We opened registration for "Webinar: Cheese Tourism 2020" back in January, when the plan was to talk about farm-stay bookings, cave tours, and how to build a tasting-room season around a summer of visitors. It runs this Thursday, and almost nobody registered for it is thinking about any of that right now.
We talked about pulling it. We're not going to. We are changing what's on the slide deck.
The session is staying, the topic is shifting
Nobody is planning a farm visit this spring, and pretending otherwise on a webinar would waste your Thursday afternoon. So we've asked our presenter — a member who's run tasting tours and farm-stay bookings for years — to spend the first half on what she's actually doing right now: what she's telling visitors who already had reservations, how she's handling refunds versus credits for a summer that may or may not happen, and what she's keeping ready so that when tours do come back, she isn't rebuilding the program from scratch. The second half is still yours, live, for whatever's actually on your mind this week — the chat has been more useful than the slides in most of our sessions lately.
If you registered expecting a marketing session and this isn't that anymore, we understand; you're welcome to skip it, and we'll have the recording. If you run any kind of visitor-facing program — tours, tastings, farm stays, retail events — we think the Thursday version is more useful to you than the January version would have been.
What this means for the rest of the events calendar
We've been watching what other associations and conference organizers are doing this month, and the pattern is consistent: postpone the ones that can wait, convert the ones that can't into something remote. We're applying the same test event by event rather than canceling everything on the calendar at once. Nothing changes this week for the July Annual Conference in Portland — registration stays open, and we'll update members directly the moment that changes rather than let it sit unaddressed.
For webinars and workshops already scheduled through the spring, assume they run as planned unless you hear otherwise from us directly. We'd rather send you a specific notice about a specific date than a general "things may change" email that tells you nothing.
A few members run their own tasting-room events, release parties, or farm tours and have asked us how we're deciding what to keep on our own calendar. Our answer: ask whether the value of the session survives if nobody can travel to it. A hands-on affinage workshop doesn't survive that test — you need hands in the room. A conversation about what you're doing right now, with people who are in the same spot, usually does survive it, because the value was always the conversation, not the room. Use that test on your own spring calendar before you cancel anything you didn't have to.
We've also noticed something we didn't expect going into this month: attendance for virtual sessions is running well ahead of what we'd normally see for an equivalent webinar. Part of that is simply that fewer members are on the road right now, so a Thursday afternoon slot is easier to protect. But part of it looks like members wanting a half-hour where the topic is cheese and not the news. If that's part of why you're joining Thursday, you're not the only one, and we'd rather build more of these sessions than fewer while that's true.
Come with a question, not just an ear. We're keeping the second half open specifically because the members-helping-members portion of these calls has been more valuable lately than anything we could put on a slide. If your tasting room, farm-stay program, or retail calendar has a decision on it you haven't made yet, bring it. Somebody on the call has probably already made a version of that decision this month, and would rather tell you what they learned than watch you learn it the slow way.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.