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“I feel very good about the progress we’ve made” in terms of PCMA’s overall membership and engaged community, said Leonard Hoops of his year as Chair of the PCMA Board of Directors and Trustees, “We’ve moved the needle forward.” (Whatever Media Group)
When Convene spoke with Leonard Hoops last year as he was preparing to take on the role of chair for the 2024 PCMA Board of Directors and Trustees, he talked about his extensive involvement with PCMA over the years. The president and CEO of Visit Indy, Hoops has been an active member in both PCMA’s Northern California and Greater Midwest chapters, served as the board’s liaison to the Mexico, Southwest & Pacific, Northern California, Greater Midwest, and New York Area chapters, and served on PCMA’s Board of Directors and Trustees for a combined six years, among other high-level voluntary roles within the organization. On a more recent call with Convene reflecting on his time as board chair, he summed it up this way: “I’ve been doing PCMA things for almost all of my 30 years in the industry.”
Hoops describes his 2024 term as “rewarding,” particularly because his role as chair has given him the opportunity to engage with PCMA’s global community. “The chair role is like no other,” he said. “Even when you’re on the executive committee, or you’ve been on the board a combined six years, you still generally don’t get quite outside the bubble of being on the board.” But the mandate as board chair “is clear,” he said: “You do as many things as possible.”
During the past year, Hoops has traveled the world attending a variety of industry events and connecting with PCMA members and partners. “Most of this,” he said, was at the request of Sherrif Karamat, PCMA’s president and CEO, “simply to have the chair with him to explore these partnerships we’re trying to build globally and make PCMA a truly global ambassador for our industry. Personally, I’ve definitely felt that.”
Now that his year as board chair is coming to an end, Hoops looked back on the board’s greatest milestones, what he’ll remember from his experiences over the past year, and what challenges and opportunities he thinks await the industry in 2025.
What are some highlights from your term as chair that stand out to you?
There are a lot of things. It was a very ambitious agenda. First and foremost, under Desirée [Knight, chair of PCMA’s 2023 Board of Directors and Trustees], we kicked off the exponential growth strategy. That’s a strategy that takes us all the way through the end of 2030. I make this analogy: Desirée got us to the 20-yard line, and my goal is to get us to the 30 — if you’re making a football analogy, since we’re in the middle of football season — and we need to get to the end zone on those goals by the end of 2030.
Every year, you need to make progress. You need another first down until you’ve stacked all those together until you get to your final goal. I feel very good about the progress we’ve made there. I think the numbers Sherrif has shared with me recently in terms of our overall membership [and] our overall engaged community — the broader term we use for anybody who, even if they’re not a member, is engaged with PCMA in some way, shape, or form, maybe they’ve taken training, or they’ve gone to an event, or they’ve subscribed to something, or they’ve been monetized in some way — we’ve moved the needle forward.
Then there are a lot of individual projects we’ve taken on. One of my big pushes has been the accessibility part of inclusion. When I think DEI, I often think about accessibility because of my own life experiences with my son, Cannon, who’s 19, in a wheelchair, and has cerebral palsy. [My focus on this] has led PCMA to engage outside resources to assess our accessibility [specifically at] PCMA events. They’ve already done it for edUcon. They’re going to be doing it for Convening Leaders in Houston. We’ve engaged a number of our folks in the industry who are passionate on this topic. Sherrif and I have had several calls with different communities about this topic and on moving the needle forward on that. This is an ongoing effort. I think we have taken the right first steps toward helping PCMA be a leader in accessibility in our ecosystem — this meetings and events world.
Spark AI — I think that that continues to build really strong momentum. …The number of users of Spark now is pretty significant. PCMA just went into a partnership with a company called Tempus to integrate Spark into Tempus products. Visit Indy is a member of PCMA and a user of Tempus products, so that’s great — the idea of having the Spark platform within my CRM, I think, is a great resource. We’ve made progress in that area, too.
Event organizers have faced a lot of challenges and disruptions in the last year — geopolitical conflicts, budgetary constraints, the rise of AI, the push to create more sustainable events, and much more. As we head into 2025, what do you see as a challenge they will face, and what do you see as an opportunity for growth?
I think we are seeing a pretty traditional technology adoption lifecycle with AI in our industry. The past couple of years, we’ve moved from the innovators into the early adopters and in 2025, I would expect the events ecosystem to be firmly in the early majority phase. There is a certain amount of fear and loathing that comes with something that is initially hard to understand but from my perspective, event strategists are starting to move past that. They are really starting to see AI tools as, at a minimum, a time saver, and for the more advanced users, a strategic advantage — albeit a temporary one, as there will probably be just a short gap between this stage of adoption and the next where AI will be well integrated into event strategy. Shameless plug time: PCMA’s Spark can help event strategists make that leap tomorrow if they haven’t yet already.
CVBs, venues, and industry partners also have faced their share of disruptions in the past year. In 2025, what do you predict will be a challenge for them, and what do you see as an opportunity?
I’m going to stick with AI, as I see business event partners as being behind their event strategist counterparts in this area — perhaps at the innovators stage and just moving into early adopters, a full stage behind. As a DMO CEO, I haven’t come across many DMOs who are doing anything cutting edge with it yet, but I see many applications — from creating bespoke itineraries on the destination website to digging through reams of CRM data to help convention teams target the best prospects to fill their event calendars. My own team has only recently been trained in some of the core platforms and we’re just now putting money into our 2025 budget to license our full staff for those tools. And since we’re probably a stage behind the event strategists, this may be a competitive advantage for just a bit longer for the DMOs and business event partners that lean in now.
Casey Gale is managing editor of Convene. This interview has been edited and condensed.