PPAI did more than just change the venue for its Leadership Development Conference in 2024. The Dallas Westin in Southlake, Texas held an LDC that has evolved in terms of its investment in fostering community and educationfor the industry’s young leaders from Sunday evening through Tuesday afternoon.  

  • The event invites the 2024 PPAI Rising Stars and other young industry leaders, as well as serves as a convergence for promo’s regional volunteers.
  • This year, LDC created true dual-track sessions, separating the regional association volunteers from the emerging leaders on Tuesday, while also providing joint sessions and opportunities for the two to mingle.

With an eye toward the future and the voices that are shaping promo’s evolving landscape, PPAI takes the task of fostering connections among young industry leaders seriously.

“We always have to look at the younger generations and help bring them along,” says Jessica Gibbons-Rauch, CAS, professional development lead at PPAI, who remembers being a fresh face in the industry and feeling the need to connect with fellow millennials who, at the time, were few and far between in promo.

“Getting them in a room with each other to have that solidarity and their own cohort helps them work with each other professionally.”

Getting Young Leaders Out Of Their Seats

From its initial planning stages, LDC was designed to be a conference that would require more than passive involvement from its young leaders. Beyond just planned speakers, the emerging leader track included team building exercises and rotating roundtables with mentors from specific departments within promo. 

“I do think we were louder than the other group, so I hear there was some FOMO from the regional volunteers [in the adjacent conference room],” says Gibbons-Rauch, who hosted an optional early morning kickboxing session on Tuesday.

With the assumption that young leaders are innovative thinkers, the panels and conversations create opportunities for attendees to think through ideas differently.

“I’ve enjoyed the nuggets and the gems that you receive,” says Latisha Marshall, senior vice president of operations at ePromos Promotional Products, who spoke on a panel titled “Making Your Own Path.” ePromos is PPAI 100’s No. 30 distributor.

“It’s a refresh from the day-to-day, especially in my role – I’m in operations so I’m in a bubble,” Marshall says. I’m often working with the same people on the same things. But here it’s like ‘Oh, I didn’t think of that.’”

In some ways, the excellent educational panels are a means to give young leaders a great reason to converge in the same place, creating networking collisions among peers.

“These are people who we will likely have relationships with in the future,” says Dominique Volker, vice president of sales at Whitestone, who also voiced that she would like to see the group opened up to an even greater diversity of experiences. “I’ve been in the industry for nine years, and there was someone in there who started in January. But I think there could be even more voices in the room.”

Volker’s thinking mirrors that of PPAI, as LDC’s formatting was designed with scalability in mind, according to Gibbons-Rauch, who says, “this is only the first step.” The potential for compounded and exponential impact is huge as the conference grows, given the intentional formatting of LDC.

  • There is nothing random about hosting the emerging leaders in the same event as the regional volunteers. Many young promo professionals are not as aware of the impact they can make at the regional level and the way it can shape their careers.
  • Each emerging leader is assigned an “accountability partner,” so they all walk away from LDC with at least one influential industry contact who they can reach to make sure they have what they need to work toward their goals.

“Networking, not only with people who have been around a long time but with fresh faces, sets the tone,” says Marshall. “The first 10 years of my career I wasn’t attending these kinds of events, but once I did, it just opened up so much more for me and created a bigger path. A bigger community allows you to make a bigger impact.”