3 Big Takeaways from MPI’s Toronto Education Conference

The setting was spectacular for this year’s Toronto Education Conference. And it’s fitting given that the theme was “Learning with a View”.  The conference was filled with informative, engaging, and interactive breakout sessions where attendees could select their sessions based on their personal and professional interests.

As a sponsor, and provider of the event app we had the opportunity to experience the event first hand and there were certainly a lot of great learnings to be had, below are three that stood out.

1. Touch the Rock

In his incredible opening Keynote, wilderness writer Bruce Kirkby took us through his wild journeys and accomplishments.Bruce brought Learning with a View to life for attendees, teaching us to “touch the rock” meaning that you will inevitably turn away from those big obstacles in your life unless you actually go up and face them head on and, ‘touch the rock.’ Bruce gave us meaningful stories and lessons for professional and personal development.

2. The Future of Live Events is Changing

Dan Berger, CEO of Socialtables, followed the day and gave us a radical view of the future of events – is the Annual Meeting endangered? The core competencies of the Annual Meeting are education, association updates, and business deals – all of this can be done online, so what does this mean for our industry? Dan suggests it will become a reunion focused on culture and relationship building.

3. Become Part of the Story

Closing out the event, motivational speaker Tony Chapman showed us the power of story selling. Nope, not Telling – Selling – which means we need to shift the conversation from what our companies, products, services, and selves can do to how we can enable the customer’s life and livelihood so that we become part of the customer’s story.

Everyone’s a Winner

While everyone wins when you get to leave after hearing such amazing sessions, it was great to see the EventMobi app in action, particularly for gamification. And there was a special initiative designed to highlight the major sponsor Ottawa Tourism and the Shaw Centre. Using trivia questions and eye-catching photography for the City of Ottawa, attendees could gain even more points for the in-app game, TEC Play, by learning about all that Ottawa has to offer and answering the trivia questions correctly in the app. Everyone had a blast networking, learning about Ottawa, and winning some awesome prizes!

A big shout out to the team at MPI for putting on such a great show, looking forward to working with you again next year!