VIRTUALLY THERE - CCI NATIONAL LEADERS FORUM & CONFERENCE

Twice each year, CCI holds a National Leaders Forum (NLF) and conference, which provides an incredible learning opportunity for condo owners, condo directors, condo professionals and business partners. Since we are still suffering through the pandemic, this fall’s NLF was held virtually, Nov 4th - 7th.

While I did learn lots attending my first NLF, one of my lessons learned is that attending virtually is nothing like attending a conference in person. When attending in person, besides the various presentations and seminar sessions, there are hallway discussions, conversations during meals and coffee breaks, as well as the exhibitor hall in which you can have in-depth discussions with industry professionals and business partners. Most importantly, being physically there allows you to establish personal connections, which is such an enabler for future communication and collaboration.

SESSION HIGHLIGHTS

There were many highlights from the various information sessions, including an awards night and a trivia contest. Informational sessions included an update on the CCI business plan, legal case studies, reserve fund problems and opportunities, case studies of condo boards or condo owners misbehaving, insurance trends and challenges, and how to improve governance with bylaws and rules.

TECHNOLOGY

While most of us are now familiar with Zoom (https://zoom.us) for virtual meetings and AGMs, it by itself is not well suited for managing a conference. Organizers used an application called Whova as a management tool in coordination with Zoom. Whova managed the agenda planning, seminar and presentation sessions, session recordings, attendee contact details, messaging, discussion groups, speaker profiles, sponsor profiles, an exhibitor hall (via Zoom), and surveys. The application can run on a desktop, tablet or smartphone - I used all three options through the conference and found that generally it worked well. A few glitches seemed to be dependent on the device used at the time.

One nice aspect of attending virtually was that if two sessions ran concurrently , I could attend one live and one later via recording - while messaging various presenters through the Whova app to ask questions.

AWARDS NIGHT AND TRIVIA CONTEST

These were more informal and relaxed events, allowing attendees to get to know some of the key members across the country. Five CCI members were presented with distinguished service awards (well presented virtually at least) for their past contributions to both the National organization and their local Chapter. Very inspirational. Sad though that we couldn’t celebrate their success in person though.

The trivia contest took a while to get sorted out because there were several teams comprised of three to five members, and each team had to figure out how to collaborate without the other teams overhearing. The team I was on ended up using SMS group texting for collaboration. It ran in a single Zoom session with several rounds of questions, with each team keeping their score on the honour system. Questions were challenging but not impossible to answer. It would have been much better in person working as a team at our own table while sipping a favourite beverage.

CCI BUSINESS PLAN UPDATE

How can CCI provide better value to you, our members? That is the primary focus for our National organization of 17 Chapters. Not only do we as an organization have to understand our members' needs and expectations, we also have to examine and improve on the ‘how do we do it’ aspect. CCI National worked with a consultant for the past year or so gathering input from members across the country, consolidating the information and creating a strategy. The next phase of the project is to develop a plan of action and implement it. Stay tuned for more updates.

One of the ‘how do we do it’ items that has already been completed is the introduction of the National Resource Centre https://cci.ca/resource-centre/overview.