Powerful, Enterprise-Grade Event Management Software
Sell tickets & Collect registration fees online
Full-Service Abstract Management Software: Collect ➩ Assign ➩ Review ➩ Decide ➩ Notify
Customizable forms to collect & review abstracts, symposia, proposals & grants
The Complete Event Schedule Builder to Create Virtual & Hybrid Sessions
Create Event Schedule with Slides, Group Chats, Survey forms & more
Engagement Tools to Host Virtual Conferences & Online Community Website
Engage attendees & Produce knowledge with online networking portal
Cloud-based event management platforms like ConfTool are helping numerous event organizers from around the world run their events. Professionals planning academic conferences, in particular, have ratified ConfTool’s stature as a trusted tool in the scholarly community. It handles core event management functions like abstract submissions, peer review workflows and basic registration for academic and scientific events skillfully. At least it has for a long time.
The things that come for free can seem like a lottery win at first glance. On first use. Imagine receiving all you need and for a price tag that reads zero. Free. Completely free of cost. Microsoft CMT is one such free jackpot. It is a conference management toolkit that is accessible in the market for free. Microsoft says, “No worries, it’s on the house.”
An outstanding, even potentially groundbreaking research paper, sometimes simply never materializes. Perhaps the author may never get down to writing it and the paper remains an idea. Or even worse, a promising paper, written and pruned, simply never reaches the right platform. There is a particular kind of disappointment that comes in circumstances such as this. It is also one that conference organizers, just as much as promising authors, know all too well. You’ve spent weeks if not months planning a research conference. Building something you believe in. You’ve dedicated your time and effort into perfecting it. However, once the Call For Papers is ready to go out, you’re confronted with a bitter realization: that submitters didn’t nearly believe in your research conference as much as you did.
Plenty of event planners today realize halfway through that the service they signed up for does not meet their needs. And their attendees’ expectations. In this view, the team is forced to reckon with the reality of the software they have been working with. Sometimes costing tens of thousands of dollars, discontinuing a service is never easy. And never the first choice, at all. However, circumstances outgrow our events and we look for alternatives. It is with this thought that we have set out to discuss some of the brilliant vFairs alternatives.
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There is a moment that most academic conference organizers know well. A reviewer who cannot find their assigned papers. An author who cannot tell whether their submission went through. A program chair rebuilding their workflow from scratch, again, because the interface refused to cooperate. For years, that moment arrived inside EasyChair.
The role of the corporate event planner has changed fundamentally over the last few years. Many of these changes have been driven by the advent of contemporary technology, such as artificial intelligence and data technologies. From the perspective of the attendees as well, performance expectations are greater than they have ever been.
Let’s cut to the chase: what is a symposium? To answer this question, you’ll first need to understand what a symposium is not. A symposium is not a place wherein attendees gather arbitrarily and gratuitously. While one may argue that, ‘Well, no gatherings are uncalled for! Everything holds a purpose.’ However, symposiums hold a particular kind of weight and importance that other closely associated conference formats don’t. A conference is often massive, sometimes with people packed to the brim. The takeaway is, therefore, limited in individual scope. It is more passive than active. Some participants run the show, while most others watch the show run.
Businesses, organizations and pretty much any entity that sells a product or service for-profit warrants visibility. A spectacular product that never reaches the right audience is simply a failed invention. A life-changing service that no one signs up for is, yet again, a failed proposition. What distinguishes success and failure for players across industries has a lot to do with how and where they position themselves.
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Signing up for an event should be exciting rather than tiring. Your registration portal should be able to sustain the enthusiasm that a user entered in with. And not kill it altogether. An event registration that lags, reloads several times or asks for insignificant information, is a sure shot route to disappointment. A user will exit your registration tab just as quickly as they logged into it. Therefore, it is important to be introspective with the kind of event registration platform you will be using for your event.
Most event teams do not go looking for a new platform in the middle of a planning cycle. The switch happens after a live event exposes a gap that no workaround can fix. Something like a check-in system that cannot keep pace with peak arrivals or even a badge-printing machine that jams under pressure. These are operational failures that happen in front of the very audience that you and your team spent months building for the event.
There is a point in every poorly planned online networking event that most of us may have encountered. The host cues to something like ‘go ahead and introduce yourself in the chat.’ Following this, dozens of names appear in the chat simultaneously and almost nobody is able to follow them. The next 15-30 minutes then whittles away in the kind of polite, structured silence that feels busier than it is.
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Conflict management is perhaps the single most valuable skill that any professional leader can develop. This is particularly relevant in the event management space, which is prone to several different kinds of conflicts. Managing conflicts is never about allowing them to arise at all, no.
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