Joelle Morgan, Bishop-McCann Chief Experience Officer, on how to integrate experience design into the business conversation.
Over the past few years,”experience design” has become an industry buzzword on how to shape modern, meaningful meetings and events. Now, event management agency Bishop-McCann, named SITE’s global strategic event partner in December 2025 for a three year term and known for its proprietary JOY Index that uses AI to measure attendee engagement in real time, has appointed experiential branding expert Joelle Morgan to the new position of Chief Experience Officer. Prevue recently caught up with Morgan to get the skinny on her goals and objectives and her insider tips on how experience design can drive business results.
Prevue: Congratulations on your new position as Chief Experience Officer for Bishop-McCann. Please share details of your job description.
Joelle Morgan, Chief Experience Officer, Bishop-McCann: Joining Bishop-McCann as Chief Experience Officer is exciting because the role sits at the intersection of strategy, creativity, operations, and experience design. I oversee how we design and deliver experiences that drive real business impact for our clients, from creative and experience strategy to operational integration, storytelling, innovation, production, and the systems that support scalable excellence across the agency.
In a world that’s faster, more automated, and increasingly digital, the opportunity to bring people together in person has never been more valuable. But gathering people in a room is no longer enough. The experiences that truly resonate are reverse-engineered from a clear business outcome—whether that’s growth, loyalty, education, culture-building, or brand positioning—back to the design itself.
That requires getting experience teams closer to the business conversation. The more our teams understand the real objectives behind a program, the more impactful and effective the experience becomes. At Bishop-McCann, we have an incredible opportunity to keep evolving what modern experience design looks like, combining strategy, creativity, and operational excellence to create experiences people genuinely remember and act on.
Prevue: What are your goals and objectives for your new position?
Morgan: My biggest goal is continuing to elevate and scale how experience strategy is integrated into the broader business conversation, both for our agency and our clients. Too often in our industry, experiences are still viewed through the lens of logistics or execution. Flawless execution matters, but the real opportunity is influencing business outcomes, audience behavior, brand perception, and long-term engagement.
A second focus is operational integration. As audiences expect more personalized and immersive engagement, creativity, strategy, production, technology, and client objectives need to work together far earlier and more collaboratively in the process. Closely related is building the scalable systems and frameworks that let teams innovate while maintaining operational excellence. The best creative ideas only become impactful when there’s alignment around process, communication, measurement, and execution.
Finally, I’m focused on pushing how we think about experience design overall. Audiences are overwhelmed with content and digital noise, which creates an extraordinary opportunity for live experiences to become more differentiated when designed thoughtfully. Success in this role looks like helping Bishop-McCann deliver experiences that feel extraordinary in the moment and create measurable, lasting impact long after the program ends.
Prevue: How do you define experience design for meetings and events? What specific outcomes does it help to achieve?
Morgan: Experience design is the intentional creation of environments, moments, content, interactions and emotional cues engineered to influence how people think, feel, engage, and ultimately act. It goes far beyond aesthetics or production value. Great experience design starts with strategic questions:
- What business outcome are we trying to achieve?
- What audience shift needs to happen?
- What should people walk away believing, understanding, or doing differently?
From there, every element of the experience reinforces that objective— from content, storytelling, agenda design, pacing, environment, technology, networking, and audience participation. The best experiences feel seamless to attendees, but in reality they’re deeply deliberate.
When done well, experience design helps organizations build brand affinity and trust, accelerate learning and adoption, strengthen loyalty and community, drive behavior change, and support long-term growth. And because audiences today are more selective than ever with their time and attention, live experiences must be meaningful, memorable and differentiated enough to genuinely leave an impression.
Prevue: Has experience design become an evergreen industry trend?
Morgan: Great question. Experience design has moved beyond a trend and it’s become an expectation. Audiences are more selective with their time and attention, and in a world filled with constant digital interaction, live experiences have to offer something more meaningful to stand out. At the same time, organizations are asking more sophisticated questions about business impact. They want programs that strengthen culture, accelerate learning, build loyalty, create community, and influence perception—not just gather people together.
That’s where strategy and experience design matter regardless of the type of event. It ensures every part of the program is aligned to a purpose and built around the desired outcome. The approach will keep evolving as technology and audience expectations evolve, but the need for outcome-driven experiences is absolutely here to stay.
Prevue: How does experience design differ, if at all, across meetings versus incentive programs?
Morgan: The fundamentals are the same across both: every element should be designed around the desired audience and business outcome. Where they differ is in the emotional objective and audience mindset.
Meetings are typically focused on alignment, education, strategy, innovation, or driving action. Experience design in those programs shows up through content storytelling, agenda pacing, executive messaging, collaborative workshops, immersive environments, and technology that boosts engagement and learning retention.
Incentive programs lean more heavily into recognition, loyalty, exclusivity, and emotional connection. Experience design there might include highly personalized touches, elevated hospitality, surprise-and-delight moments, destination integration, intimate networking, curated gifting, or once-in-a-lifetime activities that create lasting emotional resonance.
The best programs in either category feel cohesive and intentional, aligned to the broader purpose of the brand, rather than a collection of individual activations.
Prevue: How do you measure the bottom-line success of experience design?
Morgan: This is my favorite question! It is one of the biggest opportunities for our industry to keep evolving. ROI in experiential has historically been hard to quantify perfectly because human behavior, trust, loyalty and decision-making are rarely influenced by a single moment. The strongest measurement models look at multiple facets of return rather than relying on one isolated metric. Depending on the program, success metrics can include engagement, retention, learning adoption, audience sentiment, community growth, sales influence, pipeline acceleration, or long-term brand perception
The most effective frameworks combine ROI (return on investment) with ROO (return on objective). That means looking at financial outcomes alongside whether the experience achieved the behavioral, cultural, educational, or brand outcomes it was designed to create. In previous roles, I’ve helped build real-time engagement dashboards that connected attendee behavior back to broader business indicators like revenue, loyalty, likelihood to return, and long-term brand affinity. But that level of measurement only becomes possible when event teams are closely connected to finance, analytics, strategy and executive leadership—all functions that have historically operated separately from experience teams.
I also believe strongly in what I call ‘return on feeling’. People want to feel good about their decisions to be a customer client or an employee. This is an emotional factor that is innately human. The way an experience makes someone feel directly influences trust, loyalty, memory, and advocacy. The real opportunity for our industry is ensuring emotional resonance and business outcomes aren’t treated as separate conversations. The most effective experiences are the ones where they work in harmony by design.
Prevue: What do you think is missing/most needed in terms of successful experience design planning for meetings and events?
Morgan: The biggest gap is earlier and deeper integration between experience teams and business leadership. Too often, experience teams are brought in once objectives are already set and timelines (and budgets!) are compressed. The most successful programs happen when strategists, creatives, producers, operations teams, and executive stakeholders align early around the actual purpose and the audience outcome.
Our industry also tends to default to adding more rather than designing more intentionally. Great experience design is rarely about volume. It’s about clarity, pacing, and understanding how people absorb information, emotion and memory.
Another major opportunity is stronger measurement integration. Experience teams need closer relationships with analytics, finance, strategy, and leadership so success can be measured holistically and tied directly to business impact. That’s how we continue to advocate for, and grow, our industry’s influence. The organizations seeing the greatest success are the ones treating experiences not as standalone events, but as strategic platforms for culture, communication, brand, loyalty, and long-term growth.
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