Thursday, September 30, 2010

VOTE NOW FOR OUR 2012 CONFERENCE SITE

Every year as fall approaches, the VAM staff begins the process of determining where our next conference is going to be. Making this decision is a balancing act, as we need to travel around the state, make sure different museums and communities get the chance to serve as local hosts, and keep to a very tight budget and a very specific need for space. In the past couple of years, many members have asked us how we choose a community or a hotel, and so we decided to show you "behind the scenes" of our decision process.

There are several things we need to keep in mind as we look at hotels:
  • Do they have enough meeting space to provide our participants with ample classrooms and our exhibitors with a large enough exhibit hall?
  • Is the hotel able to provide us with a room rate for our participants that fits into their tight budgets, and conference food prices that fit within VAM's tight budget?
  • What does the area around the hotel look like in terms of museums--how far is it to area museums, and is there a good variety of museums for our participants to see?

When VAM was "younger," we were small enough to be able to spread our meetings across many of the communities in Virginia--Fredericksburg, Lynchburg, Staunton, Charlottesville, even Alexandria. As we have grown into the largest state association in the country, our choices for hotel and location have shrunk. There are now only eight cities in the state that have hotels with appropriate meeting space in which to hold our meeting--Richmond, Roanoke, Hot Springs, Reston, Crystal City, Williamsburg, Portsmouth and, with a brand new hotel, Newport News.

With a goal of going to Roanoke in 2013, 2012 gave us the opportunity to look into Northern Virginia for a conference site--we haven't been to this part of the state since 2004. At the same time, the new hotel in Newport News, as well as the museums in Newport News, offered us a wonderful chance to try that site.

Let us know what you think. Because the 2011 conference is in Portsmouth, we do not want our members in other parts of the state to feel slighted by returning to the Tidewater two years in a row, and we also want to do what is best for VAM and for our members.

We'd love to have your opinion on 2012 VOTE NOW!

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