The Ultimate Guide to Streamlined Conference Management

For many associations and higher education institutions, conferences are the focal points of their annual event calendars. These gatherings empower passionate, like-minded individuals to spread knowledge and forge connections. However, ensuring large events go off without a hitch requires significant, hands-on effort before, during, and after the conference.

Although conference management may seem daunting at first, developing an effective process is worth the positive impact on the attendee experience (and on your team’s stress levels!). In this guide, we’ll cover the basics of managing conferences for associations and higher ed, including:

• Conference Management FAQ
• Essential Elements of Conference Management
• How OpenWater Supports Conference Management

Let’s begin by diving deeper into what conference management is and why it matters.

Conference Management: Frequently Asked Questions

What is conference management?

Conference management encompasses all aspects of planning, executing, and evaluating large-scale, formal gatherings of association members or higher education communities. The ultimate goal of conference management is to facilitate an environment where attendees can learn, network, interact with vendors, and generally have a memorable experience with your organization.

Associations typically use conferences as a member engagement tactic, while higher ed conferences may attract a mixed audience of faculty and students at different levels who want to further their knowledge in a specific area of study. So, although many high-level aspects of conference management look similar for these two categories of organizations, their different objectives shape the smaller steps teams take along the way.

Why is effective conference management important?

By optimizing its conference management process, your organization can experience the following benefits:

• Streamlined planning processes. A systematic, technology-supported procedure for conference management keeps your whole event team on the same page about what they’re supposed to do and how much progress they’ve made, improving efficiency.
• Improved participant experiences. When internal conference processes run smoothly, it has a trickle-down effect to everyone else involved with your event—attendees, speakers, vendors, exhibitors, and volunteers.
• Increased revenue potential. Between registrations, sponsorships, sales, new memberships, and other conference revenue streams, you’ll earn more money from your event if there are systems in place to collect funds with minimal hassle on either side.
• A clear picture of success. Understanding whether your event was effective for your association or higher ed institution depends on setting actionable goals and gathering and analyzing many types of data—all of which are part of conference management.

Evaluating your conference’s success also helps you improve your process in the future and experience the benefits of effective management even more strongly at your organization.

Who is responsible for managing conferences?

Most organizations designate one team member as their primary conference manager at the beginning of the planning process. The conference manager typically leads a team of event planners through preparing for, executing, and evaluating a conference. They also serve as the point person for questions and delegate responsibilities as needed.

Your conference manager and event staff also need to collaborate with your organization’s marketing team to promote the event effectively and your volunteer coordinator to ensure all volunteer roles (check-in, packet creation, abstract review, etc.) are filled by the right people.

What tools are necessary for conference management?

Like many modern administrative processes at associations and higher ed institutions, conference management is significantly easier when you have the right software on your side. Make sure your organization has the following platforms in its tech stack before you begin:

• An association management system (AMS) or constituent relationship management (CRM) solution that can function as the central repository for conference data
• Event registration tools that allow you to create custom signup forms and process payments securely but flexibly (accepting multiple payment methods, offering special discounts, etc.)
• An attendee-facing app or community platform that facilitates event engagement through individual schedule-building, session interactivity, discussions and networking, push notifications, and other related features.
• Marketing software that makes it easy to develop consistent, branded content for every platform—your organization’s website, email, mobile messaging, social media, direct mail, etc.
• An application and review platform that streamlines the notoriously difficult sub-process of abstract management and also functions as an awards management tool if you want to formally recognize attendees during your conference.

By leveraging these tools together and integrating them whenever possible, your team can overcome many of the common pain points associated with managing conferences and achieve your goals for these events.

Essential Elements of Conference Management

Now that we’ve covered the basics of conference management, let’s walk through the hands-on steps your association or higher ed institution will take as you get started with this process. Keep in mind that some of these steps may overlap, and you should generally adapt the process to your organization’s needs as you go.

Overarching Event Logistics

When you first confirm that your organization wants to host a conference, you’ll have several decisions to make right away. Some logistical considerations you’ll need to confirm include:

• Length: Will the conference last just one day or span multiple days?
• Dates: When do you want to host your conference, and can you prevent it from overlapping with other major industry events or holidays?
• Format: Will your conference be fully in-person, fully virtual, or hybrid?
• Location: If you host an in-person or hybrid conference, in what city and event center will attendees gather?
• Budget: How much will your event cost to host, and how much of that cost can you offset with sponsorships?
• Goals: What do you hope to accomplish in terms of attendance numbers, revenue generation, participant satisfaction, etc.?

Goals are arguably the most important factor to consider at this stage, since they’ll guide your team’s entire process from start to finish. Once you have a general idea of what you want to achieve with your conference, use the SMART framework, which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound, to make your goals actionable.

Conference Content

After figuring out the basics, you’ll probably select a theme for your conference to focus it on a particular topic that’s relevant to your field and attendees’ interests. That way, you can build a cohesive schedule that features:

• One or two keynote speeches from highly respected industry professionals or researchers
• Different session formats, such as lectures, panel discussions, hands-on workshops, and poster presentations
• Dedicated times for socialization, networking, and visiting exhibitor halls
• Opening and closing sessions to welcome everyone to the event and wrap it up (potentially by presenting awards to standout individuals)

Filling in the educational portions of your conference schedule is where abstract management comes in. Make sure to clearly explain your event theme and acceptable presentation types in your call for abstracts, select judges who are knowledgeable about the topics that abstracts are likely to cover, and communicate decisions and speaker registration processes in a timely manner.

Event Scheduling & Production

One of the most helpful features to look for in an abstract management platform is the ability to transfer approved abstracts directly to a schedule-building tool. This way, you can group related presentations together while making sure not to double-book sessions that the same audience would like to attend.

For example, let’s say you’re planning a day-long undergraduate research conference for a university that includes poster presentations and short lectures. You split the poster presentations into two sessions—one for students in pre-professional programs and one for majors in the liberal arts and sciences—so that presenters’ professors and classmates can see all of the poster presentations from their department in one place. However, you’d want to avoid scheduling a block of lectures by English majors during the arts and sciences poster presentations, since the same faculty and students will likely want to attend both sessions.

Once you’ve built your conference schedule, create two supplementary documents from it. The first should be a polished, public-facing agenda that attendees can use to plan their days and navigate the event. The second should be a run of show, which provides more detailed information about event production for event team members and volunteers (e.g., a minute-by-minute rundown of activities and the sequence of audio/visual cues that will occur during each session).

Promotion & Registration

Marketing your conference early and often is essential for maximizing attendance. As soon as you finalize the basic details, start promoting your conference across multiple channels, such as:

• The Events page and calendar on your university or association’s website (or even a dedicated conference microsite).
• Email blasts and mentions in recurring newsletters.
• Mobile messaging via SMS or your association’s member engagement app.
• Social media posts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and any other platforms your association uses.
• Digital ads on social media, search engines, or pop-ups within your association’s app.
• Direct mail, which is still an effective offline supplement to online marketing!

Keep your organization’s visual branding and messaging consistent across all channels to make your messages appear trustworthy to potential attendees. If you promised your event sponsors free publicity in exchange for fiscal support, double-check your agreements to ensure you promote each sponsor appropriately in your event marketing materials.

Link to your registration form in every marketing message to make it easy for interested attendees to sign up while your conference is top of mind. Once you publish your agenda, start linking to it in marketing messages as well, and follow up with registered participants so they can browse the schedule and get excited to attend. These channels are also helpful for promoting your call for abstracts to a broad audience of potential speakers, where you should link to your submission form to prompt them to take the next step.

Post-Event Follow-Up

Conference management doesn’t end when your event does. Within 48 hours of your closing session, send segmented follow-up messages thanking everyone who contributed to your conference’s success, including:

• Attendees
• Presenters
• Sponsors
• Volunteers
• Venue teams (if your conference has an in-person component and the event center’s staff worked with yours)

Additionally, you should analyze data on every aspect of your process at this point to determine what went well and what you can improve going forward. Here are some metrics you could track for different areas of your conference:

• Attendance: Total attendees, attendance by demographic (e.g., members vs. non-members of an association or faculty vs. students for a higher ed event), number of first-time and returning attendees, participants per session
• Revenue: Total income generated, revenue totals by source (registration fees, merchandise sales, raffle entries, etc.)
• Marketing: Email and mobile message open and click-through rates, event-related website traffic, social media post interactions, digital ad impressions, conversion rate by channel
• Abstracts: Total submissions, abstracts received by presentation type, submission form abandonment rate, acceptance percentage, most common reasons for rejection
• Satisfaction: Qualitative and quantitative feedback from attendees, speakers, sponsors, and volunteers

While you don’t have to track every single one of these metrics for all of your conferences, make sure to analyze the ones that relate closely to your goals so you can tell whether your event was successful and what factors contributed most to (or prevented you from) achieving what you set out to accomplish.

How OpenWater Supports Conference Management

Although abstract management is just one part of conference management, and an abstract management platform is just one piece of a complete conference tech stack, getting this complex step right can make or break your event’s success. Enter OpenWater, a user-friendly, comprehensive application and review platform that supports every element of abstract management with features like:

• Drag-and-drop builders for designing branded abstract submission forms and call-for-speakers landing pages.
• Multi-round review capabilities to minimize bias while saving time and effort during judging.
• Conference scheduling and email tools that streamline your team’s next steps after decisions are made.
• Reporting and analytics so you can easily evaluate abstract management-related metrics during the post-event phase.
• 65+ integrations with popular AMS, CRM, directory, and payment gateway solutions, allowing you to create a unified conference management system.

If you need to manage awards as you plan your conference, OpenWater is equipped for that process, too! In addition to repurposing the platform’s foundational application, review, communication, and analytics features for awards management, your team can build an online gallery to showcase award winners’ achievements to attendees and non-attendees alike with no coding required.

More than 750 associations, foundations, and higher education institutions trust OpenWater to help them navigate application and review processes during conference planning and beyond. But don’t just take our word for it—check out our client success stories to see the real results OpenWater has produced for organizations like yours!

Wrapping Up: Additional Resources on Conference Management

Conference management may seem overwhelming at first, but with the right strategies and technology on your side, you’ll be able to plan an event that’s both educational and memorable for your association’s members or university community. In addition to using post-event data to inform future conferences, stay on top of trends in your field and in conference technology so you can remain contemporary in your event offerings and management practices.

For more information on different aspects of conference management, check out these resources:

• What Is Abstract Management? A Guide for Conference Planners. Learn more about abstract management and how it fits into the bigger conference management picture.
• What Is Awards Management? Everything You Need to Know. Discover why and how you should incorporate awards into your organization’s conferences and overall strategy.
• Abstract Management Software: 10 Conference Planning Picks. Explore the top abstract solutions on the market so your conference team can make an informed decision.