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Author: Taylor Stockett
Taylor blogs and tweets for ProposalSpace. He lives in Austin, TX and is passionate about Social, running, and his two adorable puppies: Fitz & Franco. Follow him on Twitter @cstockett05.
ProposalSpace is the more efficient and affordable way to collect, review and select proposals online. For more information or to set up a free account, visit ProposalSpace.com.
New Feature: Email Receipts
Call administrators can now track the status of every email sent through ProposalSpace! Just pull up any message sent via the Messaging Module and click the new Delivery Receipts tab. Continue reading New Feature: Email Receipts
Data Export Improvements
Our Data Export feature now has an option to limit reports to certain types of proposals. This means call administrators no longer have to weed out unwanted proposals after generating a report. Now, you can just pick the status(es) you want to include.
Next up: The ability to select specific items from the submission and role forms.
New Feature: Scheduling Module
One of the most critical tasks for any conference organizer is building the session schedule. Not only do you have to figure out how to arrange the sessions so they tell a story, you also have to make sure you don’t put someone in two places at the same time.
Unfortunately, we can’t help you with the story-telling part (at least not yet). We can, however, help you easily check for scheduling conflicts with our new drag-and-drop Scheduling Module.
Where Is My Logout Button?
Some of you may have noticed some changes to the design of the site. We’ve been working on new features and needed a little extra “real estate” in order to keep things from becoming overcrowded. Plus, the average size of monitors (even on laptops) has continued to increase, so why leave all that extra white space unused?
Crowdsource, Curate, or Combo?
The most common model for selecting presenters for educational conferences is pretty straightforward:
- Announce a call for proposals (or call for papers, call for abstracts, call for speakers, etc.)
- Collect proposals
- Have a committee of volunteers review the proposals
- Select presentations based on the reviews
- Build a session program that accommodates the selections
Although the process works for the vast majority of meetings, it’s hard to argue that it can’t be improved.
Review Groups Are Here!
A lot of conferences—especially larger ones—need to split up their review tasks among different groups of reviewers. Up to now, the only way to do that in ProposalSpace was to set up multiple calls, each with its own set of reviewers. Now, call administrators can manage multiple sets of reviewers in a single call!
Live Streaming via YouTube
YouTube has announced a new feature (not available to everyone yet) that allows events to stream proceedings live: http://sites.google.com/site/ytpartnercommunications/Announcements/youtubelive
It looks like YouTube is planning on rolling out the new feature throughout 2011. We’re not exactly sure how it works, but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on!
Strategies for New & Return Attendees
Jeff Hurt recently posted something on Velvet Chainsaw’s Midcourse Correction blog that caught our attention. Basically, he points out how past attendees and prospective attendees employ different criteria when deciding whether to attend your conference and recommends unique marketing strategies for the two groups.
New Feature: Session Publishing
Our new Publishing Module lets you publish your conference’s session information—including supporting materials—on any website.
Conference organizers can:
- Assign dates, times and locations to sessions.
- Select which information gets displayed for each session and for each person in the session.
- Embed the session information in any website with a single line of code.
Authors can:
- Attach documents to their sessions for attendees to download.
Attendees can:
- Search for sessions by keyword.
- Sort sessions by title, date/time, and location.
The best part? Any change you make in ProposalSpace shows up immediately on your website.