ISGE Congress Coordinator's Report
By: Alan Gordon, M.D.
The ISGE Board met in Montreal and made some decisions, which
will affect the management of future ISGE Congresses and Regional Meetings and the involvement of the organizers.
Hitherto meetings have been organized by local groups who were usually a national Society or a University. The
local group had to find their own sponsorship, approach industry with cap in hand for money to set up the meeting
and usually did not know if they would make a profit or loss until very close to the conference date or, occasionally,
until part way through the meeting. Any profits made were small and were shared with the ISGE who took no responsibility
for financial affairs.
Obviously this was not an ideal arrangement and all of us who
have organized meetings have suffered from the anguish of not knowing if they were going to make a profit or have
a financial disaster. The Society is still relatively small and, up until now, has not been capable of guaranteeing
financial backing.
We have now entered into partnership with a core professional
conference organizer, Events International Meeting Planners (EIMP), who are based in Montreal and have been responsible
for organizing the last two very successful FIGO meetings in Montreal and Copenhagen and will be organizing next
year's meeting in Washington. The contract is for five years with performance reviews at one and three years. Initially
75% of the financial risk will be taken by EIMP and 25% by the Society. The profit will be split 50:50 at first
but, as our contribution to risk rises over the years, so will our share of the profit. This can only bring in
more revenue to the Society and enable us to assist local organizers to a greater extent. The co-ordination of
future meetings will be in the hands of a new Conference Committee which consists of the Congress Co-ordinators
(Professor John Newton and myself), the Chairman of the Scientific Committee (Professor Michelle Nizolle), the
Members of the Executive Board and a representative of EIMP (Andre Martel). The committee will assist the local
committees on the management of their meetings both from the logistic and scientific points of view and capital
for all aspects of the meetings will be provided by us. It is still possible, of course, for organizers to make
use of local industrial contacts to provide more sponsorship. It is important to stress that, even though management
will be by a professional management company, the meetings will always be owned by the Society and we will have
full control of the scientific content. Both industry and the Society will benefit by the ability to forward plan
for three years instead of local organizers making annual agreements, which is the case at present.
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The plans for the next meetings in Cairo, Australia and Budapest will
not be affected although EIMP have offered to assist with promotion and sponsorship. The meetings from 2001 in
Chicago and Sao Paulo and those planned subsequently will be organized by EIMP using local professional conference
organizers for on the spot arrangements.
The result of this re-organization is that organizers of both Congresses
and Regional Meetings will not have to find "seed corn" money to kick-start their meetings, they will
have all the planning arrangements such as publicity, mailing, printing of brochures and programs, negotiating
with industry, etc. dealt with by EIMP. They will receive a share of the profits if the meeting is a success. They
will also continue to organize the scientific programs in association with the ISGE Scientific Committee. We believe
that this will make meetings easier to organize and they should be more profitable to all parties.
Another change in plans is that we are considering reverting to holding
Congresses in alternate years but having more Regional Meetings. The latter are focused on a specific topic. It
is possible that we may use the same topic and even the same faculty in more than one meeting a year.
Future plans are:
| 1999 |
Regional Meeting Cairo
September 9-10 |
| 2000 |
Congress Gold Coast
April 16-19
Regional Meeting
Budapest
Aug 30-Sept 2 |
| 2001 |
Congress Chicago March
28-April 1
Regional Meeting
Sao Paulo September 7-8
Regional Meeting*
Goa November |
| 2002 |
Congress Berlin April
or May
Regional Meeting
Bangkok November 12-15 |
| 2003 |
Regional Meeting To
be decided
*Provisional Arrangement |
Other applications under consideration are from Buenos Aires and California
but we need more possible sites for conferences to discuss at the next Board meeting in Cairo in September. We
hope that potential conference organizers will be encouraged to apply to run meetings with us as a result of these
new arrangements. Application forms and further details can be obtained from the Secretariat in Haarlem.
Alan Gordon
Congress Coordinator
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