Australasian Nonprofit and Social Marketing Conference

Stephen Dann has been kind to send a participant report from this conference.

Finding a good quality niche conference in your specialist field is like discovering a great little restaurant.  As much as you want to tell all your friends, you don’t want to overcrowd the situation and miss out on the very intimacy that made it so great in the first place.  That’s the feeling I have about reporting on the Second Non Profit Conference. 

So, with that disclaimer, let’s take the overview.  This year’s conference covered social, sports and arts marketing, making for a diverse and surprisingly linked series of papers.  Although this is a highlights package, a detailed rundown of the papers is available in the following posts.

The conference opened with Emeritus Professor Michael Rothschild, author of a couple of the definitive set pieces in social marketing, presenting his view of the current social marketing paradigm.  A hallmark of the quality of this conference comes from Prof. Rothschild’s continued attendance at the following sessions, and the presence of the keynote speaker from the previous year as a delegate in 2005.  The other keynote speakers Dr Dennis Apo, and Professor Gus Geursen were also notable by their presence in the sessions.  All three keynote speakers brought their best game to the conference,  contributing suggestions, asking questions, and offering advice to their fellow delegates.  The small size of the conference also allowed for the opportunity for genuine one-on-one discussions in the post-conference breaks, rather than the usual business card swap and promise of an e-mail.

Papers at the conference covered a broad gamut from the PhD-in-motion papers of first time presenters, through to statistically laden empirical works, qualitative journeys of -discovery, and the occasional theoretical/conceptual paper.  Although the dual-stream presentation format only afforded me the opportunity to see half the tracks, it has been a rare conference to find yourself sitting in one session, dying to see the other papers being presented but completely unwilling to leave the presentation at hand.  It’s a tribute to the reviewers and the conference chairs that the quality was so high.

Track Stream Overview

* Arts and Aboriginal Arts Stream

* Education Marketing

* Event Marketing

* Health Marketing

* Marketing Legal Drugs (Alcohol Stream)

* Marketing Value

* Social Marketing Stream

* Sports Marketing

More information about the conference and links to individual papers are available at Stephen's blog.  Thanks again, Stephen!