Case Study: Christ in Youth

Name: Tommy Nobis, Junior High Business Director

Affiliation: Christ In Youth

Meeting or Event: Christ in Youth is in 76 cities, 15 countries, and between its four conferences hosts 102 individual events a year. Nobis plans the Believe Conference, a junior high intentional weekend conference, which meets 12 times in the spring and averages about 1,500 attendees each time. The Know Sweat Conference is a weeklong conference for junior and senior high students, which meets 16 times a year on concurrent weeks of the summer and attracts about 190 per conference. “My job consists of finding venues for the events, contract negotiations, financial structure of the event and programs as a whole,” he says. Those logistics include scheduling load-in and load-out times, food costs and times of meals, and breakout room scheduling.

Special Challenges: Attrition rates are a huge challenge for Nobis due to the number of venues and hotels he is working with as well as the large numbers of students that attend the different events. “On a given year I will have negotiated and signed over 50 contracts, and [I have to] make sure we’ve got everything lined up,” he says.

Advice: “CVBs have helped enormously when coming to a new city,” Nobis says. “CVBs are like a volunteer co-worker who gets us the information we need without [us] having to step foot in the city. Contacts in a city are huge to make sure we have our ducks in a row for when we show up.” Nobis says that the local CVB can help with attrition rates, venue and hotel negotiations, and can work on your behalf in general to make sure your event runs smoothly. “The Northern Kentucky CVB is probably the single best CVB we use,” he says. “They are dynamite at helping us propel our events in that area, we couldn’t and wouldn’t want to hold our event without them on our team.”

Check out the Special CVB Showcase Section in the upcoming June issue of Rejuvenate for more on destinations and CVBs who cater to faith-based meetings and events.