How Technology Killed the Live Conference

There are certain events in your life – good or bad – that no matter how long ago they happened, you remember exactly when and where you were. For the purpose of brevity in today’s missive, let’s focus on technology.

For example, I was at a friend’s house in 1984 when his wife was typing on her IBM 286 equipped with a Prometheus modem who explained she was “talking” to one of her colleagues at the large cosmetics company where they worked. Their “conversation” came across as simple block letter text, but that was my inaugural introduction to e-mail.

Some 15 years later, a CPA friend who needed some more credit hours in order to fulfill his CPE requirements for the year explained that he was going to attend a “webinar” – an online course he could take while seated at his desk.

“One day this is going to replace live conferences,” he predicted. When I asked how, he explained that the savings in terms of travel, lodging (if the event was a regional or national) not to mention time, would be huge determining factors in terms of attendance.

Obviously that didn’t happen overnight.

CPAs by nature are reluctant to change their daily routines, let alone how they have been receiving CPE since they were first accredited.  So that shift in how people receive their CPE probably took longer than my friend predicted.

For those keeping score at home, there has been an unmistakable drop off in live conference attendance, especially in some of the smaller state society shows where the customers lately have come disguised as empty seats.

A state society show last week which shall go unnamed, more resembled a haunted house than it’s heyday of 10 years ago, when people had to sardine themselves into sessions often standing against the back wall for the duration. It didn’t help to draw in folks when the roster of keynote speakers has gone unchanged for the past eight years and the venue itself should have been razed during the Clinton Administration, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Closer to home, our company has basically abandoned the live conference and its hefty price tag which includes a not so incidental four-figure fee to set up an exhibit booth. Our referrals from our online CPE have rendered attending live shows, both moot and unprofitable.

Unlike the reports of Mark Twain’s death which were deemed to be greatly exaggerated, I’ll go out on a limb and say that over the next decade, 75-85 percent of all CPE will be online, if it’s not close to that figure already.

Although I’m sure many of us will lament missing the traditional cocktail receptions afterward.