Crowdsource, Curate, or Combo?

The most common model for selecting presenters for educational conferences is pretty straightforward:

1. Announce a call for proposals (or call for papers, call for abstracts, call for speakers, etc.)
2. Collect proposals
3. Have a committee of volunteers review the proposals
4. Select presentations based on the reviews
5. 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.

One suggestion we've noticed recently is to open the process up to crowdsourcing. Basically, the idea is to leverage the power of social media by turning over the selection (and possibly scheduling) tasks to attendees. For a more detailed explanation, see Michelle Bruno's post at TSNN.

Another suggestion, seemingly at odds with crowdsourcing, is to have a curator manage the selection and scheduling tasks. The idea here is that conferences, like museum exhibits or other curated collections, are far more effective if the content is carefully selected and organized to "tell a story" to attendees. For more information, see Jeff Hurt's post on Velvet Chainsaw's Midcourse Corrections blog.

So which is it? Crowdsourcing obviously works for larger conferences, like SXSW, but does it also work for smaller meetings with more focused content? And how about curating? Does it work for every type of conference or only for those that can be organized around a clear theme? How about a hybrid? Is it possible (or even desirable) to combine the two into a single model?

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!

Our new Review Groups feature lets call administrators set up an unlimited number of groups and assign an unlimited number of submissions, review chairs, and reviewers to each one.

Say, for instance, that your call asks each author to select one of five topic areas. Previously, if you wanted to assign a different set of reviewers to each topic area that meant you had to set up five calls. Now, you can just create five review groups within a single call (one for each topic area), then assign submissions, review chairs and reviewers to one or more of the groups. Permissions are based on the review group, so a review chair may only work within his/her assigned group. Call administrators, of course, can work within any group.

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.

Past attendees are already biased in your favor (assuming they found your event valuable). They know what your conference is all about. You just need to remind them of the experience and demonstrate how the next conference can build on it.

Prospective attendees, on the other hand, are typically biased against you. They need to know why your event is different from other conferences competing for their time and money. Your challenge with them is trust. And who better to build trust than past attendees? Make your previous attendees your "salespeople" by giving them the tools they need to promote your event and ways for prospective attendees to connect with them.

Something similar could be said of presenters. You have two audiences—past presenters and prospective presenters—with distinct sets of needs. Your communications strategy should reflect those needs.

Past presenters already understand the value of presenting at your conference. You don't need to sell them on the benefits. They are more concerned with the process. Make it clear to them that the process will be as easy—or easier—than the last time.

Prospective presenters don't care so much about the process. They don't have a point of reference, so it's all new to them. For them, your focus should be on the benefits of presenting.

You already understand that attendees and presenters have different needs and tailor your marketing and communications strategies accordingly. So why not do the same for loyal and prospective participants? Their needs may overlap, but they are not identical. As Jeff puts it, "Segmented marketing strategies work."

New Feature: Session Publishing

Our new Publish 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.

New Feature: Profile Photo

User profiles can now include photos!

To add a photo to your profile, just log in to the site, click the "My Account" tab, then click the "Change My Photo" link. You can upload any standard image file (JPEG, GIF, PNG or TIFF) and even scale and crop your photo without the need for photo-editing software.

New Feature: Text Limits

We're really excited to announce a new feature in ProposalSpace: text limits.

Call admins can now assign a word or character limit to any text field in a proposal submission form or role form. Just select "Word Limit" or "Character Limit" from the pull-down menu in the question settings, then enter the number of words or characters you want for the limit.

We designed the feature to follow Twitter-like rules, so responses are allowed to exceed the limit.

Extra text is displayed with ellipses, which can be clicked on to reveal the full response.

Check it out and let us know what you think!