User:Saskac/BlogEntry: 2007 May 08 14:10:15 EDT
From sasCommunity
The SAS Global Users Group Executive Board wants very much to make our annual meeting the premiere event for users worldwide. (The Executive Board is made up of past and future chairs of the event plus three SAS Institute executives). When we found out that 23% of attendees in Orlando came from countries other than the U.S., we invited any who were in Orlando on Sunday to a reception. We asked what we could do as conference officials to make the meeting more attractive to users from around the world.
The Number #1 reason these people attend SUGI and now SAS Global Forum, is that they want technical content! They feel that there is no technical content in conferences outside the U.S. (There was no mention of the local conferences held in individual countries that I understand contain technical content. Not sure if these attendees were not aware of those meetings or whether they were only talking about the big conferences, or whether they felt that even these conferences were not technical enough.) One user said "We want semi-colons; not success stories." (A t-shirt waiting to happen?)
Cost is an issue, but one lady from Sweden said that she was able to come to Orlando cheaper than she could have gone to the annual SAS Forum in Stockholm! European countries find it easier to come to the east coast of the U.S. or Canada; Asia-Pacific countries prefer the west coast. Not sure who will come to San Antonio in 2008.
At a later meeting of the Executive Board, the Global Marketing Council and some other representatives from SAS offices came and talked about the same issues. How can SAS Global Forum be truly global? We learned that some of the offices, particularly in Scandinavian countries, had made huge efforts to recruit their users to SAS Global Forum. Some were able to entice their users by setting up travel where all could travel together to the conference. This appealed to those who wanted a respite from speaking and listening to English voices.
We also agreed that it would be useful to invite some of the best paper award winners from the country meetings to present their papers at SAS Global Forum. This would incent users to win (and thus give good papers), but it would also be a way to draw interest to the meeting from other international visitors.
Ideas about other ways to make the SAS Global Forum appealing to users from around the world would be welcomed.
