 If you attended the event over the past couple of years, you likely experienced brain dates. That's where I started to learn about brain dates. But rather than have me tell you about brain dates today, we're talking with one of Canada's top meeting planners about brain dates and this emerging conference format. Stick around. Hey friends, it's Leanne. And brain dates was introduced to me as I attended the event in Ottawa in 2018. And of course, they continued on with brain dates in 2019 in Montreal. But I thought, who better to talk to about brain dates than one of our industry's meeting planners who has actually implemented this at their own conferences? So everyone, I would love to introduce Isabella Bakmonek with Dieticians of Canada. She's gonna share her brain date experience with us today. Welcome, Isabella. Hi, Leanne. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for doing this with us today, Isabella. But before we launch into brain dates, I was wondering if you could share a little bit about your role over at Dieticians of Canada. Sure, I joined Dieticians of Canada in May 2017. The person that had been doing the role retired after 17 years, which I took as a good sign that she liked it there. And so they were looking for someone to come in and continue with their annual conference and events, but also to bring in some fresh ideas and some new strategies to keep their events moving forward and keep their annual conference relevant and revenue producing as all associations need their conferences to be. Well, I learned about brain dates at the event in Ottawa in April 2018. It came across through email after I registered and I just thought it was a fantastic idea to be able to pre-book meetings with people or on topics that were of particular interest to me, because that's the hardest thing I find about going to events is finding the right people to speak to amongst the hundreds or thousands that are at the networking events or in the sessions with you. You never know who is the other association planner that might have a piece of information that could really help you. What a great point. You're right. There's so much talent just in our associations that it saves a lot of work having to look outside for those speakers. So Isabella, why did you decide that this was a good format for your audience? Well, from what I've learned of dietitians, they are all about staying on top of emerging research, skills, techniques. They wanna connect with one another and collaborate and share information. And so they were looking for better ways to connect with each other during those few times that they get the professional development dollars or time to actually get out of their offices or hospitals and get together. So Isabella, what was your first step in implementing brain dates? Well, the first thing I did was when I got back from the event, gave a debrief to my boss who's the senior leader of the conference and other events and programs that happened. And she was quite intrigued by it as well. And so then we decided to speak to one of our long-time exhibitors at conference and asked them if they thought this would be something that they would be interested in supporting. Once we had them on board, then we contacted E-1-80, which is the company that runs brain dates. And they assigned us a fantastic project manager. She walked us through implementation all the way to being on site with us for execution. The first thing we did was to get a group of internal champions to start off posting a few brain dates on the platform, just to get people started, to get them to see what types of things can go on there, also to get them to start booking brain dates and telling their friends about it and so on. And then we promoted it in our newsletters, websites, social media and so on. And then when we were on site, we actually had the lounge in a very central area with the concierge desk just outside the doors so that people, whenever they walked by, were sort of curious of, oh, what's this brain date lounge and what's happening here? And so our concierges were actually able to tell them about it. And a lot of people ended up signing up for brain dates on site. Isabella, what can you tell me about the results of your first year of using brain dates? Can you elaborate a little bit more on some of the successes of the program and potentially even some of the pain points? Sure, as an organization, our goal is to foster a vibrant community of members and BrainDate certainly helped us to do that at conference. We got a lot of positive feedback on our evaluations. We even had some fantastic unsolicited blog posts from our members about describing their experience. And during our post conference report with our BrainDate project manager, she said that we had the highest number of connections for a first-time event of our size that they had ever seen. So that just is a testament to how dietitians just love to connect and love to talk to each other. And even then, we only actually engaged about 40% of the attendees, which is good for our first year, but we're shooting for next year, we're shooting for like 80% or something like that because we imagine the buzz from here on in is gonna be great. The hardest part, though, is getting people to grasp the concept of what BrainDate is before they get on site. So I think it's really important to build a webpage on your conference website that shows screenshots of what BrainDate is, maybe have a tutorial video actually showing somebody that they recognize either another member or someone from leadership from your organization actually going in and creating their profile and creating a BrainDate and everything just so that it really clicks to them before they get there what it actually is. That was the biggest hurdle for us. It's not a cheap tool, so I would recommend looking at reaching out to a sponsor or exhibitor who might be willing to help you with the costs of this tool because for associations like ours, that was key for us to be able to bring this to our attendees was to have some financial support from an exhibitor. What, yeah, those are all excellent points, but I love that your engagement was 40%. And if you don't mind me saying, I think that has a lot to do with how you as a meeting planner rolled it out to them as well. So kudos on an incredible engagement strategy. And the Dieticians of Canada Conference website is a public website. So you can pop over to that website at DCconference.ca and they even have a link there to BrainDates. So you can scroll down and take a look at what Isabella has set up to engage or to educate her members on what BrainDates are about. Isabella, is there any other advice you'd like to give to meeting planners as they look to BrainDates as being one of their conference formats? I would say that it's a great tool and you can adjust it to whatever your type of attendees need. Our attendees love to the group BrainDates more than the one-on-one BrainDates, but if you're a corporate organization or an organization that does sales, maybe the one-on-ones would be better for you, it is customizable in that way. The other thing is that it does take about two years to build it. Because as I said, the first year, you're really educating people, you get sort of some early adopters to jump on board, but it really is a two-year cycle to fully launch it. So you just need to be patient. Isabella, I can't thank you enough for your time today. I think it was really important that the meeting planning community here about a real life example of something that we learned at one of our conferences. So thank you so much for sharing your story. Folks, there's links to all the resources that we've mentioned here in the description for this video. I invite you to go over to dietitians.ca to see the work that Isabella is doing, Isabella and her membership are doing with dietitians across Canada. Check out Isabella's conference website at dcconference.ca. And BrainDates itself has its website over at braindate.com. There you can learn about the work that E180 is doing to create and deliver this platform to us all. And to learn more about the event, which is where we learned about this conference format, the event 2020 is taking place in Toronto in April. And you can learn more about that at www.the-event.ca. Thank you again to Isabella for sharing her story today. And we will see you next time. Bye for now. Bye.