Infrastructure

There are several systems which are useful for organising events which an Event Lead may want to use.

To manage event registration, the Eventbrite system is very useful. There is a fee for paid events (that’s how the system is supported); for free events, there is no fee. You can add custom questions, export registrations to another system, e.g. Google Drive Sheets (or Excel, LibreOffice Calc), to help see how people have answered questions about participation or catering requirements to help with further planning. It has an integrated email system so reminders can be sent to people before they attend, e.g. what they should bring along such as laptops. In terms of payment, there is also an option to allow participants to request invoices, as well as raising invoices at the organisational side so it can add to overheads. This option can be essential for allowing certain groups to attend; however, extra effort is needed to keep track of these and chase these up with reminders.

The Institute has its own website (www.software.ac.uk) which runs on the Drupal content management system. Although information can be placed on the Eventbrite system about the agenda, accommodation options, guidance and other matters relating to the event, it is better to have these on a dedicated website. GitHub, via GitHub Pages, allows the ability to set up a website and may be useful for an adhoc event where access to existing website infrastructure or a content management system is not available.

If your organisation has a list of people who have signed up to hear news or you have permission to contact them after a previous event, then an excellent system to use for promoting to them could be an email marketing system. An example of this is the Mailchimp system which allows the creation of named lists of email addresses and scheduled mailshots amongst other features (e.g. integration with Eventbrite). Sometimes the personal touch may be better and a named person emailing to a list may be more effective. Do make sure to adhere to any applicable data privacy regulations (e.g GDPR in Europe). Also if mailing lists are not being used nor mail merge then remember to BCC multiple recipients so as not to unwittingly share email addresses.

Contacting sponsors individually and having one person emailing them gives better results. Those responsible for the first contact with potential sponsors can be different from those who take over the conversation if sponsors show interest.

Another example of organisational tools are those that help support scheduling; e.g. for talk orders, reviewers or collaboration groups where certain constraint combinations (role, gender, domain or career stage) are used. Doing this completely by hand could be tedious, so Python libraries for handling data, such as Pandas, and linear modelling libraries, such as PuLP - could be helpful to create an initial configuration of people which you can then manually tweak, thus saving a lot of time.