what the R is. And so some of that is actually quantified around the amount of experience that’s being consumed, so how many people are in this room as an example. We also want to take a look at what the quantification around the composition of the room is. So when it comes to demographics, usually at the person level, if it’s at the company level, we’re calling it firmographics. >We want to understand where folks sit in their industry, maybe within the hierarchy of their company, of course, within the purchasing authority. We want to make sure we got more of the right people in the room because it’s great to have a full room, but if it doesn’t match our ICP, our ideal customer profile, that’s probably not a sponsorship we’re going to return to.

Shomali: Sponsors are no longer satisfied solely by visibility. They want precision. They want to know who will be in the room. Where do they work? Are they decision makers? Do they align with their ideal customer profile? That means that success isn’t just about attendeet size. It’s about attendee composition. Vinnu Deshetty has decades of experience in the Association event space and encourages organizers to dig deeper by using behavioral and interest data to connect the right attendees with the right sponsors.

Vinnu Deshetty: So one thing I’ve been exploring a lot with organizations is looking at the why. What drives a member to stay within an organization? What other interests do they have? What topics are they interested in? And being able to match that back up to the sponsor interest. So for example, if you get a track about all about, it’s all about electric vehicles. The whole conference is climate change, but one track is electric vehicles. Well, then I know those people that came to that session are interested in electric vehicles. So who am I going to go back to as far as partners and say, guess what? I had 5,000 people in this session about electric vehicles. These are your people. This is where you should be. Not only should you be at this conference, but you should be, this is your subsegment that’s of your interest.

Shomali: Too often organizations treat event data and membership data as completely separate. Vinnu says that’s a mistake.

Deshetty: We tend to look at event data very much in silos, and it sits over here in this little bucket here. And then you got your membership data that sits over on this side, and they really don’t connect. So when we talk to sponsors or partners about, you know, we want you to come in for an event with sponsorship, we talk event data, and we forget about the value that we have over on the membership side, and other parts of the organization too. So it’s really important not only to look at the data, the behavior data that you’re getting within your event data base, but also within the membership and connecting the two. Because it’s great to be able to say, you got 2,000 butts in seats, but it’s even better to say that those 2,000 butts in seats belong to whatever demographics or firmographics that’s of interest to your sponsors.

Shomali: So whether you’re reimagining your entire conference or just testing one new sponsorship idea, today’s episode reminds us of a few things. Sometimes smaller can be smarter. Connection is the goal, and data is so important if you use it well. My thanks to Tara Puckey, Joe Colangelo, and Vinnu Deshetty for sharing their bold ideas and practical insights.

And remember, you don’t have to completely rework your event to make it more valuable. You just have to design it with intention.

Until next time, I’m Carolyn Shomali, and this is the Association RevUP Podcast.