Face to Face Conference Planning

Tips: Planning a one or multi day Conference (Face to Face)

  1. What is the purpose of your Conference?  Who is the Audience?
  2. Did you check the Agency Wide PD calendar, Lead Inspire Innovate, and Well Being calendars to make sure you aren’t scheduling too close to another event?
  3. Put your event and course number on the agency PL calendar.  (just copy from your personal calendar to the agency one)
  4. What are the dates and times of your Conference?
    1. Reserve Rooms in the Agency using the same name you put into the registration system for the title of your conference.  
    2. Make sure dates and times in your rooms match your times in your flyer.
    3. If you need to set up the day before, you will need to reserve rooms the day before too.  (Same title as your conference title in the registration system)
    4. Avoid Mondays for conferences because they are hard to set up for and there are also weather limitations.  Speakers don’t like to lose their weekends flying.
  5. If you have speakers whom you want to pay to come present, set up a meeting with Lisa Downing and Amy Moine.  They will need to know:  What is the purpose of the speaker?  How long do you want them to talk? Are there break out sessions?  What is the speaker’s email?  How much did the speaker quote you for a fee?  
    1. Once Amy and Lisa know that information, Lisa can set up a contract.
    2. Assign one member of your team to be the liaison with the main speaker so you can clarify content of presentation, handouts, logistics of their day etc and be sure to communicate with the PL Director.
    3. If you have participants that will also lead break out sessions, we often let them attend for free.  If that is the case with your conference, those break out session leaders don’t need to register.  On the day of the Conference, please give the list of presenters to Lisa (Registration Coordinator) and she will add them to the roster so they don’t get charged but it will appear on their transcript.
  6. Communication Protocol from Beth Strike
  7. Communication Protocol for Professional Learning

Communication Protocol to get the word out

  1. If you want Beth, to tweet and do promos, talk to Amy Moine and Beth about getting on Beth’s agency calendar.
  2. Set up your schedule
    1. Example Schedule
    2. Example Website for going paperless
      1. We are hoping for a paperless conference. If you have handouts or resources that you would like participants to have, please send them to me electronically and I will upload them to our conference Google site before your sessions. 
  3. Charging Fees.  Work with Amy Moine on how you should approach charging fees for registration, material, food, etc….
  4. Catering Request Form
  5. The PL team will support you about communicating parking and logistics as the numbers come in and it gets closer to the conference date.
  6. Lastly, after the conference, debrief and give the PL team some feedback.