We recently heard of a fantastic idea for making the best of a bad situation and wanted to pass it along!

It seems an organization was forced to cancel their annual conference at the last minute due to the novel coronavirus pandemic (like many these days). Attendees made it clear they expected full refunds and the organization felt it could not risk angering its members if it did not give them their money back. Giving every attendee a full refund, however, would have meant the organization would end up with no revenue to offset their own non-refundable expenses, causing a huge loss for the organization.

Continue reading Making Lemonade

Dave Lutz, over at the Midcourse Corrections blog, lays out six really good ways to improve your conference committee.

Here at ProposalSpace, we always try to see things through the eyes of our users, so we especially liked his recommendation to “Walk in the attendee’s shoes”:

Many conference committees evaluate potential sessions and speakers using more information than the attendees will see. Attendees make the decision to attend based on session title, session description, and learning objectives. Embrace a blind review process. It will help eliminate personal agendas and challenge the committee to evaluate the program as a paying attendee would.

For years now we’ve been told that virtual conferences are destined to replace traditional, face-to-face meetings. “Experts” (who usually work for companies that produce virtual conferences) keep insisting that people are clamoring for the chance to “attend” conferences without all the hassles of travel, pandemics, bedbugs, whatever. But despite the inconveniences, people have continued to flock to conferences, giving organizers little reason to make the switch. Until now.

Continue reading Virtual Conference Tug-of-War