Things your website should clearly state / make accessible:
- The core focus of your conf
- Your core values
- The (precise) location
- The dates
- Your programme, complete with speakers and their bios/pics
- Ticket prices, release schedule and easy access to ticketing (if not open yet, e-mail capture form to notify people when tickets open)
- Travel and accomodations tips and useful info (including, say, pre-arranged discounts and coupons with airlines and hotels)
- Code of conduct / harassment-free policy, if you enforce any. If you do, it's perhaps a good idea to have a designated member of the team, clearly identifiable, as the go-to person for this.
Feel free to use some mad CSS tricks for wow, but also make sure your website is mobile-friendly, or at least smoothly provides a mobile-friendly version featuring all the same important pieces of info.
Bottomline: it should be easy, fast, smooth, mobile-friendly, and capture as much of the attendee info you need as possible.
- Define a clear set of ticket release/batching rules from the get-go, and be as open about it as you can. Some confs want to favor individuals and make mass-buys difficult, so they open their batches during weekends and cap the number of attendees in a single registration payment, whilst others need to appeal to corporate clients. Some want to create a buzz or favor early-adopters and enthusiasts by doing pre-programme sales and early-bird discounts, when other confs target industries where nobody minds a high ticket price but would never consider registering without a clear programme and speakers line-up. It's a balancing act, but think it through.
- Use a good ticketing platform. There are precious few, but it's likely you'll love Tito.
- Avoid accruing cash to a PayPal account. PayPal are dicks to conference organizers (just google it up, you'll see) and make your cashflows a significant issue. If you do accept PayPal payments, make sure you wire that cash daily to your bank account.
- Make sure your entire payment workflow is easily usable on smartphones and, in general, tactile platforms.
- Don't require people to print their tickets. If name duplicates are a potential issue, make it easy for people to use e-tickets, at a minimum with QR-code-bearing PDFs, ideally with de-facto-standard, Passbook-style formats usable on ticket-holding apps available on smartphones.
Selecting speakers is always tricky. Depending on the spirit behind your conference, you may or may not want to promote such aspects as gender diversity, inspiring vs. technical-heavy talk balance, local-language vs. English, etc. Corporate-heavy events are usually big on useless stuff like standardized slide decks and heavy control of communication channels, while the techie world mostly cares about bringing awesome content to the table.
If you wish to get a few high-profile speakers to your event, get in touch with them early on. Don't rely on your call for papers (CFP from now on) to lure them in: reach out to them. This shows them you care about them specifically, and lets you target each desired speaker individually, tailoring your pitch to them and addressing their specific concerns directly.
Either at the same time or later on, release your call for papers.
- If your event is dual-language, make sure all your visible content is available in both, keeping an eye on translation quality.
- If your event has over-arching themes or strives for specific properties in talks, make sure you spell these out clearly in the CFP.
- If you have multiple talk formats (e.g. 45-min, 15-min, lightning 5'), detail these so proposals can tell you what format(s) they could be done in. Sometimes you'll refuse a proposal in format A but could have it in format B, so the earlier on speakers are aware of these, the better.
- If you have multiple tracks, describe these and their respective properties in the CFP.
- Provide an online UI with predefined fields (and as good a UX as you can tweak, including reminders about all these aspects we just discussed: tracks, themes, formats, etc.)
Each conference triages its incoming proposals differently.
For instance, Paris Web uses a staff-only voting app for preliminary triage, followed by in-person all-staff meeting to finalize decisions on the pre-filtered set. JSConf US described its unusual, interesting approach (which it exceptionally broke for the 2013 edition). Other events are small enough that all talks are by hand-picked speakers with no call for papers, which sort of makes this section moot (I believe this is what happened at La Conf, SchnitzelConf, BaconBizConf or Funconfs).
TODO: no standard deck?, get hw requirements, pay for as much travel/accom as you can, pre-buy public transportation tickets and such, get a good hotel near the conf venue, prep maps or such, book signing?, speakers dinner, ways to mingle with audience AMAP…
Know your costs. Come are foreseeable, some are going to pop up unexpected. Be especially wary of "hidden costs" from your venue or A/V service provider, who might end up billing you for every extra mike or some such.
Depending on your conference, many items below may not apply. This is as comprehensive a list as we could make it, just so you don't forget anything that does apply to you.
- Venue rental
- A/V equipment (video-projection, various types and quantities of mikes, walkie-talkies, lighting, photography) and staff
- Video capture, editing and streaming (incl. relevant staff)
- Catering (breakfast, breaks, lunch, parties / drinkups)
- Payment processing fees (online signups)
- Printing (programmes, signage...)
- Graphic design (website, printed materials...)
- Staff travel (incl. public transportation within the city and from/to the airport) and accomodations
- Speaker travel (same) and accomodation
- Goodies / schwag, incl. bag to hold it.
- Party venue deals
- Giveaways / Raffle items procurement
- Live translation
- Sign language translation
- Video subtitling
- Video / talk transcripts
A number of things can crop up, often related to "speaker distress" (lost/damaged laptops, accomodation issues, health issues, etc.). Make sure all speakers have a designated staff member (just one across the board or spread across many staff members) they can easily get in touch with, and try and have some spare cash they can use to alleviate issues, compensate for delays, provide temporary replacement hardware, and so forth.
Decide upfront whether there are speakers you're prepared to compensate for talking or not, and what maximum budget you can allocate any given speaker for refunding part or all of their travel / accomodation costs.
Asking speakers to let you book their hotel, and booking most or all speakers in a minimum number of hotels (close by your venue) can help you keep that budget under control.
Issue a clear financial policy to your speakers upfront so nobody feels cheated down the road. Often, conferences will refund speaker travel up to the matching economy/coach rate, to avoid speakers high-rolling on your budget.
Be careful about what money you'll have available at any given time. If your payment processing platform delays the wiring of your funds somehow, take that into account when planning your expense schedule. Some or all of your service providers, caterers, venue managers, etc. will require some form of deposit at various points ahead of time, and have various cancellation and refund policies. Put together a comprehensive schedule and map your cashflow onto it to ensure you'll always have enough cash readily available to honor your bills and secure any service you need at the proper point in time.
Having a clear vision of your cashflow is essential to determining how "nice" you can be to your attendees when it comes to your refund policy. If you can't issue refunds past a certain point (or at all), at least make it possible for people to change names on their registration (up to a certain time pre-conference; you may have your own deadlines for submitting such names to your venue's security apparatus, for instance), so they can re-sell their tickets or have a fellow co-worker use it instead.
TODO: attracting, using (or not) levels (e.g. platinum, gold, etc.), ways for them to support you (money/hardware/services/budget items…), visibility and whether or not to give them booths / talking spots / material in schwag bags, how to define the way they can communicate about the event (usually avoid "co-organize")…
- Send reminder e-mails with all useful info (how to get there, registration hours, Lanyrd page, Twitter accounts to follow for up-to-the-minute notifs, e-mails to contact, "official" Twitter hashtags, etc.) 1 to 2 days before the event
- A speakers dinner on the night before the event is a great way to introduce the speakers and staff to each other and help strengthen a team spirit and general good vibes for the actual event days.
- A pre-event drinkup for the audience, staff, speakers and possibly local community is another possibility, depending on your budget and timing.
- Try and keep tabs on your incoming speakers: ask for their travel schedule on the way in and try and touch base with them when they're about to board or are supposed to have landed / gotten off the train / etc. Inquire as to last-minute issues such as laptop problems ("the guy next to me spilled his tomato juice on the keyboard and the thing fritzed!"), missing directions, other assistance they might need. Sending them a one-page recap the day before containing all their personalized info (their hotel and its check-in time and directions to it from their incoming point, their talk slot, etc.) is a nice touch.
- Make it easy for the attendees to get a feel of who's coming so they get excited about who they might meet and chat with. The usual way for this is to publish your event on Lanyrd and add your speakers/schedule in there too, as they provide a nice set of formats for alternate consumption of these (iCal, etc.).
- Timing is important. Running as close to schedule as possible is always appreciated. Don't be anal about it and enforce timing when stretching it a little would be beneficial. However, helping speakers keep their allotted time in mind is always neat. Paris Web does this in the following ways:
- A small screen at ground level on the front of the stage, facing the speaker, has a countdown, with color-coded background (5' left = yellow, 1' left = red)
- A dedicated staff member per room (not the same guy the entire conference, round-robin across the staff, please!), seating on the front row or at the front of the stage, has special 10/5/1 minute laminated signs they discreetly wave at the speaker at the proper times.
- These times do not include any predefined Q&A time closing the talk.
- Key staff members across the tracks/rooms keep in touch by walkie-talkies with earpieces so they can be aware of other tracks running late or early and sync (or unsync, depending on the people-flow needs you have at the venue) session exits and room-changes. This is only useful for multi-track conferences.
- Schedule at least 5 minutes between the end of any talk (including Q&A) and the beginning of the next slot, so people can at least grab coffee, or go to the restroom, or change rooms if you're multi-track.
- Schedule at least one 20-minute break per half-day, and at least 90 minutes for lunch break. Hallway discussions are an integral part (sometimes event the biggest part!) of what makes your event great.
- Staff members need be clearly identifiable. Special badges don't cut it alone: use special T-shirts, different from schwag T-shirts.
- React to any contingency as fast as possible, and make sure all the attendees know about it fast. Tweet on the official Twitter account, perhaps use stuff like Gather to notify attendees by SMS.
- Take plenty of photos, even video interviews in the corridors and parties. This is great marketing material for later editions and lets people get a feel of what your conference's vibe is like.
TODO: accessibility, signs & directions, restrooms… Avoid long rows of chairs… Round tables across the room are generally more conducive to inter-audience sharing and discovery. Also try to provide power sockets at all tables and working Wi-Fi!
TODO: name printed big on BOTH sides, make it simple to put Twitter/Github IDs on there (and don't display them in confusingly similar ways), badge-as-booklet?, badge-as-stickers?, don't require printed/e-ticket but just name(s) and perhaps an ID if need be, cool t-shirts always nice, not too much sponsor marketing material, printed programme with all relevant details (tracks, rooms, speakers, talk titles, perhaps talk pitches, talk types / duration, clearly labeled breaks, maps to restrooms/etc. if need be)
- Have multiple A/V adapters ready for your projector, to its format from VGA, DisplayPort and mini-DisplayPort. These should cover most laptops, you may want to also have DVI and HDMI just in case, but that's rarely necessary.
- Also make sure your speakers don't run out of battery on stage: provide a power strip (not just one socket: they may need other devices than their latop) and keep a few universal power socket adapters around so their power plugs can use your local socket format.
- Make sure your speakers can have hands-free mikes. Fixed mikes prevent movement and stage dynamics, hand-held mikes are also fairly restrictive (one hand is usually already busy with a remote for slide control, so they'd have no free hand).
- Provide new mineral water bottles (usually a small format), perhaps with a clean glass, for each speaker coming on stage. Speaking for any extended period of time strains vocal cords and the throat, let your speakers hydrate easily during their talk.
- Try and get the largest-possible resolution video-projection you can get. Speakers will thank you for it, especially in tech/design circles. Make sure color contrast, fidelity and brightness are good.
- Project as high as possible, so speakers and audience heads don't get in the way (or as little as possible), and as large as possible (so even small items on-screen are large enough to be clearly visible from the back of the room).
- Try and allocate a predefined period of time at the end of each talk for Q&A, and have one or more staff members ready with hand-held mikes so that audience questions get audible as fast as possible.
- Ask your speakers ahead of their talks to repeat aloud questions that were asked without audio assistance, so the entire room knows what was asked.
- If you're going way overtime during Q&A, kindly ask the audience to postpone further questions until the next break and go to the speaker then.
If you have too much content to cram in too little absolute time, you'll have no choice but to go multi-track. You might also choose this route because your event tackles various themes that are each addressed by specific tracks. A multi-track conference poses its own set of challenges to organizers, though.
You want to make people flow between tracks as smooth as possible, and reduce choice frustration between sessions scheduled across tracks on the same time slot. The latter is dealt with by careful planning ahead of time when designing your programme. The former is helped by a number of little tricks:
- As said earlier, schedule at least 5 minutes between the end of any talk (including Q&A) and the beginning of the next slot, so people can at least grab coffee, or go to the restroom, or change rooms.
- A great way to sync tracks (and thus avoid cutting Q&A in track A for time sake, only to find the respective session in track B isn't done yet) is to equip one staff member per track with walkie-talkies (with earpieces so chatter traffic doesn't intrude on sessions) so the staff can keep in touch about one session going overtime, exiting, etc. and the other tracks can then sync their Q&A or wrap-up accordingly.
- On no account offer single-track tickets to multi-track events. You will not be able to enforce that, and this goes against interdisciplinary knowledge sharing, which is a great source of insight and creativity.
TODO: really good (and strong) coffee, wake-up drinks like Club Mate, good food (not your basic sandwich crap), well-stocked free drinks (with plenty of hydrating / non-alcoholic stuff too), good breakfast stuff…
TODO: Have some! if the venue has a max capacity, perhaps require registration so people don't show up expecting to get in and end up denied and frustrated. Whenever possible, allow conference outsiders to get in (local related community, etc.). Free drinks, at least up to a given tab ceiling, also help.
TODO