“By bringing people together, whether in person or online, you unlock the boundless potential of knowledge to inform and inspire. Research conferences serve as a genuine social network for academia.” Paul Killoran, CEO and founder of Ex Ordo.
Valued by researchers, managing a research conference play a key role in advancing knowledge, fostering collaboration among peers, and sharing new ideas. Researchers are always on the lookout for opportunities to get published. Boost your researchers with forums for knowledge exchange, networking, international collaboration, professional development, visibility, and recognition by using this conference planning guide.
With researchers and conference organisers in our ranks, we at Ex Ordo understand the challenges of organising these events all too well. Should you opt for hybrid, virtual, or in-person? How can you meet your delegate targets? How can your event stand out? Is it financially sustainable? How do you manage it with limited resources?
Whether you’re a seasoned conference organiser or managing your first research conference, we have resources that are here to help reduce stress and save you time. You need to leave workarounds and a lack of support in the past. We asked Ex Ordo customers what are the biggest problems they face? Time-saving solutions, seamless integrations with existing workflows, and quality support.
Like the aim of any conference, organisations deliver the outstanding experience your delegates deserve. That’s why this article has been written, we’ve combined the experience of the team at Ex Ordo along with some great guidance from our customers to provide conference organisers with hints, tips and templates to help them continue to deliver outstanding experiences.
Conference Planning Guide Resources
Like anyone managing a research conference or scholarly event, you don’t have days to spend on admin. But with planning, a proactive team, and the right software, you can manage a great research conference without the sleepless nights.
Before we jump in, there are tonnes of useful conference planning guides that talk you through tasks like choosing a venue and arranging catering. So we’ve skipped the event planning side and focused on managing the “research” side of an event. This is for two reasons: it’s a huge part of the planning process, and it’s what we know best at Ex Ordo.
To help break down this information, we made this infographic to help conference organisers manage their research conference.
No Panic Conference Planning Guide
At Ex Ordo, we understand the challenges event organisers face when dealing with unintuitive systems, manual data exports, and time-consuming workarounds. That’s why we’ve created The No-Panic Conference Planning Guide to Organising Successful Scholarly Events, designed to provide practical advice and support tailored to conference organising teams needs.
This extensive conference planning guide covers every step of the conference planning journey, from initial strategy development to post-event analysis. It’s filled with actionable insights, expert tips, and real-world examples that will help you streamline your planning process, improve attendee experience, and ensure your events are a resounding success. In the guide we delve into a number of different key chapters of your conference organising journey.
Get your organising committee on board
Thinking about doing everything yourself? Stop right there. Even with an events team, you need an active organising committee to run a successful research conference. So form your committee and agree on who does what. Whether you have a large committee or a few dedicated folks, everyone needs clear roles and responsibilities. Identify the major conference tasks and agree on who is responsible for what. In our No Panic Research Conference Guide we provide a useful template to help you stay on top of your organising committee needs.
Choose your format
Are hybrid events too good to be true? Are virtual events here to stay? Or are you planning to run a physical event for the rest of your days? How do you choose and achieve your event goals through community connections, sharing research, and opportunities for sponsorship?
Bringing people with a shared purpose together and making it as easy as possible for communities to meet is generally a common goal of any planned event. Whether it is a social or scholarly event that aims to educate or celebrate, understanding what type of event (virtual versus hybrid versus physical) is best for your desired outcomes is important.
Event revenue – build your conference budget
Even though the goal of a scholarly event usually isn’t to make a profit, managing your research conference finances is still vital. In a society or an institution, it’s important to stick to a strict budget. Create your draft budget now. Then adapt it as you secure funding and sponsorship. Creating a detailed budget is a vital part of the planning process, but there can be a fair bit of guesswork involved.
We have a useful conference budget template available that can help you and your team stay on top of their expenses.
Create your conference website
Whether it’s a simple site, a new webpage on your society’s site, or a bespoke design, you need a digital destination to send people to. Get it live as soon as possible so you can start sharing your event with the research world. Your website will showcase your conference, answer visitors’ questions, and allow them to submit, register, and get in touch. And it should get them as excited as you are about your event.
Use scholarly event software for efficiency
Sourcing the right software is as important as setting a date. Now’s a good time to do your homework, compare software packages, and choose the one that offers you flexibility and seamless integrations with your workflows. The right software can eliminate a lot of late nights, uninspiring work, and admin stress. This means you can focus on your #1 priority: organising a great conference.
Issue your conference call for papers
Time to announce your amazing conference to the world. There’s just one problem: thousands of other scholarly conferences are trying to do the same thing. Use creative solutions to stand out from the crowd, supported by seamless, simple conference comms.
Find a useful template for your CFP in our No Panic Conference Planning guide and use it to best engage your community.
Collect and review submissions
Before you send your call for papers, you need to define your submission and review dates, develop your submission process, and set up your abstract management system, made simple with easy insights across a single platform and painless peer review solutions. When it comes to managing submissions, the devil’s in the detail. Iron out your process and use software to eliminate as many manual tasks as you can before you open submissions.
Build your conference programme in the mobile app
At this stage of managing a research conference it’s a good time to build and release your final programme. But keep in mind that you’ll likely be making changes to it right up to the wire, so use a system to maximise your time and keep things beautifully simple. Shape your programme so it facilitates connections between attendees, embraces variety, and leaves people with some room to breathe.
Ex Ordo Mobile allows you to build out your full conference programme in our core Ex Ordo system, and then sync your programme or any updates you make to your mobile app, saving you time on template imports and manual edits, and reducing the chance of human error.
Register delegates
The registration portion of any event is often a magnet for things going astray, which is where a smart system can set the experience apart for you and your delegates. So do some prep, test (and then re-test) your system, and open registration now – at least a month before you send acceptance letters. Registering delegates for a conference means all the usual ticketing tasks, plus some added complications. So aim for simplicity and get organised early.
Conference day
Time for one final push. Now’s a good time to get all hands on deck. And remember: you are a swan gliding gracefully across the surface of a lake. (No one needs to know your legs are paddling like hell below.) Even though the bulk of work is done and dusted, there’s still lots to do. But don’t panic. Divide this list of tasks amongst your committee. Then go forth and conquer.
Post conference analysis
Take a moment to savour that post-conference feeling. It’s nice, isn’t it? Now it’s all over, apart from the post-game analysis. No matter how well your conference went, there are always lessons to be learned. Now’s your chance to document them in your post-conference report, at a research conference we don’t need to tell you how powerful your event data is. During your post conference report, make sure to reflect on how you can use that data better.
How Ex Ordo can help?
We know someone, when managing a research conference, who used to print a thousand submissions and sort them into topic piles on their office floor. Then they would walk around with post-its, trying to pair submissions with reviewers. They don’t do that anymore because they use conference management software. (Ours, of course.) Others use clunky low-budget tools, for example Google forms, that ultimately leave members, authors, and others with a poor first impression of the event experience. Conference software is essentially abstract management, registration, scheduling, and a reliable virtual or hybrid software rolled into one system. If you’re expecting to receive more than 50 submissions, we strongly advise you to invest in a decent software package, designed for the complexities of scholarly events, to help you manage them and help you save time and stress for your team.
Can’t I buy software separately?
Absolutely.
Sourcing systems that talk to each other is a huge relief when you have a million other things vying for your attention in the run-up to your event. Maybe you have software you already use for part of the process that you really like, but you need something that will slot into place and actually work together. Or centralise everything to one piece of software so you can share the workload with your committee. And you can do things like see which presenters haven’t registered yet, and make abstracts and papers available for download from your programme. Platforms like Ex Ordo are committed to building into your tech ecosystem through membership systems and more.
Handy stuff.
Hope you enjoyed our conference planning guide.