The 2025 ICCA GlobeWatch has been out for a few months now, and the industry is doing what it always does with it: celebrating the rankings. Which city climbed. Which country leads. Who landed the big conventions.
But the number that stopped me is one almost no one is talking about.
Most meetings are small
Over 60% of all international association meetings have fewer than 250 participants. Add the mid-sized ones and more than 90% stay under a thousand.
Meanwhile, the mega-congresses everyone chases, those with 1,000+ delegates, are just 8% of all meetings, even though they drive around half of the total spend.
A scoreboard built for the biggest 8%
Here’s the tension I can’t unsee. Our industry’s headline metrics (rankings, economic impact, delegate volume) are built around that biggest 8%. But the actual work of associations, the overwhelming majority of it, happens in rooms of 50 to 250 people.
And those are exactly the rooms where change is most possible. Small enough for real conversation. Focused enough to move a field. Intimate enough that people leave having actually decided something.
Measuring what changed
We’ve built a scoreboard that measures size and spend. We’ve barely begun to measure whether anything changed.
Imagine an ICCA ranking for impact. For legacy. For what an event actually left behind. I suspect it would look nothing like the one we celebrate every May.
That’s the gap I think our sector has to close next.
Build for what’s next.
