Thunderbird's Award-Winning Global Speaker Series

For nearly a decade, every summer, shortly after graduation ceremonies in May as the number of people on campus goes down and the temperatures in Arizona go up, the School has featured guest speakers in an event called the Executive Lecture Series.

Once a month from May to August, Thunderbird invites alumni, existing students, prospects, business partners and visitors from the community to sample the thought leadership of in sightful guests speaking about interesting global subjects. The goal is to provide engagement opportunities through the slower summer months. The ELS events have been very nice, garnering at tendance of 20-30 people and a small online audience.

This year, under the leadership of the School’s Director of Special Events, Erin Schneiderman, Thunderbird turned it up a notch.

The School developed a community partnership with the Phoenix Business Journal, changed the name of the series, and co-branded it as the Thunderbird School of Global Management/Phoenix Business Journal Global Speakers Series. Key stakeholders at the School stepped up to “host” each of the four monthly events and they invited a provocative list of guests armed with relevant and timely topics – Dr. Allen Morrison, Professor Suzanne Peterson, and T-bird alumni, Wolfgang Koester, ‘91 and Rodrigo Xavier, ‘93.

Attendance hit all-time highs with an average of more than 200 people per event attending in person and online – the vast majority, in person. This translated into leads for executive education, campus exposure for prospective students and greater awareness of Thunderbird’s unique position in the higher education marketplace for business partners and people who live and work in the city where the School exists. The success of the program was so strong, in fact, that Thunderbird won an award from the Arizona Chapter of the International Live Events Association for “Best Fair, Festival or Event Series 2016-2017.” Known as the “Zonie Awards”, the program was developed to acknowledge and honor Arizona event industry professionals.

While it’s nice to win awards, the real win this summer was that engagement was nearly 10 times more than in previous years. And that success was based on content delivered by T-bird faculty and alumni. Proving once again that the more opportunity we have to let people know about Thunderbird, the more they respond to the what the School has to offer.

Watch for the series in 2018. Join us if you can in person, or online. It will bring back good memories – without a test or required term paper at the conclusion!