What I learned from organizing a conference

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+ guestc949d7 6 months ago
Great presentation - and as the photographer (fuse) in one of the used photos, you’re welcome!
+ tsikapil 6 months ago
so very interesting & real....also made me smile..:-)

Notes on slide 1

Had no clue why you needed an early bird system with cheaper tickets, now I do: you’ll need money to get things going, this is how you get some.

Don’t go for the cheap stuff. We bought 60 power bricks for €2 each in the Netherlands. When they arrived it was just that: power bricks. Had to run to the DIY store for cables and plugs and spent a whole night making these bricks. Total price: same as the one we could buy here.

Don’t assume everyone will go for PayPal, even though it’s a conference for web savvy people. Some prefer more traditional money transfers (some need to for the accountancy department).

Now that I mentioned PayPal... request your merchant approval soon. Took us about 3 weeks not knowing if we would pass our initial €2000 limit or not. Calling PayPal every single day is not fun.

Take care of the few sponsors willing to support you. We made the mistake to have them in a separate room, not good. Look for a place where people have to pass: coffee corner, hallway,...

We should get subsidies for these kind of things (city-, province- and/or state level) but you need to know people and loads of time. We didn’t succeed. A best practice for Belgium would be nice.

The Provinciehuis in Leuven was a perfect location. Easy to reach by public transport, close to the city center, modern, good infrastructure. We had a 3 men technical staff to our disposal during the whole day, you’ll need these guys.

Make sure you have a separate network for your speakers if they want to run network intensive stuff: eg. Flash demo’s.

Don’t take the catering at the venue if you can choose. This was our mayor cost (around €2000 for 150 people) and still people complained about the breakfast.

Not providing lunch was perfectly fine as we announced it well in advance but make sure you have an alternative. We called the Quick to prepare them but they couldn’t handle it. The Quick, McDo and Greenway got overloaded in 15 minutes time. Have something ready.

We sold more tickets to Dutch people as to people from Wallonia. We expected Twitter would reach everyone in Belgium but it did not. Do we have a Belgian platform for these things? The only cross language event I know of is Fosdem.

People kept asking if the conference was in English, even after we added it in big letters to the website. We need to explain non-Belgians that we do speak English on international events.

We didn’t sent a confirmation mail after ticket registration. I expected the PayPal confirmation mail would do, I didn’t. Sent a personal mail right after registration and explain there is now physical ticket needed. Set a deadline for name changes (or you will have to reprint conference passes the night before).

I was scared to drop the speakers dinner (speakers arrived late and we didn’t have any money left). We went for a Belgian beer tasting night out and the few who joined enjoyed it. Be creative, it works.

Check your speakers and topics. We tried to get speakers we had seen before but this wasn’t enough so we added speakers proposed by others. Some where great, others somewhat disappointed. Try to stay away from speakers working for a big company, you’ll end up with sales talk which we didn’t want.

Check the slides and connections before the start, there is still time to find a Belgian power plug or new VGA connector. Some speakers may need special care, ask in advance (separate table, different mic, etc).

Get a €80 KVM switch to switch between your backup laptop and the speakers laptop fast. Less erros when changing plugs and more time to show you sponsors on screen in between presentations.

The hashtag was #twiistbe but lots of people went for #twiist. I can understand but it didn’t make sense for us as it did not reflect the name. We should have had hashtag signs in the hallway or a Twitter stream filtering only the ‘official’ hashtag to motivate it’s adoption.

Networking is super important, it was one of the main reasons to organize the conference. Make sure you keep it small, add coffee breaks, ask the speakers to hang around and do some kind of after event. This is the charm of these small conferences, don’t make it too formal as you will destroy the whole intention.

All photo’s are released under a CC license on Flickr, the usernames are mentioned on each slide. You can use this presentation if you like as long as you follow the licenses of the included photos.
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