Open Forum

- Job Title: Training Program Coordinator

- Event Description: I recently worked on a sales and marketing conference for 400+ of our sales partners at a local convention center with some of the events of the conference taking place at our factory headquarters one town over and at our secondary manufacturing facility about 30 minutes away.

- Event Dates: April 2023

- Phase of Event Planning: (Event/Web Build, During Event, Post-Event): Currently in post-event for this particular event

- Type of Event (webinar, training, conference, rewards trip etc): Sales/Marketing Conference with In-Person and Virtual attendance options

- What Worked for You (Do's – include 2+): 

1.  I loved the use of Planner Alerts for an event of this size.  Waitlist and cancellation alerts helped me keep a constant eye on our registration numbers once we were within a few weeks of the event.  It was great to see what sessions were getting close to capacity by setting up a planner alert for sessions that reached 90% capacity and then 100% capacity.  This allowed me to quickly add an additional occurrence of one of our sessions, which we had not anticipated to be as popular as it was.

2. I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to collecting and managing data, so I dived pretty deeply into reports for this event.  I was able to pull analytics from our past events and compare registration and participation numbers between this year's event and our previous events.  It was fascinating to see the breakdown of what types of customers (based on registration questions) were registering for in-person vs. virtual attendance, for each type of session, and how many new attendees we had compared to attendees who had attended many events with us in the past.  This data was instrumental for our executive team as we finalized our curriculum before the event and to track ROI after the event. Pulling data on which sessions were the most and least popular will also help inform our curriculum choices for next year's event.

- What to Avoid (Don'ts – include 2+)

1.  I ran into issues with my separate registration path for staff members, which I wasn't expecting.  In order to keep sessions within their room's capacity for attendees instead of filling seats with staff members, I restricted the ability for staff to register for sessions.  This ended up backfiring when staff couldn't add sessions to their calendar in the Attendee Hub.  

2.  Likewise, in an effort to prevent in-person attendees from accidentally registering for virtual sessions (which were intended to be dedicated just for the virtual attendees), I had rules in place that only allowed the in-person registration path to register for in-person sessions, and vice versa.  In the end, this caused issues with In-Person attendees not being able to view On Demand content after the event.

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