Feature

The Dartmouth College Conference Center

MAY 1985 Doug Tifft

The Dartmouth College Conference Center Doug Tifft MAY 1985

Feature

MAY 1985 Doug Tifft

Tapping New Resources

What you do with a college when the students go home? One solution is to establish a conference center which Dartmouth did ten years ago. Since that time, the College has hosted hundreds of conferences, association meetings, athletic camps, and training programs sponsored both by Dartmouth organizations and by outside groups.

The aim of the center is to make the best use of Dartmouth's facilities during times when they would otherwise stand idle term breaks, summertime (when the student body drops to about half its normal size), and the infamous "mud season," when early spring thaws liquify the ground. The College's annual income from this enterprise totals well over a million dollars, but the benefits to Dartmouth run deeper than the bottom line of the ledger.

Robert Kimball '46, Tu '48, formerly assistant dean of the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth, has directed the Conference Center since its inception in 1974, and he stresses that College facilities exist first and foremost for Dartmouth students, faculty, and administration but there are times that the College doesn't need them: "If Dartmouth wants to fill all the rooms of the Hanover Inn as it does during many football weekends, commencement, and reunions then we're not going to book a conference. Dartmouth comes first. If during three to five weeks of the summer, the College can fill every dormitory room with its own sponsored summer programs such as Alumni College, Dartmouth Institute, Tuck Executive Program, then we won't try to put anything in there. But let's be honest. Particularly at the beginning (in 1974), Dartmouth didn't come close to filling the facilities. For practical purposes it still doesn't. We are still called upon to fill a lot of dormitory beds all summer and hotel beds for the balance of the year."

Kimball, his assistant, Linda Hathorn, and secretary, Shirley Martins, run the center out of a small office suite in South Fairbanks Hall. There is also one other on his staff Catharine Bravar '84, a sales representative in Boston. It is the job of the Conference Center staff to know far in advance when College facilities will be available, to attract outside groups to Dartmouth to use them, and then to meet each group's needs.

Except for the small, picturesque Minary Conference Center on Squam Lake in Holderness, New Hampshire, all of Dartmouth's meeting facilities are right on campus. During the fall, winter, and spring terms, the Hanover Inn, owned and operated by the College, is the focus of conference activity, but during the summer, when more dormitory and dining hall space is available, and during particularly busy times for the Inn, Kimball and Hathorn do some creative juggling with a variety of College buildings and services in order to house, feed, and gather conferees.

As a result, participants get their own taste of the "Dartmouth experience" as they crisscross the Green going from bedroom to classroom and to Thayer Dining Hall to eat with the students. In fact, conferees receive a certain amount of "student status," which includes access to the libraries and athletic facilities. Kimball believes that this appeals to conferees who are tired of the "noise and glitter of the metropolitan convention center."

Dartmouth appeals as a conference site to companies planning small to medium-sized educational meetings, Kimball said. "We compete head-on for the high-level corporate conference," he added, and for that, his sales pitch stresses the serious, educational atmosphere of a college campus, the beauty of the Hanover area, and the variety of outdoor activities available here. As the Conference Center ads read, "If your purpose is to teach them something, bring them to a learning place." But"the big draw," according to Kimball, is prestige: "We are a prestigious institution we are really selling an image."

A great variety of groups has already been attracted to Dartmouth, as a sampling of last year's conference calendar demonstrates. The Law and Economics Center from Atlanta, Georgia, brought federal judges from across the country to Dartmouth to delve into new aspects of economics to enable them to make better business-related rulings. Two hundred fund-raising officers from schools across the country learned money-raising techniques at a program sponsored by the pre-eminent Council for the Advancement and Support of Education in Washington, D.C. For the past 35 years, the National Association of Credit and Financial Management has sponsored a two-week management education program that offers MBA-level finance and management courses to executives from hundreds of corporations.

The Minority Business Education Seminar has provided management training at the Tuck School for minority business executives. For 38 weeks, 20 to 40 Honeywell computer salesmen attended week-long motivational sales programs run by their company at the Hanover Inn. Sport clinics in lacrosse, tennis, soccer, and football, most led by Dartmouth coaches, used the College athletic facilities for week-long athletic camps in the summer. The private foundation, CATO, mainstay of the Libertarian Party, brought 75 people to Dartmouth for a week-long summer program. Supervisory personnel and key employees from northern New England savings banks attended a weeklong School of Savings Banking conference on economics, management, and banking during term break in March.

The Conference Center has learned that some groups work out better on a college campus than others. Once 60 cheerleaders came for a regional clinic and stayed in Gile Hall. "In their exuberance," recalled Kimball, "they cheered all over campus, and some people complained. It was kind of wild." When Alumni Hall was decked out like a giant funeral parlor during a casket manufacturers' convention, Kimball came to the conclusion that commercial trade shows don't work well. Now, he says, some 90 percent of the conferences are "educational in nature," and potential customers are carefully screened.

The line between a desirable and an undesirable conference client can be a fine one, as the case of the CATO Foundation illustrates. "We were criticized by those who oppose the Libertarian Party," Kimball said. One year, The D ran an editorial condemning the College for hosting the group. The administration decided in this instance to allow the group to continue to come because, according to Kimball, "they were simply using our facilities for educational purposes not rabble-rousing, not politicizing, and their meetings were not open to the public." However, he stressed, "we will not allow an outside group to use Dartmouth as a forum."

Scheduling, not surprisingly, has been a major summer headache, and it is the Conference Center, working with the Events Office, that oversees the master calendar for the College. The more successful the Center is at filling blank spots in the calendar, of course, the less flexibility there is for last-minute changes. Another problem results from the fact that corporate planners are used to booking space years in advance, while academicians, as Kimball puts it, "sometimes don't plan that far ahead." Lately, College-sponsored groups have begun to protect themselves by reserving space a year or more in advance. "We have advance bookings for Dartmouth events such as we never had in the past," said Kimball. "For example, Alumni College has given us dates right through 1999."

The benefits the College derives from the Conference Center far outweigh occasional scheduling problems. This is especially true at the Hanover Inn, which gets much of the conference business brought to Hanover by the Conference Center. With an overall occupancy rate of about 70 percent, the Inn is, according to Kimball, doing better than almost all other hotels, motels, or resorts in the region.

The conference business has been good, good enough in fact, to lead the Inn to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in 1979 to build the Eleazar Wheelock Room primarily for conference groups. The initial revenue projections for that room have been substantially exceeded. "It's paid for itself many times over," said Hodgson, "but we can do even better."

Hosting outside groups is also a shot in the arm for public relations, Kimball noted. "We are exposing many highlevel people to Dartmouth College," he said. "IBM gives a lot of support to Dartmouth. So does Xerox. So do a lot of other corporations. If the people responsible for giving away corporate money philanthropically know that Dartmouth is used at least three times a year for two-week management education programs, as in the case of IBM, they think a little more highly of Dartmouth." And, of course, parents who attend a conference at Dartmouth might think it would be a nice place to send their children. As Kimball puts it, "We've had all sorts of people say, 'I'd never seen Dartmouth. I want my kid to come up here and look at it. This is one heck of a college!' I think it's great that these people have a soft spot in their hearts for Dartmouth College and will talk about it in glowing terms."

Augmenting the College's continuing education effort for alumni is yet another way in which the Center benefits Dartmouth. "A lot of us have felt that Dartmouth really needs to do even more in continuing education for its alumni," said Kimball, who explained that his office would happily take some of the facilities now marketed to outside groups and use them instead for College-spon-sored alumni programs.

Kimball serves on Dartmouth's Committee on Continuing Education, together with representatives of existing alumni programs such as the Dartmouth Institute, Alumni College, and the Tuck Executive Program. Vice Provost Gregory Prince said that the Conference Center is represented because "it plays an important coordinating role." He predicted that Kimball's office might assist with continuing education by expanding the services it now offers, especially as a way to prompt faculty members to bring their association meetings to Hanover. "The growth of con- tinuing education," Prince noted, "will provide new opportunities for the Conference Center... and it will probably change the mixture of conferences and continuing education programs."

"In fact/' Kimball said, "I hope that within the next ten years, Dartmouth builds a building for the principal purpose of continuing education." Such a structure would operate as a conference center, he explained, and it "would continue to attract businesses, corporations, and associations in periods when it couldn't be filled from within."

"We still haven't had a year where we've filled every room every night," Kimball said, "but we sure have added a lot of people and a lot of dollars to the College over the last ten years. It's been, I think, a totally rewarding experience." With a grin, he added, "It's a wonderful place for Dartmouth alumni/ae to bring their business firms for a meeting. They can be assured of excellent accommodations and dining in the Hanover Inn, as well as professional conference facilities and assistance; they can also show their associates the College they brag about."

Bob Kimball '46, director of the Conference Center.

The rambling Minary Center on Squam Lake is the Conference Center's only off-campus facility.

Conference Center facilities range from the traditional elegance of the Inn's Hayward Lounge, top,to the modern functionalistn of the Hop's AlumniHall, middle, and the Murdough Center's largelecture rooms, bottom.

Douglas Tifft, formerly a newspaper ed- itor, is currently editorial/marketing as- sistant with the University Press of New England in Hanover.