I have now run/been involved in running a few conferences, e.g., Marketing Science, Marketing Strategy Consortium, the Empirical and Theoretical (ET) Symposium. (Now called ETSYM because people thought ET Symposium was silly — I thought it was funny). I’ve learned quite a bit and been surprised by a number of the things that I have seen. Here is some advice from my experience, hope it is useful.
Venue — Your University
Venue really matters.
If you are at a university your space should always be the first choice. This can be executive education buildings if they are more conveniently located. If your university won’t help, then maybe don’t volunteer to manage the conference. Your life will be miserable if your school doesn’t value the work you put into it. BTW are you working at the right place if they don’t want to support conferences to share insights? This is the sort of thing that helps build university profiles. I think they should probably give you a bonus but don’t hold your breath for that. You run conferences as a public duty (and for the fame and glory) not for any other reason.
The cost difference between doing a conference at a university and doing it at a hotel is truly massive. Often you might see the cost double per head. Classrooms with stadium seating are usually at least as good as hotel rooms with stackable chairs. You also won’t have to worry as much about AV support. Universities often have computers and projectors ready. Plus, there are likely technical people who can troubleshoot any problems.
University premises = good.
Commercial Venue
Why then would you go anywhere but a university? Two reasons size and location.
Size is a hard problem to get over. If you want more than a couple of hundred people to attend many universities simply can’t cope. You will need to go with a commercial venue. There are a number of excellent commercial venues, but you would be surprised to see the massive variance between them. When I visited some the cost difference was minimal, but they varied between one with a basement from the shining fell and a lovely modern layout. Do make sure you visit — don’t just look at the brochures — and then pick the good one assuming you want it to be a success.
At one place the conference areas were poor quality, but they offered me a truly lovely room. That didn’t seem right. (If you are thinking of accepting a bribe, I hear Trump coin is a much more efficient method).
Transportation
People will also go for commercial venues if transportation to the university is challenging. We have that issue in Athens, GA. For local conferences it isn’t too bad. Just have a few parking spots ready. If you are running a national or international conference, think about the major transportation hubs. Trains are great if you have them, but the US doesn’t feel as much shame about the rubbish state of its trains as you would think it should. This means you need to worry about planes.
If you can do the conference at a hub that is easy for your target attendees that is great. That isn’t always possible. When visiting Georgia, getting to Atlanta by plane is easy and getting to Athens is easy if you have a car. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help attendees from out of town. To be clear transportation is something to give great thought to. I thought about putting on buses, but it just wasn’t practical. Rideshares are becoming an easier option worldwide so you might want to give people details of what they might expect on that. Likely all you can do is provide as much information to the attendees as early as possible and at least they know what they are commiting to.
Still, if you end up hosting a conference somewhere outside of main airport hubs expect complaints about location in the feedback. The good news is that you shouldn’t feel too bad, there wasn’t anything else you could have done.
Scheduling — Good Luck
This is a good time to embrace imperfection. The academic conference calendar is getting very busy. You will find it very, very hard to pick a date suitably far from everything else.
What can be done?
Schedule much earlier than you think you should. Plan and announce dates years in advance if you can. You ideally want to squat on a date and let other people worry about scheduling around you.
Expect someone to decide that the date is wrong for them and want you to change everything around because they are the most important person in the world. (After all they have publications in A journals that at least a half dozen people have read). Of course, the best solution is to get all key stakeholders involved to agree the date when you set it, but don’t expect planning in advance to make as much difference as you might hope.
Cost, It Is A Problem But There May Be No Easy Solution
When you attend conferences, you will wonder where your massive registration fee goes. I did.
Having run them you get to see how expensive it is to host them. The bulk of the money will go on catering. It is amazing how much you can spend, especially when you add in coffee and snacks. If the hotels you recommend give attendees breakfast that is a real bonus. Just give them coffee first thing — it’ll save a lot of money. At university premises you may have an idea of what it’ll cost that won’t be crazy wrong.
Commercial venues are something else. They often give you the venue free if you commit to a certain amount of spend on catering. Their catering will be incredibly expensive to make up for the free space. expect to pay in advance of $100 per person for a meal. Fairly bad catering is still super expensive so don’t be shocked.
Food
When making the menus, try and ensure that there is something everyone can eat. The amount of times I’ve visited conferences and not been able to eat anything because vegan doesn’t work for them is shocking. To add insult to injury people will come and pester you about not eating. Waiters will hover saying, you didn’t want to cheese dish, so how about a dead chicken?
It isn’t just about the hunger. When people don’t feed you, then you instantly feel completely unwelcome. Of course, food service is complex so you want to limit options but simpler is usually better. You don’t need many types of dead animal. Beef is an unsustainable food. I’ve been to sustainability events that served beef. This is truly crazy.
If you do have a vegan dish, don’t assume it is a calorie reduction plan on the part of the attendee. A piece of cauliflower is not a meal. Dribbling cheese over it does not make it one. Although it does allow vegans to opt out of the meal rather than pretending to like burnt cauliflower.
Labels are really important as well. Often, the food may be okay for the person, whatever their food restriction, but you need to tell people. Guessing if it okay to eat the food isn’t a fun game, especially if people have severe allergies. Don’t make an attendee sick, especially if you are in the US. Have you seen US hospital bills?
Someone who made the food presumably knows what is it in the food (one hopes). Write on a piece of paper what that is.
Swag and Sustainability
Who wants swag (rubbish gifts)? Who has ever thought, ‘you know what I need is a branded note pad from a random university I’m not connected to’? Try and avoid these if possible. A lot get thrown away, especially if they are cheap nasty stuff.
If you must do swag do less, but better. Give a quality item that they will really want, or at least think good enough to regift.
Badges: let’s work on cutting out the plastic and lanyards. At a minimum collect these and re-use them. If anyone has a lanyard collection and wants to keep theirs let them but most people don’t know what to do with a ten-year-old lanyard sitting in their desk. They either throw it away eventually or feel guilty every time they stare at it.
At an event, I used card-sized plastic name tags but have reused them for games in my classes. There is likely a better solution but I felt I tried. Often events use hard paper nametags which seem to work, at least for short conferences. Ideally, we will all start to bring out own name tags. I try but half the time I forget and the other half of the time there is already a badge made for me and I don’t want anyone else taking it and pretending to be me. (Okay that is pretty unlikely but I’m manifesting a world where everyone would love to be me).
Hybrid Events
With the advent of online conference software hybrid (or even fully online) conferences. I have mixed feelings. I totally agree with people who see this as a way of reducing unnecessary travel and democratizing conferences for those who can’t afford the high cost of in-person attendance.
On the other hand, online conferences are pretty much uniformly shit. Who really listens to a voice on screen? You also miss the networking aspect of the conference (have you tried networking on a zoom call?). And you can’t really clear your schedule. After all, you are still around if someone needs to talk to you.
Hybrid for some bits seems a good compromise where possible. I really hope I can update this with wonderful innovations in online conferences soon. I want to like online conferences, I really do.
Let The Young People Speak
One pet peeve I have with conferences is that senior people don’t want to hear from junior people.
People who most need to present at conferences in order to improve their work are junior scholars including PHD students. Unfortunately, no one wants to listen to them, after all some of them don’t know what they are doing. Thus, we get conferences being a list of people who have (mostly) good things to say but it isn’t at all new. Go to a few and you will hear the same thing again and again.
A lot of conferences set up gate keepers to try and ensure that those with early-stage ideas don’t get to present. What is the point then? If the idea is fully developed it can be published and people can read it, they don’t need to come to the conference to hear it.
So, when running a conference ensure that there are a variety of ways to get on the program. Sure, have a few “celebrities” speak but make sure that more junior people get on the program. This may be in traditional sessions or shorter lightning sessions (which is especially good discipline to train people to get to the key point).
If you have posters try and ensure that people go to the poster session. Often this involves putting the drinks by the posters. That helps but work to encourage participation in the poster sessions. Just being near people drinking doesn’t help the students showing off their work
Give Awards — And Not Just To The Usual Suspects
A second peeve is that senior people get all the awards. Ask yourself, who needs the awards. A senior person who has already published lots, edited journals, and has a ridiculously long CV. Or a new scholar. Obviously, it is a big boost to the new scholar whereas the senior people might forget their award on the plane.
Awards are great. We should give more but rather than giving more to tenured professors think of how you can give them out to people who need them both to boost their confidence and to pad out their sparse CVs. Can you give a best PHD student paper in a category prize? Best junior professor’s work? How about best paper from someone who hasn’t attended a conference before? If you can work out a way to give prizes to those who have less advantages — so not Wharton, Duke etc… students great. How about best presentations?
It can be hard to do this perfectly. With lots of talks one person can’t go to all. Have one of the team visit all talks, this isn’t ideal as some will benefit from having a more enthusiastic judge. Who cares? Better to give an award with a noisy judging system than give nothing.
Awards are good. Let’s encourage people more but there isn’t as much point in encouraging anyone who is already successful.
Try New Things
Don’t be afraid to innovate. Sometimes they won’t work. At Marketing Science many years ago they offered double length sessions. As a PhD student I thought, “great, longer to explain my fascinating ideas”. Turns out that (pretty much) no one else thought listening to a bonus length PhD student presentation was a good use of their time. That said, I appreciate the innovation.
Try new things, most won’t work but if they do they can make the conference so much better.
