Helping members shine overseas.Your members want to generate more international business. They look to your association, as the industry leader, for ideas and answers. How do you respond? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The experience of the Travel Industry Association of America America [for Amerigo Vespucci], the lands of the Western Hemisphere—North America, Central (or Middle) America, and South America. The world map published in 1507 by Martin Waldseemüller is the first known cartographic use of the name. (TIA (1) (Telecommunications Industry Association, Arlington, VA, www.tiaonline.org) A membership organization founded in 1988 that sets telecommunications standards worldwide. It was originally an EIA working group that was spun off and merged with the U.S. ), Washington Washington, town, England Washington, town (1991 pop. 48,856), Sunderland metropolitan district, NE England. Washington was designated one of the new towns in 1964 to alleviate overpopulation in the Tyneside-Wearside area. , D.C., shows that trade groups can help their members reach those lucrative overseas buyers through cooperative efforts. When Congress eliminated America's national tourism office and Capitol Capitol, seat of the U.S. Congress Capitol, seat of the U.S. government at Washington, D.C. It is the city's dominating monument, built on an elevated site that was chosen by George Washington in consultation with Major Pierre L'Enfant. Hill showed little interest in funding new international-travel marketing programs, TIA created a strategic international vision based on the industry pooling its resources under one brand to sell travel to the United States United States, officially United States of America, republic (2005 est. pop. 295,734,000), 3,539,227 sq mi (9,166,598 sq km), North America. The United States is the world's third largest country in population and the fourth largest country in area. . This included supplements in foreign newspapers, educational seminars, overseas media events, international research, and more. The program kicked off in 2000 and now provides examples of how other associations can harness their cooperative member resources to market themselves overseas. 1. One brand, one call to action. Ensure that your members agree on one brand and a single Web site. For TIA the brand was See America, which was used on all marketing materials and in the name of every international event and product. The single Web site was www.seeamerica.org See .org. (networking) org - The top-level domain for organisations or individuals that don't fit any other top-level domain (national, com, edu, or gov). Though many have .org domains, it was never intended to be limited to non-profit organisations. RFC 1591. , which now includes links to every travel organization in the United States. 2. Cooperative advertising. Associations can produce supplements in overseas newspapers and trade publications that feature ads from multiple members. Cooperative ads sell for much less than stand-alone (jargon) stand-alone - Capable of operating without other programs, libraries, computers, hardware, networks, etc. Exactly what is absent is presumed to be obvious from context. "We only run Windows on stand-alone PCs because it's too dangerous to run it on networked ones." ads in the same publication, so members get a price break, the association gets its message out, and visits to the association Web site increase dramatically. 3. Education. TIA expanded the educational programming at its national conference to include more sessions on overseas markets given by international travel professionals who understood the market. 4. Media events. At international trade shows, TIA brings groups of its members overseas for See America media market-places. Foreign media are invited to these events to meet one-on-one with dozens of U.S. travel companies in a tabletop format where they hear about interesting story ideas. Large numbers of media turn out for these one-stop media events because they are time- and cost-efficient. 5. Research. TIA's research department searched the Internet Internet Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the and purchased secondary international research from multiple sources and combined them into reports about the United Kingdom, Japan, Brazil, and other key markets, which are then made available to members. 6. Seminars. On their own, members could not attract 100 qualified international customers in one room at one time. But if their association brings together a number of them for a single event where each member has a chance to present its product or service, that is sufficient to draw a large crowd. TIA successfully operates these kinds of cooperative seminars for international wholesalers and retailers in Europe, Asia, and Latin America Latin America, the Spanish-speaking, Portuguese-speaking, and French-speaking countries (except Canada) of North America, South America, Central America, and the West Indies. . --Michael Pina, manager of communications, Travel Industry Association of America, Washington, D.C.; mpina@tia.org [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] |
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