In coming weeks, the Croakey Conference News Service will report on the Royal Australasian College of Medical Administrators annual conference, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists annual scientific meeting, and the Healthy Environment and Lives (HEAL) Network conference.
Below, Leanne Wells, Director of Business Development for Croakey Health Media, writes about how health sector organisations and leaders can improve their strategic investment in conferences, to ensure wider and long-lasting impact.
Leanne Wells writes:
For many organisations in the health sector, the annual conference is a significant calendar event — and often one of their biggest investments. More than three-quarters (76 percent) of associations hold an annual conference, confirming that conferences remain the most important event format for associations.
Months of planning go into securing speakers, developing programs, attracting delegates, finding sponsors, managing venues, producing communications and creating the conditions for hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people to come together.
Then, after two or three intense days, everyone goes home. The exhibition stands come down. The PowerPoint slides are filed. The conversations that generated excitement in the room become distant memories as delegates return to their desks.
What if we stopped thinking about conferences as events to be planned and staged – and started thinking about them as strategic organisational assets?
The Australian Business Events Association (ABEA) describes good events as powerful catalysts for change, advocacy and knowledge exchange. The Association’s Forum and the broader association sector similarly recognise that conferences are increasingly more than events or revenue generators: they can advance an organisation’s purpose, member value, influence and financial sustainability.
Measuring value
Too often, a conference’s value is measured by registrations, sponsorship revenue and delegate satisfaction. These things matter, but they are only part of the story.
A strategically designed conference can deliver:
- Member value and engagement – giving members opportunities to learn, connect, exchange ideas and participate in their professional community.
- Thought leadership – shaping discussion, showcasing expertise and strengthening the organisation’s voice and authority.
- Advocacy and influence – bringing influential stakeholders together and creating opportunities to advance policy priorities and build relationships with government and decision-makers.
- Revenue diversification – generating income through registrations, sponsorship, exhibition and associated commercial opportunities.
- Brand and reputation – reinforcing the organisation’s identity and credibility with members, partners, sponsors and the wider sector.
- Networking and community-building – creating relationships and connections that are difficult to replicate through digital communications alone.
- Knowledge transfer and innovation – exposing delegates to emerging ideas, evidence and experience from elsewhere.
- Strategic intelligence – providing leadership with an opportunity to listen to members and stakeholders and identify emerging issues, needs and expectations.
- Partnership development – fostering relationships with sponsors, exhibitors, government, researchers and other organisations.
- Organisational alignment – bringing membership, advocacy, education, publications and other activities together in a visible expression of organisational purpose.
Seizing opportunity
Consider what happens at a typical major health conference. Dozens of speakers share research and experience. Hundreds of people debate policy and practice. Important announcements are made. New evidence emerges. People tell powerful stories about what is happening on the ground.
In just a few days, an enormous amount of potentially newsworthy knowledge is generated. Yet much of it reaches only the people who were physically present – a significant loss of intellectual capital.
The challenge is particularly acute in health, where conferences can be incubators of policy ideas, practice and service improvement, emerging trends and professional debate. However, the people who most need to know about those discussions may not be in the room.
The conference is therefore not only a gathering of an organisation’s existing community. It is an opportunity to engage its wider ecosystem of policymakers, professionals, members, communities, parliamentarians, researchers and prospective stakeholders.
The strategic asset is not the conference itself. It is the knowledge, relationships, influence and content generated around it.
International association-sector thinking encourages organisations to consider this whole value journey: what opportunities exist before, during and after the event, and how can the conference contribute to year-round member outcomes, policy advocacy, publications, products and community-building?
Beyond the conference hall
In a world where attention is scarce, bringing the right people together is only half the job. The strategic return begins when the ideas generated in that room travel further.
The Croakey Conference News Service (CCNS) is designed to help make that happen.
Before a conference, CCNS can:
- build anticipation around the organisation’s conference agenda
- profile key speakers and emerging issues
- generate registrations and stakeholder interest
- establish the conference as an important sector conversation.
During a conference, CCNS journalists:
- provide independent reporting and analysis
- capture key debates and consumer and community perspectives
- identify and showcase emerging ideas
- encourage participants’ engagement and connection through activities like real-time social media posts
- create content that reaches beyond delegates
- increase the overall impact and reach of the conference.
Afterwards, CCNS can:
- turn presentations and debates into enduring journalism
- extend the conference’s reach across the wider health sector
- provide interview opportunities for the sector and organisation’s thought leadership
- provide journalism to inform material for advocacy and stakeholder engagement
- create a searchable record of the organisation’s contribution to the field.
Our reporting provides a platform for event organisers, participants and the wider community to engage in respectful dialogue and to provide feedback upon presentations, sessions and the overall conference organisation.
Independence is the point
Organisations already have plenty of ways to communicate what happened at their conferences. They can publish their own news stories, film sessions, produce social media content and write reports. Those activities have value.
CCNS provides something different: credibility through editorial independence.
CCNS is explicitly independent. Conference organisers fund the journalism team’s time and associated costs, but coverage is not vetted by organisers before publication.
That distinction matters. A conference wrap-up tells audiences what the organisation wants them to know. An independent journalist can ask what was surprising, contested, significant or missing.
The result is content that can be more useful, relevant and consequential — while giving the organisation’s investment a longer life and a broader reach.
Independent conference journalism can:
- Extend reach – taking ideas from the event to audiences who were not there.
- Extend the life of the event – generating content that continues to circulate for weeks or months.
- Strengthen thought leadership – identifying significant ideas and positioning the organisation as a convener of important conversations.
- Demonstrate impact – creating tangible evidence of the knowledge and debate generated by the organisation’s investment.
- Support advocacy – translating conference discussions into accessible material for policymakers, media, members and stakeholders.
- Create additional value for sponsors – associating sponsors with substantive ideas and sector leadership.
- Build organisational memory – creating an enduring archive of how thinking in a field has evolved.
- Provide a wealth of resources – for use in wider communications, such as thanking event sponsors, organisers and presenters, or for informing future advocacy and policy work.
Strategic intelligence and impact
Imagine a conference package that delivers:
- real-time social reporting
- interviews with key speakers and participants
- a stream of news stories
- emerging themes and debates
- consumer and community perspectives
- video interviews
- a post-conference synthesis
- a professionally designed digital report
- material for member communications
- content for policymakers and stakeholders
- an archive of the event’s key ideas
- analysis of issues that deserve to be pursued after the conference.
This shifts the role of conference coverage from simply documenting what happened to helping organisations understand and extend the value created by bringing people together.
It also changes what organisations can measure.
Instead of simply asking how many people attended, they can ask, how far did the ideas generated reach?
Instead of asking whether delegates enjoyed the conference, they can explore what changed because those people were brought together?
Instead of measuring whether the conference achieved media coverage, they can track whether the ideas generated entered the wider policy and professional conversation.
Croakey has provided conference coverage for more than a decade, across a wide range of Australian health events, including rural health, Indigenous health, mental health, climate and health, health promotion, medical imaging, social prescribing and medicines management.
The opportunity is to stop treating the conference as something that begins when the doors open and ends when the delegates leave.
A conference is a significant organisational investment. The real question is how much value you can generate from it – before, during and long after the event itself.
Explore the Croakey Conference News Service and its extensive archive of conferences covered, and contact me if you’d like to find out more.
Previous articles
- Making the case for embedded health journalism in research projects
- Why this health leader is stepping up to support Croakey Health Media
Author details
With training in communications, a career in public policy, leadership roles in primary care and health consumer affairs and as a researcher in consumer leadership, Leanne Wells was thrilled to take up the role of Director, Business Development at Croakey Health Media in June 2026.
Leanne is a health policy consultant and consumer advocate with over 30 years’ experience in national health and social policy, program, and service development. She is the former longstanding CEO of the Consumers Health Forum of Australia, the nation’s preeminent peak body for healthcare consumers. She has served as CEO of national peak and state-based organisations in the primary health sector after a public sector career.
Leanne has extensive governance and advisory experience. She has served as a Non-Executive Director on boards in the for-purpose and health and human service sectors and as a Ministerial appointee to several Australian Government advisory groups. She is presently Board Director at the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care and chairs the Primary Care Committee at the Commission. She is a Director at Women’s Health Matters, serves on several Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) committees as a community representative and is affiliated with the Australian Social Prescribing Institute for Research and Education (ASPIRE).
See testimonials about Croakey Health Media’s work and Croakey Conference News Service coverage dating back to 2013
Add Comment