This conference planning playbook is work-in-progress, aiming to guide the running of future Geekcamp conferences.
Highly inspired by @winston's Conference Planning Playbook
GeekcampSG has been around since 2009. Even though we are (probably) the oldest community conference in Singapore, one of the areas we are lacking is in the knowledge management of the SOPs and good practices for organising the conference. This has resulted in new organisers having to figure out things on their own, sometimes encountering avoidable blind spots due to their inexperience.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was a constraint which resulted in the conference being held online due to social distancing. GeekcampSG 2020 was not only a virtual conference, but one that experimented with live compositing in front of a green screen to retain a conference hall experience. In fact, we believe that we may be the first community conference in Singapore that used such a setup. Thus, we believe there are new learnings and knowledge worthwhile documenting.
We hope that this playbook can allow future organisers to build on the knowledge of their predecessors, and aid the longevity of GeekcampSG.
At the same time, we hope that this document can be a solid reference for any new conference organiser. It could be someone executing an inaugural run of a new conference, or those who want to bring their conference virtual first time.
We are always learning and welcome feedback/discussion with regards to this playbook. Finally, what we have presented has worked for our context, but may not necessarily work for other conferences. YMMV.
(Further elaboration needed)
- Slack for main conversations
- Screen.so for calls
- Trello for task management
The objective of the marketing team is to create awareness of GeekcampSG
Marketing team members need to manage and utilise social media and mailing lists to reach out to target segments. It is ok to be unfamiliar with the tools, but it is highly recommended that interested candidates should at least have some experience with using social media.
Assuming all templates are in place:
- Pre-conference: Min 1 pax. Ideally at least 2 pax
- Conference: Min 2 pax. Ideally at least 3 pax
Note: during D day. There is a lot of work to be done. The lesser people there are for marketing, the less capacity there is to execute the full marketing plan
- Give trusted members of the team access to the social media accounts
- Setup email forwarding for new marketing team members
- Setup tweetdeck to monitor hashtags and mentions
- Ensure that queries sent via email and on social media are answered promptly
- Recruitment
- Team meeting pictures
- Sponsorship deck
- CFP + conference date
- CFP closing soon / CFP extension
- Confirmed schedule
- Collect speaker's social media handles
- Individual talk/speaker promotion
- Registration
- Sponsor shoutouts
- Reminder of event at D-1
- D-day postings for each talk: start and end
- Sponsor booths
- Food
- After party
- Post event Survey
- Post-event promotion: video uploads for each talk
- Post-event promotion: video playlist link
- Social media accounts: FB, Twitter, Instagram
- EDM: mailchimp, past attendee emails
- Message templates: for social media and EDM
- Marketing channels spreadsheet
- Email account
- Design assets
- marketing in public slack
- #marketing in geekcampsg organisers slack
- Youtube
Work with various teams to set up the platform/webpage for attendees to sign up for conference and pay for the tickets if it is a paid event,
Assuming all templates are in place:
- Min 1 pax. Ideally at least 2 pax
Note: Not necessary, but usually dual-hatted with Registration as they are closely linked and Ticketing is pre-conference heavy while Registration is conference heavy.
- Set up the ticketing platform
- Work with committee to determine dates and timing of event.
- Work with committee to determine when to open and close the registration.
- Work Venue Management team for venue details to populate the registration page with.
- Check with all the teams on questions they require to be added to questionnaire (eg: t-shirt size, meal preference, workshop attendance, etc)
- Work with Marketing team on marketing information (copies and website link) to put in registration page.
- Work with Marketing team on promote registration when it opens.
- Work with Sponsorship team to create ticket codes for sponsors and partners
- Create ticket codes for volunteers
- Attendance
- Ensure members of the Registration team have access for checking in attendees
- Monitor attendance
- Statistics
- Gather statistics from the ticketing platform and send to the committee
- Number of registrations and attendance
- Responses to registration questionnaire
- Future action
- Provide information from responses to next committee that is for their future action. Eg: Name list of those interested in speaking or helping out.
- Give members of the Ticketing team access to the ticketing platform accounts
- Give members of the Registration team access for checking in attendees to the ticketing platform accounts
- Give committee members view acces (for statistics/analytics) access to the ticketing platform accounts
- eventbrite
- Full featured ticketing platform
- Free for free events, but a bit pricey (around 10%) for paid events
- Tito
- Quite comparable to eventbrite
- Also free for free events, cheaper for for paid events at 3% (1% for community & non-profit events)