These fast-paced half-hour meetings held every Monday were started in the Conference Services Division to give each team member a chance to update their colleagues on current workload, priorities and challenges. The meetings also provide an opportunity to share lessons learned, best practices and solutions to specific issues that can benefit the whole team and ensure a more cohesive and coordinated approach to supporting CICS clients.

Throughout 2019, CICS developed a pan-Canadian conference venue directory, a set of conference planning guides for clients, and an online calendar of CICS’ availability. These are important additions to the tools that will make the Agency even more effective in its support and guidance, especially during the early event planning stages.

As part of efforts to improve information sharing and knowledge building with clients, CICS distributed in early January 2020 its first semi-annual newsletter to conference organizers and other stakeholders in all 14 client governments. This first issue talked about the upcoming Knowledge Exchange Forums, the new Pan-Canadian directory of meeting venues, and virtual conferencing.

The surveys that assess client satisfaction were upgraded to maintain their relevance and better address certain service areas, while new surveys were developed for organizers and participants of virtual meetings, an area that has been steadily gaining in popularity over the past 5 years. Approaches to surveying were also modified, especially to simplify participation and therefore increase response rates.

Two surveys (one of an annual sampling of conference organizers and the other of delegates after each in-person event) are used to assess client satisfaction, which continues to be very high. It is important to note that with the development of new or upgraded surveys for meeting organizers in 2019-20, the comparison of results with those of previous years may not be entirely accurate.

The move from in-person to virtual meetings during the last quarter of 2019-20, as a result of the growing COVID pandemic, became a complete shift after mid-March. CICS was able to react swiftly and seamlessly to the dramatic impacts of the pandemic on its operations, and maintain a high quality of support throughout. All the time and effort invested in the development and implementation of new technologies and processes in 2019 proved most auspicious in view of this complete shift towards virtual conferencing.