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Business View Magazine
square feet and over, per year. China is in second
place with 6,000 shows in 107 Chinese venues and
Germany is in third place with an annual total of about
3,500 shows.
The IAEE, with a full-time, professional staff of 22, has
been based in Dallas, Texas for the last 25 years, af-
ter the organization moved from its home in Ohio. The
organization’s Strategic Plan has two Pillars: Advoca-
cy and Education. Regarding Pillar One, DuBois says
that advocacy is “promoting the value of face-to-face
exhibitions and events as the primary marketing me-
dium for business development and growth.” Regard-
ing Pillar Two, he says it’s about “providing timely and
relevant education to our members to help them be
more successful. We do it through webinars; we do it
through 65 to 80 workshops at our annual Expo! Expo!
meeting every December; we do it through all of our
content, and through our great website. We have our
CEM (Certified in Exhibition Management) program
in 28 countries. It is the highest designation one can
achieve in our industry.”
Nicole Bowman is the IAEE’s Vice President of Market-
ing and Communications, responsible for keeping its
far-flung membership informed. “A lot of the commu-
nications that we do is on the chapter level,” she ex-
plains. “We have 12 chapters around the world. It’s a
multi-channel mix: emails, newsletters, social media.
We rely on our chapters to communicate our values
and initiatives and things we have going on at a local
level.” In China, she reports that they even have We-
Chat and Weibo accounts - two Chinese platforms - so
that they can better reach out to 800 individuals there
who are IAEE-certified in exhibition management, but
are not yet IAEE members.
DuBois adds that while most of the IAEE’s literature
