OK so we’re back to me just recounting what I’m doing at the moment in the hope that you might find it useful. This week we’re going to talk about conference organization. I’m about two weeks out from the 7th Pre-Clinical Stroke Conference which we’re hosting in Oxford this year, there’s three of us on the local organizing committee and it’s got to the stage where I am waking up at 3am with things I need to try and remember to do. So I am going to pass on all this experience to you in the hopes that you can learn something from it. And my first piece of advice? If anyone ever asks you to organize a conference, say no.
Actually, that’s not true, bits of it have been enormously fun but let’s start at the beginning.
Conference organization is actually relatively straightforward if you have money. Everything to do with a conference costs money. The venue, the food, the signage, the name holders, the poster boards, the IT support, the coffee. Everything. So if you’re starting from a place of no money, as we were, then this is incredibly challenging. So here is task number 1:
Finding Money: For us this was really quite difficult because we got stuck in this perpetual loop of having to find a venue, find out how much they wanted to charge us, ask how much the booking fee was and then figure out if we could scrounge that from someone without having to have our own actual money. Then once we’d booked it, we knew our financial goal and set about trying to achieve it.
Obviously, this results in instant panic. Suddenly you’re sat facing a £10k bill and your bank balance says £0k.
But there are organizations out there that can help. Quite a few funders and societies have their own conference funds. We got funding from the British Heart Foundation, the Company of Biologists and Alzheimer’s Research UK [1]. Our local network centre for ARUK also chipped in and hired posterboards for us. This started to fill the gaping hole of our event and made us feel slightly better.
The next step is sponsors, a great source of funding for a conference but you need to pick them carefully. Some sponsors are genuinely just not relevant for what you’re doing. Companies that sell fancy microscopes or NMR machines are probably not what this audience needs, but they might need snazzy new ways of imaging zebrafish, or measuring blood flow, or even genotyping animals. If you’re organizing a conference on a topic you work on then you will know which companies you most often buy from. Approach them, ask them whether they’d like to participate and then scope out prices. Generally bigger conferences can command higher prices, so at a large 1000+ people conference they might expect to pay many hundreds of pounds a day.
You can also vary what you offer them. Some people do full page ad spreads in the conference booklet and charge more for that than just adding a logo. Some people offer bigger vs smaller tables. We were only around 50-60 people and about two days so we asked for between £300-£600 and offered a table, or a table and a talk.
Conference bingo + chocolates in the delegate bags = peak academic event planning
Opening Registration: We were lucky, we had a local admin lady who we side-lined into helping us who was absolutely amazing. She helped do all the things we realised instantly we had no clue how to do. These included, but were not limited to, the following: setting up a website, linking the website to the registration portal, linking the registration portal to a payment site, linking the payment site to an account we could access to we could buy things, organizing the registration so we took all the additional details like ‘would you like to give a talk’ and ‘could you paste your abstract here please’ as well as ‘would you like to have dinner’ and ‘do you have any special dietary requirements’.
Many conferences offer local accommodation so it was down to us to talk to the venue, get them to preliminarily ‘pencil’ rooms in that people could book with a special code, get the code added to the website, get the link for the rooms added to the website. The initial admin was endless.
Then you realise that you have a bunch of abstracts coming in but you can’t leave this going on forever and at some point you’re going to have to offer people talks and give them enough time to prepare them. Is it the summer? Are you going to be emailing people when they’re on their summer holidays? Is it January, are you going to be asking people to prep talks over Christmas? Give your attendees plenty of time so pick an end date for your abstract submissions. And remember to also add this to your damn website.
Organizing Talks: This was one of the ‘sort of’ fun tasks. We got selfish and decided it was in Oxford so everyone was going to have to put up with all the Oxford people talking, so we all gave ourselves some decent slots. But then it’s a case of ‘who do you want to hear?’. We approached a few people to give relevant talks and at this point you also need to figure out what you have the budget to offer them. Are you asking someone from the States? Do you have the budget to fly them over? Are you going to cover the registration of the people from outside who are talking? Are you covering their dinner or their accommodation?
From then it was really a case of figuring out a rough timetable that wouldn’t give people a headache or send them to sleep. I am not a great auditory learner so I actually really like quite fast paced conferences.
Three one hour talks in a row. No thank you very much. Ten 15 minute talks? Sure, sounds great.
So we’ve gone with some half an hour slots for us and our invited people, lots of 10 minute flash talks to give our ECRs a platform and enough chance for as many of them to have a shot at speaking as possible, and one big keynote.
Everything Else: You’d think that would be it, wouldn’t you? You’ve got a venue, some money, you’ve asked some people to speak. Boom. You’ve got a conference. But no. You have to think about a heinously long list of things which, again, includes, but is not limited to, any of the following: where are your sponsors going to park, how many tables do they need, do they need plug sockets, do you need accessible access for any part of your event, do you need IT support for your presentations, what kinds of microphones do you need, where and when do you want coffee served, if you’ve hired poster-boards how are you getting them to the venue, do you need signage and if so, will you be printing it yourselves, how are you seating people for dinner, how are you printing name badges, do you have name badge holders, what kind of wine do you want with dinner because that’s extra, do you want pre-dinner drinks and if so, where are you hosting them, who is chairing each of the sessions, who is introducing the keynote, who is making booklets and how much do they cost to print, do you need conference bags and pens, do you need a script and bio for introducing the keynote, do you need to organize formal networking or just let people mill around and bump into each other. And these are just the ones that loosely flew off my fingers as I was thinking. There are probably a dozen more I have absolutely not thought of but I can guarantee they will wake me up at 3am tomorrow morning.
Adding Fun: Given that this was, broadly, an exhausting process which we are, I hasten to add, not getting paid for, we tried to inject a bit of fun into it. The first idea I am fully crediting to Paul on our organizing committee. Sponsors at smaller conferences often just sit there looking slightly sad with nobody chatting to them so to encourage engagement he suggested something he’d seen at a larger conference which was ‘conference bingo’. All the sponsors get a sticker, you collect a sticker from all the sponsors and you get added to a prize draw. In theory, instant engagement.
Second idea I am crediting to a young lady called Barbara who works in another group I am part of. As part of a networking event she asked very obscure questions to help people get to know each other, things like ‘if you were an ice cream flavour, what would you be and why?’ or ‘what is your most irrational fear?’. I have taken these and we’ve stuck them on the back of dinner place cards to help people have random things to talk about if they don’t want to discuss work.
And today instead of doing any science I’m going to go and put some chocolates in some conference bags for half an hour and listen to a podcast about spies. Because, as I mentioned above, like much of academic grift this is unpaid extra labour. My other half just rolled his eyes when I did some complaining and said ‘why are you even doing this’ to which I had to confess I wasn’t sure. When I told my mum what I’d been up to she, coming from the more corporate world, said ‘secretaries normally do that kind of thing don’t they?’. And yes, yes they do. But not in academia, where we are expected to write the grants, have all the knowledge, teach the students, fix the broken equipment, coral the engineers AND organize the conferences.
But it’s ok because I ordered a box of Celebrations to add to the conference bags and am 95% sure there are WAY too many so my hours and hours of free labour is going to be rewarded with a couple of spare Milky Ways. Yay…
Dr Yvonne Couch
Author
Dr Yvonne Couch [2] is an Associate Professor of Neuroimmunology at the University of Oxford. Yvonne studies the role of extracellular vesicles and their role in changing the function of the vasculature after stroke, aiming to discover why the prevalence of dementia after stroke is three times higher than the average. It is her passion for problem solving and love of science that drives her, in advancing our knowledge of disease. Yvonne shares her opinions, talks about science and explores different careers topics in her monthly blogs [3] – she does a great job of narrating too.