Hi,

One of the quieter frustrations in the events industry is this: the evidence is there. Decades of research proving the economic impact of conferences. Outcome data from medical congresses that changed clinical practice. Case studies from association meetings that shaped legislation. Reports documenting exactly how much a hosted event contributed to a city's GDP.

It exists. All of it. Sitting across hundreds of different organisations, publishers, research bodies, and associations — largely unsearchable, rarely connected, and effectively invisible to the people who need it most.

That changed last month at IMEX Frankfurt.

The problem with advocacy nobody talks about

If you've ever had to make a case for events — to a budget committee, a government minister, a hesitant board, you know what it actually takes. Hours of research. Hunting down the right study. Finding the statistic that applies to your specific context, not the adjacent one that's close but not quite right. Stitching together an argument from sources that weren't designed to be used together.

It's not that the evidence doesn't support events. It overwhelmingly does. It's that accessing it is a project in itself, which means most advocacy conversations happen without the full weight of available evidence behind them.

The industry has been producing its own case for decades. It just hasn't had a good way to use it.

What the IcebergHub changes

On May 21, at IMEX Frankfurt, The Iceberg Charity Trust announced the launch of IcebergHub — a platform that makes more than 9,600 curated industry sources searchable for the first time. Research reports, congress outcome data, video case studies, links to global industry organisations, all indexed, all connected, all retrievable through natural language search in seconds.
The architecture behind it matters. This isn't keyword search that returns document titles. It's a semantic system that analyses complete documents, understands context, and returns specific, cited answers grounded in the actual source material. Ask it about the economic impact of international association congresses on host cities, and it finds the answer, with the source credited and a direct link to the original.
The knowledge base is designed to grow continuously. Speaker-level video citations, timestamp navigation, and enhanced metadata enrichment are already in the pipeline.

Gevme's role in this

Gevme is a founding partner of the IcebergHub initiative. This isn't a peripheral relationship, it reflects something we've believed for a while: that the events industry's ability to advocate for itself depends on its ability to access and deploy its own evidence.
As Vamshi Velmajala said at the IMEX launch, the ambition is to put this intelligence in the hands of every decision-maker who shapes the future of events, from policymakers to organizers to host cities. The goal isn't just discoverability. It's moving the industry from being understood to being indispensable.
That framing matters. Events don't need a better PR campaign. They need better infrastructure for making their case, at every level, in every conversation, with the specific evidence that applies to that specific room.

Who this is built for

The IcebergHub isn't just for researchers or advocacy professionals. It's for anyone who ever has to answer the question: what's the actual value of this event?
The association executive preparing a funding proposal. The convention bureau building a bid. The event director facing a budget review. The sustainability lead who needs peer-reviewed evidence for an ESG report. The professor teaching the next generation of event professionals.
Ambassador access is open now at £375 per year, with student and institutional arrangements available for academic partners. The Trust has also partnered with the Center for Events and Festivals — which works with over 700 event management professors globally — to bring the knowledge base into academic settings.

One industry. One message.

The evidence already exists. The IcebergHub makes it usable. What happens next is up to the people who use it.
Gevme is a proud founding partner of the IcebergHub. Learn more about how we're building the intelligence layer for the meetings industry.

The Gevme Team