How IACC Strengthens Community Connections While Safeguarding Their Intellectual Property With FlippingBook

IACC is a collection of 400+ meeting and conference venues worldwide. They are the only global association on the market, present in 17 countries across Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Americas. The company serves as the ultimate gathering place for venue professionals, as well as a trusted resource for meeting planners looking for a gold-standard experience. Their focus lies in thought leadership, providing insights into industry trends via research and comprehensive reports.

Challenge

IACC produces about a dozen publications a year for their community, including reports, guides, and white papers. The documents are usually 20–40 pages long and feature long-read articles, research findings, charts, and infographics aimed to educate meeting and conference venue professionals. In the past, most of these materials were in PDF format, distributed as email attachments. However, the IACC team felt that this approach had several drawbacks:

• PDFs lack readability statistics and monitoring, so it was hard to assess the reach and impact of the research.
• Most reports had a shelf life of a year, so whenever the team fixed typos, updated broken links, or adjusted content due to evolving trends, the file had to be resent.
• To make sure only members could access the content, IACC tried password-protecting PDFs, but that felt counterintuitive.

PDFs and Adobe didn’t provide the flexibility we needed to share, control, and update our content. We were also looking to gain insights into how our research was being received.

IACC’s other goal was to engage their audience better. The ability to embed GIFs, videos, and links within a research document was crucial for them, and static PDFs couldn’t deliver the desired level of interactivity. Finally, as a multilingual association, IACC needed a document viewer that was intuitive and worked well in countries where English wasn’t the first language. With standard PDF readers, members sometimes found the reports difficult to navigate.

It’s just about accessing content via a link instead of a PDF—it’s about presentation. We wanted to offer a richer reading experience and achieve a more professional look.

Solution

IACC looked at alternative document formats and realized that digital flipbooks would be a suitable solution for them. Fortunately, FlippingBook could help with the challenges on all fronts. The fact that reports could be updated while their links stayed the same was a game changer. Members now always had instant access to the most relevant content. Plus, the flipbook viewer was easy to use regardless of language, with intuitive icons instead of text. That made adoption within IACC’s team and community quick and seamless.

We found FlippingBook incredibly easy to use, both for us and for our readers. There’s no need for training—users can intuitively zoom in, download, and interact with the report.

FlippingBook allowed IACC to enhance their PDF designs with interactive elements: on-page videos, GIFs, pop-ups, and surveys. The team started hosting documents as flipbook embeds on their website, and included a screenshot of the cover along with the link in their emails. Via community-wide newsletters, they could now promote their research, directing members to an open-access version. And FlippingBook’s analytics gave IACC a way to measure engagement and see how widely reports were being read.

For exclusive content, the team came up with a smart solution: a webpage that features a teaser—the first two or three pages of the report—so non-members can see what they’re missing. IACC could then share the full report as a password-protected flipbook, with the password included in an email.

FlippingBook helped us protect our intellectual property while also offering a preview to encourage new memberships.

Results

Today, every IACC member across 17 countries or anyone viewing their open materials online can access conference and meeting industry insights in a click. The team also shares their experience using FlippingBook with other associations and fellow leaders. Instead of sending physical reports or PDFs, all they have to do is share a flipbook link.

FlippingBook plays a key role for us because everything is online now, and so much interaction happens between live events. Our fellow associations and customers see what we do, and we’ve always highlighted how FlippingBook helps IACC.

Association members run their own organizations—hotels, venues, and businesses looking to host sales brochures or online materials. By seeing how IACC uses FlippingBook, they’re also introduced to a robust tool that can strengthen their communication with clients.