FORUM B R A D MAY N E P R E SIDEN T A N D CEO I A VM A N D IA V M F OU N DA TION
By George Seli
B
rad Mayne, CVE, had been an IAVM member for 30 years when he took on the role of President and CEO in July of 2016. Recently, the organization’s board has extended his original three-year agreement for an additional five years. Continuing in his leadership role is an exciting prospect for this industry veteran, especially since IAVM is undergoing a dynamic period in its history. In the following interview, Mayne discusses membership development, improvements to VenueConnect’s format, IAVM’s security education initiatives and a new partnership with Venue Solutions Group.
Q
How much has IAVM’s membership grown over the last few years, and what development initiatives are behind the growth?
A
In a three-year period we’ve grown 28 percent. It’s spread across multiple sectors. We’ve been strategic in our development of membership, and one of the things that’s done really well is group membership for the professionals. We had a lot of the venues saying they’d like more of their people to be involved and looking for a discount for multiple people. So the director of membership came up with the program of group membership where you can purchase it for a flat amount and include as many as 20 individuals from your venue.
Q A
The younger membership represents the future of the venue management profession. How is it trending? A lot of the growth has come not only from the group membership, but we also have a very active young professional committee that’s been doing 18
some business development for us. The other thing we’ve seen with our venue management school is that the demographics have become much younger. People want to learn earlier in their careers.
Q A
What has been the most significant change to the format of VenueConnect in recent years?
“W
e have multiple live training programs that we’ve put into effect that support our safety and security initiatives. We thought for the most part it would be the arenas and stadiums that would want that training, but we’re getting a lot of requests from convention centers, performing arts centers and other types of venues.”
We restructured the annual conference to where the conferences for each sector [e.g., arenas, performing arts centers] take place at VenueConnect. So we went from around 80 education programs to 130 and above. Each sector has their own sessions they can attend, but what’s great about that is if they find other sessions in other sectors, something that they’re interested in, they can go to another sector meeting as well.
Q A
What are IAVM’s latest educational efforts to support venue security?
We have multiple live training programs that we’ve put into effect that support our safety and security initiatives. So we have situational awareness and active shooter programs. [Editor’s note: See page 76 for a column on situational awareness training by VenuWorks’ John Siehl.] [IAVM Director of Education] Mark Herrera, who does that training for us, was on the SWAT team as a police officer and was involved in the training of all the airline pilots in securing their cockpits working for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). We thought for the most part it would be the arenas and stadiums that would want that training, but we’re getting
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