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Martha Donato is the founder and president of MAD Event Management and has been planning events and meetings for nearly thirty years. Community, collaboration, and connection are the focus of everything she does.
Andrea Doyle
Martha Donato, founder and president of MAD Event Management, a full-service event planning and management company, discovered the events industry by chance. While working for a New York City publishing company in the 1990s, the boss bought a struggling trade show and tasked Donato with turning it around.
“To say it was overwhelming is a complete understatement. The first night I cried in my hotel room and was completely overwhelmed. But I came back the next day and I was like, I really like this ,” said Donato. “We ran this show for two years just as a test. Then we started making expansion plans and started doing these shows around the country. It took me three or four years before I felt like I had a handle on what I wanted to create. thing.”
Today, Long Beach Comic Con, Long Beach Comic Expo, New Jersey Comic Expo, the UAS Drone Disaster Response Conference, the Javits Center Sustainable Events Summit, and Thriv, a consumer show for baby boomers and Generation Xers in Atlantic City, are among them. The show she launched.
Donato is an advocate for female leadership in the exhibition industry and is the co-founder and first president of the North American chapter of the Women in Exhibition (WIE) Network. She currently serves as past president of the North American Chapter and serves on the WIE International Board of Directors.
In December, she also became regional director of the newly formed UFI North America Chapter.
Put attendees first
Important advice she received during that time. “Don’t overthink it.” She created the show for magazine readers, and it was a success. “If you can understand why people are there, what motivates them to get up and go out to see a show, then you’re on to something,” she said.
Donato founded MAD Event Management in 2008, and her director at the Long Beach Convention Center, Ellen Schwartz, offered her a date to produce a show there. “She gave me my big break,” Donato said. On October 3, 2009, she launched Long Beach Comic Con.
pay her dues
In 2011, she started working at Crain Communications. She demonstrated her ability to work at Crain’s trade show called RIMS and was offered a full-time job. With Crane’s permission, she accepted and managed MAD events in the evenings. The time zone difference works to her advantage, as she focuses on her Crain duties during the day and MAD at night. After three years, she left Crain Communications to focus on her Long Beach show as its trajectory became so strong. The local general contractor she uses for her East Coast shows is Metropolitan Exhibitions. She didn’t realize the owner, Marty Green, was her neighbor in Warwick, New York.
“We realized there was enough connective tissue between what I was doing and what he was doing that we should collaborate. So we became business partners in 2014, which helped me grow Long Beach Comic Con. “
industry advocate
Donato is often asked if she enjoys planning weddings. There are still people who need help understanding the meetings and events industry and the fact that Donato hosts business events all over the world. She made sure her three daughters and their friends understood her role, as she took them to the shows she managed whenever possible. She proudly says that her daughter’s best friend worked at MAD and then went to Informa. Still, this misconception remains one of the industry’s biggest obstacles.
Donato said the industry still has a lot of work to do in terms of sustainability. She added that single-use plastics, badges, badge holders, carpets and stalls that were being discarded in towns and cities must be replaced.
Other focuses are DE&I and attracting talent. “Many people in our industry are aging, and we’re not bringing in enough new people with high school and college degrees to meet that demand,” she said.
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