International attendance has long been one of the clearest indicators of an event’s global relevance. When professionals travel across borders to attend a show, the value of being there must outweigh the cost, complexity and time away.

But that calculation is changing. Across industries, international travel now faces tighter budgets, longer approval cycles, currency fluctuations, tariff volatility, geopolitical tensions, safety considerations and a growing number of regional alternatives. None of these factors signal that international audiences have lost interest. They’re just traveling more selectively — and so perceived value plays a critical role than ever in their decision-making.

For organization leaders, this reframes the conversation. Instead of asking whether international demand is declining, a more strategic question emerges: Is our event earning the trip?

The answer depends on how intentionally organizations build relationships with international audiences between event cycles.

Where International Participation Starts to Slip 
One of the earliest moments occurs six to nine months before the event, when companies finalize travel budgets. If the event’s value isn’t clear by then, the trip becomes easy to cut.

A second moment arrives two to four months before the event during the travel and compliance window when visa requirements and customs logistics can introduce uncertainty. When wait times stretch or requirements shift, participation becomes less about interest and more about risk tolerance.

And then there is the moment many organizations underestimate: silence.

If international audiences only hear from an event when registration opens, the relationship becomes transactional. In a high-friction environment, transactional relationships are easy to deprioritize — meaning retention risk often begins months before registration even opens.

Why International Retention Breaks Down  
A one-audience approach: International audiences are often treated as a single segment. Without meaningful segmentation by country, role or buying influence, messaging rarely reflects how these audiences actually participate.

Episodic engagement: Remember those silent moments? They happen because outreach often mirrors the campaign calendar — ramping up around registration and fading soon after. Without consistent follow-up, relationships cool between cycles.

Unclear ownership: Responsibility for international lifecycle engagement often sits between marketing, sales and partnership teams. Without a clear strategic lead, audiences can disengage over time.

Over-reliance on discounts: Offering special rates for delegations remains common, but discounts rarely resolve the underlying hesitation. Travel decisions are increasingly justified by expected business outcomes, not incentives.

How Events Earn the International Trip  
As international audiences become more selective, organizations can maintain strong global participation by making a few strategic shifts.

• From volume to intent. Rather than pursuing broad geographic growth, successful events focus on the roles and markets showing the strongest buying or collaboration intent.
• From worldwide to regional. Prospects respond when communications reflect their local market conditions and industry pressures. Generic “international audience” messaging rarely performs as well.
• From event to ecosystem. Participation strengthens when the event serves as the center of an ongoing professional community — supporting connections, knowledge exchange and engagement beyond the show floor.
• From annual invitation to year-round relevance. Continuous engagement — through research insights, regional briefings or industry updates — ensures the event remains valuable even in years when travel isn’t possible.
• From reactive to engineered retention. Participation becomes more resilient when organizations anticipate friction points and address them early through clearer value messaging and stronger continuity between cycles.

The bottom line: Many factors influence international attendance, but audiences are still paying attention — and participation increasingly reflects where they see real value.

The trip must now earn its place on the calendar. And for organizations, that shift reveals something deeper than travel trends: It shows whether an event has become indispensable to the member communities it serves.

A version of this article originally appeared on ASAECenter.org.

Crises of regional disruption or instability are, above all, human crises. The professional questions that follow from such periods — how to proceed, what to pause, where to invest — are secondary, and should be considered in that context. 

This article is not intended to encourage optimization through a crisis, but to offer guidance for making thoughtful decisions when the path forward isn’t clear.

What the Data Is Telling Us 
For those who have kept campaigns running in the region, performance data is now providing some important insight, and in some cases, permission to make the call they were already considering. 

Media costs appear largely stable on the surface.  

• Cost Per Million (CPM) have moved only slightly, from $2.53 to $2.70.  
• Cost Per Click (CPC) tick up marginally from $0.10 to $0.11.  

In a typical environment, reduced advertiser competition would push costs down. That hasn’t happened here, and the most likely explanation is audience behavior. Reduced screen time, driven by audience disruption, is absorbing the drop in competition. 

The more significant signal is cost per acquisition:  

• Average CPA has risen from $33.43 to $213.13. 

Users are still seeing ads. They’re still clicking. They’re simply not converting. Which means the gap is in the underlying motivation to act, not messaging or reach. When intent weakens, no amount of optimization can make up for it — you can’t bid your way back to an audience whose priorities have shifted.

Pausing Is a Legitimate Decision  
The data makes a clear case for pausing. Continued spend in this environment is unlikely to produce meaningful results and may place brand messaging in a context that may feel tone-deaf to local conditions. 

If pausing isn’t possible due to contractual commitments or stakeholder requirements, the approach needs to shift: Instead of focusing on conversion, the goal should be having a presence that feels appropriate. That means messaging focused on the intrinsic value of the event, the content, the community and the professional outcomes, rather than urgency or location. It also means having a clear community management approach in place, because audience sentiment can surface quickly and tone matters enormously right now.

For Campaigns Outside the Region  
For organizers promoting events elsewhere but targeting Middle Eastern audiences, the challenge is different and, in some ways, harder. Even when genuine interest exists, the practical barriers to attendance are significant and largely outside anyone’s control. 

Pushing toward conversion in this environment is likely to drive costs higher without producing results. The more defensible approach is to rebalance spend toward markets where conditions support attendance, while maintaining a lighter presence focused on awareness and relationship management rather than immediate action. This involves looking at travel and trade indicators alongside audience data to understand where demand is actually viable right now — and being honest about where it isn’t.

The Question Nobody Has a Clean Answer To  
There’s a version of this that’s about pausing now and re-entering later. But the harder question is what happens in between. 

Audiences who go quiet during a period like this don’t automatically return to where they were. Trust and familiarity have to be rebuilt. The brands that tend to recover fastest are the ones that stay present in a way that feels appropriate, maintaining the relationship without demanding anything from it. 

There’s no formula for that. It requires judgment about tone, timing and what your audience actually needs from you right now. Some of that judgment will only be possible for people who are in contact with those audiences, which many of you already are. 

That ongoing relationship, more than any campaign decision, is the most valuable thing to protect right now.

There’s a pattern I’ve started to notice in conversations with event teams over the last year. It usually begins with something about attendance feeling harder — harder to grow, harder to predict, harder to justify the marketing spend behind. The instinct is to treat it like a bottom-of-funnel problem. We need more reach. Better targeting. Stronger acquisition campaigns. 

But when you zoom out and look at how marketing is actually working today, a different issue starts to surface. So many organizations are optimizing for conversions that they’ve unintentionally deprioritized the thing that makes conversions easier in the first place: community. 

Community management isn’t a LinkedIn group. It isn’t a content calendar. It isn’t “posting more.” It’s the intentional work of making your audience feel connected to you between your biggest moments — a continuous thread that pulls in new prospects, then keeps tugging at them to return. Strategically, that means: 

• Thinking beyond campaign windows. Your audience shouldn’t only hear from you when something is for sale. If your presence disappears between registration pushes, that’s not a marketing gap, it’s a relationship gap. 
• Treating conversation as part of the job. That means not just pushing information out, but responding, participating and showing up in discussions happening in your industry — even when you didn’t start them. 
• Making audience visibility normal. If the only time members see themselves reflected in your content is during speaker announcements or awards season, you’re missing the everyday moments that build belonging and drive retention. 
• Building responsiveness into how you operate. Comments, DMs and questions are a strategic way to inform your marketing. They’re opportunities to reinforce that someone on the other side is actually listening. 
• Investing in the relationship before you need the registration. When people feel consistently connected to your ecosystem, the decision to attend doesn’t start when the email hits their inbox. It’s already been forming for months. 

Especially in a marketing landscape where professionals are inundated with messages, disappearing between campaigns creates whitespace. And whitespace rarely stays empty. Another organization fills it. Another brand becomes the consistent voice. Another community becomes the place where conversations are happening. 

Sprout’s 2026 research reinforces this shift: Audiences plan to engage with brands as much or more next year, but they are looking for interaction and authenticity — not just content pushed into their feeds. The appetite for connection hasn’t gone away. If anything, it has increased. The question is whether we are structuring our channels to facilitate that connection, or simply to promote deadlines. 

When community management is consistent, something subtle but important changes. Your event stops being a date on a calendar and starts becoming part of someone’s professional rhythm. The conversations don’t feel transactional. The value doesn’t feel seasonal. So, when registration opens, it’s viewed as a continuation of an ongoing relationship versus a cold ask. 

This is also why community work is so easy to deprioritize. It’s long term. It’s also less visible and doesn’t always tie neatly to a quarterly KPI. In an environment where acquisition feels urgent and measurable, the slower infrastructure work is often the first thing to slip — even in well-run organizations with strong events and savvy marketers. 

But if 2026 truly is a year where retention demands more focus, as the most recent Freeman Trends Report suggests, then community management can’t be treated as an add-on. It’s not a channel strategy — it’s operational strategy. It’s the connective tissue that keeps your ecosystem alive between seasons. 

So, if attendance feels harder right now, it may be worth asking a new question. Not just “How do we drive more registrations?” but also “What experience are we creating when nothing is being sold?” Because in many cases, the challenge isn’t filling the room. It’s building something people feel connected to long after they walk out of it.

Checklist
If you’re rethinking community as retention infrastructure, start here. 

1. Audit your quiet months: Look at the six months between your last event and your next registration push. What would an outsider see? Is it mostly announcements and deadlines, or are there signs of an active, thinking, evolving community? 
2. Measure beyond conversions: If your social and email performance dashboards only report clicks and registrations, you’re reinforcing short-term behavior. Start tracking conversation indicators: comments, saves, shares, replies, member spotlights, recurring contributors. Those are leading indicators of loyalty. 
3. Put a human in charge of the conversation: Community cannot be a side task assigned between campaign launches. Someone needs ownership — not just of posting, but of responding, engaging and participating in industry conversations that didn’t originate from you. 
4. Elevate member voices consistently: Make it normal for your audience to see themselves reflected in your feed — not just during speaker announcements or award season. Belonging is built through visibility. 
5. Treat social like a lobby, not a billboard: Before you post something, ask: Does this invite conversation or does it just push information? The difference compounds over time.

mdg will present Leading in an Era of Permanent Disruption, an invite-only Executive Roundtable in conjunction with Lippman Connects’ Exhibition and Convention Executives Forum (ECEF) and the Society of Independent Show Organizers (SISO).

Tuesday, May 26
3:30 – 5:00pm ET
Lafayette Room
Grand Hyatt Washington
1000 H St. NW

Note: Participation is limited to 35 executive-level organizers to maintain an environment conductive to group discussion. Those who are registered for ECEF will be given priority. Once capacity is reached, names will be added to a waiting list.

Leading in an Era of Permanent Disruption

This 90-minute pre-ECEF session is a high-level executive roundtable for event professionals to engage in candid, peer-to-peer dialogue about the external forces reshaping U.S.-based events.

Global economic shifts, evolving trade dynamics and changing business conditions are influencing travel patterns, exhibitor investment, international participation and our industry as a collective. For many organizers, the variables that once felt occasional now show up in every planning conversation – impacting budgets, sales cycles and growth assumptions. These pressures are simply part of the environment we’re operating in.

Moderated by industry peers, the discussion will center on how these conditions should inform event strategy, attendee marketing, exhibitor and sponsor sales, international visitor acquisition and financial planning. There will be no lectures or PowerPoints — just focused executive dialogue. Participants will hear how fellow organizers are adapting, compare approaches and leave with practical insight to guide decisions in the months ahead.

Moderated by

Kimberly Hardcastle-Geddes
Chief Strategist, Freeman

As Chief Strategist, Kimberly drives participation, elevates experiences and future-proofs events for Freeman clients. With a Master of Science in Business Administration, over two decades of industry experience, and a unique ability to shift between analytical and creative thinking, she brings both discipline and imagination to solving complex challenges. Her expertise in event marketing, strategic planning, tactical execution and organizational design was shaped during her 24-year tenure at mdg, the agency she helped build before eventually selling to Freeman. Kimberly is a CEM faculty member, a Krakoff Leadership Institute alumna and has been named by IAEE as an Educator of the Year and a Woman of Achievement. She has a monthly column in PCMA’s Convene magazine and is a frequent presenter at SISO, PCMA Convening Leaders, Expo! Expo! and Lippman Connects events. She’s also the mom of a TCU Horned Frog, wife of a retired Navy pilot, Peloton addict, reader, runner and believer in civil rights.

Vincent Polito
CEO, SISO

With more than 20 years in senior leadership positions in the industry, Vinnie is generally recognized as a content development and execution specialist. During his career, he’s had two international postings, launched events on five continents and developed highly specialized conferences in technology, life sciences and healthcare. He is also the past Chairman of the International Association of Exhibitions and Events (IAEE), the leading organization in the conference and trade show industry. 

RSVP

Note: Registering for this event does NOT include registration for ECEF.