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The IDM Annual Symposium The Institute of Direct Marketing Background The Institute of Direct Marketing (IDM) is Europe's leading professional development body for direct, data and digital marketing The IDM has trained more than 60,000 marketing practitioners; 5,000 hold the coveted IDM Diploma. The IDM advocates lifelong learning. They have a substantial training and education portfolio designed to meet the needs of not only their members but for marketing professionals at every stage of their marketing career, from college student to senior marketing manager: Every year the institute run their annual symposium. The event brings together leading specialists and experts for a discursive and interactive event around the trends and issues surrounding the direct marketing discipline. The Need The main objectives for the 2007 symposium was to discover, debate and discuss 10 Supertrends that will have significant impact on future marketing practices within the next 20 months. The IDM wanted to discuss collaboratively with delegates and members the threats and opportunities surrounding these Supertrends and also to discover the capabilities and skills range among delegates to cope with these emerging trends and the affect they would have on their professional development. The information derived from the symposium would be used to shape the institute’s future training and development programme. Ensuring that any gaps discovered in their member’s skills set would be addressed in developing new content and relevant training. The Solution Each trend was addressed by leading industry experts after which there was a Q&A session as well as a voting interactive session to capture and instantly feedback on screen the delegates responses to a predetermined series of questions. Crystal worked closely with the IDM to use their keypad response service (Crystal Response) to brainstorm and survey the delegates in real time to ascertain their feedback on each of the 10 trends.
The Results The IDM achieved their objectives in discovering gaps in capabilities and skills and how the main issues surrounding the super trends will impact on their future marketing profession. The information gathered from the surveys has helped the IDM in their future development and creation of training and conference programming. The IDM were also able to use the findings to support their own publicity and PR within the marketing and business press. Neil Morris, Deputy Managing Director, Institute of Direct Marketing, says: “Crystal helped us to push the boundaries with our symposium this year and take it to a higher level. They were able to incorporate their knowledge and understanding of our objectives and provided us with a live real time survey service that made the event both inspiring and enlightening for our delegates and members. Also the insight that we have gleaned from the results will be instrumental in driving forward our future training and workshop programmes”
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