Running An Association Seminar

In recent articles i've touched on organising your conference and those posts were

more focused towards finding a centre, dealing with Audio Visual requirement and dealing with a conference organiser.

In this post we'll briefly cover a few factors of arranging a conference for an association. An industry association is typically a non-profit organisation established in order to serve the needs of its members who are normally suppliers or persons from within that industry. As an illustration, CASA (The Chiropractic Association of South Africa) has largely practising Chiropractors as its members and its key function is usually to serve these members when it comes to education, continuing professional development and so on. An associations income is derived mostly from membership fees, sponsorships and needless to say its annual conference. It goes without stating therefore that this annual conference ought to be well managed and most importantly shouldn't generate a deficit. It should yield a little surplus as a way to make sure there isn't a loss and at times it has to yield a higher surplus for numerous purposes which include research that should be conducted for the advantage of its members.

Most of the components of organising a conference of this nature are similar, if not the same, as any other conference. Venue sourcing, AV requirements, menu planning etc. are all the same. The main differences are as follows: -

Speaker Management

For this conference, calls for papers will need to be distributed and abstracts collected, reviewed and a list of speakers will need to be decided upon. Regular, relevant communication will then need to take place between the organisers and the speakers in order to ensure that they know when they are speaking, what they are speaking on, how long they can speak for etc. Papers will need to be collected before the event for inclusion on the laptop being used to deliver these papers. It is no good if a speaker arrives at congress with their paper on their flash drive only to find that the version of PowerPoint they have used is not compatible with the laptop that is being used, or that their laptop is not compatible with the system. Worse still that the flash drive has been left in their room, on the plane or in the taxi. This can adversely affect the smooth running of papers and leave the paying delegate with a bad experience for future conferences. We need to always remember that the experience delegates, exhibitors and sponsors have will drive the decision of future attendance or non-attendance.

Budget

The other main item that is vastly different form a corporate conference is that these association conferences are normally funded by delegates fees, exhibitors fees and sponsorships. Assuming a small conference of 300 delegates and 20 exhibitors, will result in 320 individual invoices to be sent, 320 follow up for payments and 320 allocation of deposits received. Without a dedicated, custom designed system to manage this, it can quickly become disorganised and, to put it bluntly, a complete mess. Considering that this is the bread and butter of the conference it is imperative that this system be well run and reconciled for auditing purposes.

The other very important aspect with regards fees is that these fees need to be set in order to cover ALL costs associated with this conference. Hence a budget needs to be drafted and needs to include all costs associated with the event. Name badges, conference bags, marketing of the conference, speakers travel, to name but a few, need to be accurately budgeted for. Once a total cost has been calculated, one can then see what fees need to be set at in order to break even and one can then either cut back on costs or increase or decrease fees to make the event attractive from a cost point of view as well an experiential point of view for delegates, exhibitors and sponsors.

by: Barton Stofflet

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