Planning a Conference: Key Factors to Consider

Holding a conference is a great idea for sharing new discoveries in a particular field, meeting other researchers, or making contact with new companies. Whatever the reason for holding a conference, planning it takes a lot of work for all those involved in making it happen.

Whether you are thinking about organizing one, or if you attend conferences and are interested in knowing what's behind it, today we briefly talk about some factors to take into account. We also talk about Orvium, and how makes it easier for you to prepare for a conference.

Bonus track: We gave you a full guide to organizing a conference!

Key Factors to Start Planning a Conference

Beginning to plan any type of event is a complicated task. There are a lot of factors
to consider, including:

• Theme and objectives of the conference. Know what you want it to be
  about and what you want to achieve by holding it. This will help you to
  always adjust to what you have decided your event will be.
• Where and when to celebrate. There are many factors that influence this. If the conference is face-to-face, you need to decide when is the best time with the idea that as many people as possible will attend. The location also has an influence. Depending on your audience, the choice of location will also vary. There is also the possibility of holding the conference online, a method that has become widespread, although it also has its difficulties, especially in terms of networking. To know more about the different types of conferences that you can do, read this post: Exploring the Different Types of Academic Conferences: Presencial, Hybrid, and Virtual.
• Budget. It is advisable (not to say obligatory on many occasions) to have a
  prepared budget, which you will have to manage and allocate to each of the
  aspects of the conference.
• Sponsors and marketing. A good way to promote the event and get more
  influence is by selecting sponsors. Select them, not just anyone will do. It's important to choose the ones who have more in common with your conference. Marketing actions will help you to publicize your event and make it reach a greater number of people. The investment in these two promotional aspects must also be taken into account in the available budget.

These are just some of the aspects you need to take into account when organizing a
conference. Within each of the logistics sections, you will find a series of necessary
activities that will be important to coordinate, to make everything go smoothly, depending on both your needs and the needs of the attendees.

Top 10 Mistakes When Organizing a Conference

Although there are many things to organize, when planning, don't forget that there are also aspects that can give your event a bad image:

• Charge attendees for internet access, food, or parking.
• Talk too much about how great your conference will be.
• Taking "less is more" too far and not meeting the needs of the attendees.
• Relying too much on volunteers to organize the event.
• Forgetting to tell attendees about conference implementations and
  measurements.
• Do not ask about nutritional needs.
• Choosing a site that is "too noisy" or "too small" to hold the conference.
• Make critical decisions the day before.
• Overwhelm attendees with too much mail and conference material.
• Not giving feedback after the event and not taking into account the opinion of the attendees about the conference.

Don't Forget...

Once you have finished the conference, don't forget to thank the authors and
speakers who attended and provide them with the necessary material (photos,
documents, videos) developed during the conference.

Evaluate if the results have been positive and have been in accordance with the
objectives you had planned. This will help you to know which aspects went well and which should be improved for future events. It will also help you to start planning for the next conference (it's never too soon!).

Orvium Helps you to Plan your Conference

Despite all the work it may take, the conferences help to encourage the participation of researchers and to learn about new discoveries at the time.

At Orvium we have created a complete guide to planning your academic conference, which tells you in more detail what to do so no detail escapes you when you are organizing a conference, and some tricks to make it all easier.

You can have the guide completely free by clicking on the following button.

If this post was helpful for you we also recommend you to read this one: How to Write a Welcome Speech | Academic Conference Edition. Don't forget to follow us on social media  (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin e Instagram).