#11. Keeping Conferences Organized

Conference season…the craziest time for any event planner.  You have endless things to organize: contracts, payments, booth designs, promotional items, contractor paperwork, hotels, flights, transportation and dinners – to name a few.  The majority of your day is spent looking at paperwork, answering emails and making phone calls.  It can get pretty crazy!

I am an organizer extraordinaire around the ShareASale office.  Therefore, when I became more involved with helping to plan the conferences, my compelling need to organize kicked in and it started with making binders for each event.

Each conference was given a blue binder.  Why did I choose blue? Because black binders seemed a bit drab all lined up and I wanted to pick a ShareASale color. Yellow was a bit over kill in the anti-drab department, so blue it is!  Then, of course, these binders had to be named.  Given their color…“Ole Blue” was suggested and quickly stuck.

So what is the purpose of these binders?  What do they do?

Here is their Job Description:

Before the Conference:

• Keep me sane
• Prevent my desk from getting cluttered with conference papers
• Help me organize paperwork
• Central location for everything needed for that specific conference

During the Conference:

• Still keep me sane
• Go along to that conference
• Hold all important documentation, contacts, confirmation numbers, scheduling, etc.
• Quickly help me find whatever paperwork I might need
• Look professional
• Don’t get lost! (very important!)

I suggest this for any conference planner.  I promise you that something is bound to go wrong – the hotel might only have record of 5 rooms for your group instead of 12, the driver doesn’t show up, your booth received the wrong number of monitors, etc. – but this binder will help you remedy the situation and double check anything that isn’t going to plan.  You will have it ready to show the hotel the confirmation numbers, to find the appropriate number to call the driver and to show the contractor that you ordered one more monitor.

Maybe you have another way of having all this information on hand.  So, if any other event planners have ideas or thoughts, I’d love to hear them!