Conference Lead

Role description

Throughout entire event:

• makes all final decisions regarding the conference, including how roles and responsibilities are divided in compliance with the entire PyCon team.
• keep the whole team in place

Before event:

• Monitors that all jobs get done.
• Finds volunteers for jobs not yet assigned.
• Responsible for the budget.
• Calls to and runs organisation meetings.
• Coordinates travel subsidies.

During

• Make sure all job stations are manned and that important events run as they should.
• address to last minute situation in best possible ways.

After

• Leads the evaluation work and organisation of the next organising group.

Guidelines

As most of the people in a conference organizing committee aren’t being paid, and have busy full-time jobs, it’s important the chair can inspire them from the very top. So, the chair should be able to clearly define goals, and be able to highlight that everyone has a stake in the success of a conference.

Planning a conference can make even seasoned events professionals feel jaded or overwhelmed. But to win delegate attention today, you’ve got to do more than just tick off your standard checklist.

Successful events leave nothing to chance, and no decision, however small, should be made with consideration. Every aspect of your conference is connected and should be aligned to better delight delegates and satisfy stakeholders.

1. Understanding Your Goals

• list your goals to keep yourself on track It is a truth universally acknowledged that no organisation hosts a conference without a hidden (or sometimes not-so hidden) agenda. Delivering the desired results is much easier if you understand why vast amounts of time, effort and money are being invested in the event. In fact, one of the greatest tools for organising a successful conference is simply having a concrete and quantifiable answer to one very simple question:

What does a successful conference look like to you?

1. How Will You Measure Your Success?
2. create KPIs to measure your success

When deciding your conference goals, you should also take time to plan how you’ll measure your achievements. Not only will this help you determine if your goals are viable, it’ll also make sure you’re aware of any technology or practices that need to be implemented – for example, a platform to deliver delegate surveys efficiently.

Obviously, all conferences are different. While yours might be a tangle of seemingly contradictory goals, you have to decide what is the ultimate aim to go for

Identifying the driving force behind your conference and using it to inform your decision-making will significantly simplify the planning process. You can make sure you’re always choosing a route that helps you achieve your goals by just asking yourself:

How will this conference element help me achieve this goal?

2. Understanding Your Target Market

No matter who’s booked to speak or what entertainment is planned, the real superstars of your conference are your attendees. They’re the beating heart of your event and vital to your success.

So, every element of your conference needs to be viewed through the lens of meeting their needs and delivering value (as well as helping you achieve your goals), from the catering and entertainment, to the communications strategy and choice of venue.

Of course, delivering this is much easier if you actually know who your delegates are and what they want from a conference. The best way to gain this insight is a tried and tested market research methodology – defining buyer, or in this case attendees, personas.

Persona Marketing

If you’re not already familiar with persona marketing, it involves creating representations of the core delegates that make up your audience, in order to better understand their needs and motivations. This can be done in four basic steps:

Segment your audience into typical groups of attendees. These could be based upon anything from location, age, job role, motivation for engagement or any combination that works for your conference.

For each segment, collect a set of data that provides a clear idea of the average delegate. You should draw from a wide range of personal, consumer and vocational information – some of which may come from a 3rd-party.

Using your data sets, create a well-rounded, semi-fictional character to represent each of your personas. This should make it easier to step into their shoes and see your event through their eyes, providing insight into how you can deliver engaging and delightful conference experiences.

When planning your event, always make sure you’re making delegate-centred decisions by constantly asking yourself: How will this conference element provide value for this delegate persona?

Your finished delegate personas might read somewhat like the following examples, although you should note that these are very simple and the more detail you include, the more insight you’ll discover.

Judging from PyCon Thailand’s delegates, the delegated personas are as below:

Employee Emmy

Employee Emmy is 20-30, engaged and planning to get married soon, works as a backend developer in an international organisation. They're the household’s secondary earner and their monthly treat is a fancy meal or night out with friends.

Emmy takes pride in their job, works hard and embraces any training opportunities available, although they’re generally uninterested in wider company performance. Enjoys having something to aim for and appreciates how their organisation rewards their hard work.

Pythonista Paul

Pythonista Paul is 18-30, lives overseas and by far the biggest consumer of your product. Extremely loyal to PyCon, they recently responded very positively to a promotion offering a more personalised event.

Despite your event already being a substantial expense, Paul regularly spends additional money on accessories, add-ons and digital content, as well as making purchases from your partners and sponsors.

CTO Charles

CTO Charles is 40-50 and in charge of his IT team of 50+ employees. Although not currently a PyCon attendee, they’ve previously purchased tickets from you for some of their employees every year.

Charles is very interested in industry trends and considers themselves to be on the cutting edge of technology. They are part of a networking group that attends many similar conferences every year and can usually be found closing out a venue’s bar.

Student Sam

Student Sam is 16-20 and is currently pursuing his Computer Science Degree in a local university. They self-taught Python online and joins many FB Python related groups. They’re like to attend talks and meet ups and chats among friends to talk about the latest technology created by Python or some great coding hacks. They live in school hostel and get monthly allowance from parents. They look forward to joining some startups or multi-national organisation upon graduation. They attend PyCon last year using their own savings and profit from the student tickets.

Designing the Delegate Journey

Every interaction a delegate has that involves your conference should contribute to moving them closer to taking an action needed for you to achieve your goals – from the first point of contact to the very end of the event lifecycle, and every sight, sound and social interaction in-between.

Your audience should be able to move seamlessly through the delegate journey and so every touchpoint needs to do three things:

• Motivate the delegate to take an action that moves you closer to your goals
• Provide an obvious way forward along the delegate journey
• Feel natural and make sense – you should never make delegates feel manipulated

When planning you should be able to plot a clear path from the beginning of the delegate journey to the end. If any touchpoints don’t meet the requirements, it’s an opportunity to create new experiences that successfully move delegates along.

Results

Creating an enjoyable conference experience is obviously extremely important, but it’s vital you keep in mind that the event is just means to an end – ultimately, success is only judged on whether you achieve your goals.

Simply comparing event data to your goals will provide a basic understanding of your achievements. However, this stage of the conference lifecycle is an opportunity to gain in-depth insight into how your event (and you, as a conference organiser) performed. Don’t be scared to dive deeper into your data to find answers.

3. Managing your team

As the conference chair, you join an organization and sometimes the organizing committee has already been appointed. So it’s important that you learn how to work with them.

Handling a team where everyone has to work alongside the range of expertise and opinions of committee members, it doesn’t always run smoothly…

Everything has a knock-on effect when you’re organizing an event. When there isn’t a clear structure in terms of who’s responsible for making what decision, then as an event team we’re not quite sure which direction to go. It all gets a bit messy and delays happen, and then you don’t hit your delegate numbers and conflicts occur too.

Go through these train of questions to ask your team member:

"What can I do to help you?"

"What’s the best way for us to communicate and work with you?"

"What do you need from us so you can make the decisions we need you to make?"

Providing them with what they need, so they can come back to you with what you need is really important.

Getting recognition for your work can be challenging when you’re working with people outside the event planning world who often think organising an event is an easy task. So it’s important that you make them feel confident about your ability to deliver and keep them informed of how things are progressing. Giving committee members a view of the bigger picture is important.

As part of the onboarding process, we give them a top-level summary of how the conference fits in strategically with other activities we do. We also include a summary of conference costs and income, to make them aware of financial implications and budgetary restrictions. Then the entire team are clear on where we’re at.

Avoiding assumptions

Even if you have to state the obvious, do state it. Because although there are things that for us are standard practice and we think everyone knows this, they don’t. That’s not what they do for a living. So never make assumptions, because sometimes it’s not obvious to them and you realise when it’s too late.“

Conduct induction meeting with committee members and follow up with information in writing so they can read it and they can refer back to it. And when we have a conversation with someone over the phone or in person, we follow up with an email to summarise what we discussed so everyone is on the same page.

4. Reflection

Thankfully, collecting and analysing data no longer requires manually wading through spreadsheets, tally charts, and budgets, so discovering actionable insight into your event now takes far less time and effort.

This can give you more time and energy to reflect meaningfully on the results. Your own observations and data complemented with the strategic use of readily available tools will empower you to answer questions like:

What messages resonated most? What did we do successfully? What can be improved?

Get feedback from your staff, your team, your sponsors.

Don’t simply link to your survey in your post-event email. Embed your first question in the survey itself.

A SurveyMonkey study found a 22% increase in survey opens when the survey’s first question was right in the email. And not only are people more likely to open a survey that teases the first question, they’re also 20% more likely to finish the entire survey.

5. Resolutions

The final stage of the conference lifecycle brings you full circle, as you begin to set resolutions for next year. Remember, it’s never too early to start doing the necessary groundwork for your next event by thinking about:

• Five things we are going to do again and how to improve them
• Conference elements that actively helped us achieve our goals
• Five things we are not going to do again and what we can do instead
• Conference elements that actively prevented us achieving our goals

6. The Handover

To ensure consistency and that next conference leader has a strong grasp of the organising structure and responsibilities, the conference leader should hold its position for a minimum of 2 years and a maximum of not more than 4 years. Should the conference lead decides to step down in less than 2 years due to unforeseen circumstances, the committee members should submit the names of the candidates before the end of the conference and vote for the next conference lead.

Conference Organising Timeline