Fast Track Lesson 2B.7 - Presenter Management

NOTE: There are some descriptions in these lessons of using the status "Accepted" to indicate the presenter has accepted an invitation. This is unusual, as other resources on this help site indicate the more common use of "Accepted" to mean the abstract or paper has been accepted by the review committee, which is how it's usually set up to work with other features in EventsAir.

EventsAir allows you to set up a comprehensive process of presenter management for both live and virtual events, and this topic will take you through the steps involved.

Managing the presentation process is easier when you've thought about and set up various aspects beforehand. You'll want to consider Presentation Types, Themes and Sub-Themes, Paper Status, Keywords, Checklists, Document types, Session Roles, and more. Setting up the process properly also lets you collect information about audio-visual requirements, ensure presenter details are included in your agenda, and run reports to get vital information about your presentations (such as audio-visual requirements).

[There is a separate topic on Abstract Submission and Review Management covering how to invite prospective presenters to submit abstracts, organize to have them reviewed, and choose which ones to include in your program.]

In EventsAir, you can capture a wide variety of information about presenters such as their photo and biography, the details about the presentation, the room, the time, audio-visual requirements and special requests. If you have a checklist of things you need the speakers to supply, the system will help you track that too.

In this lesson, we'll learn how to set up your Presentations Preferences to help you capture all the data you need from your presenters.

Watch the video to see how it's done.

To collect vital details about your presenters, you can create interactive sites where they can register all their details themselves; you can also enter their details manually.

You may also want to create special registration types for presenters, record presentation items, add accommodation details and more.

In this lesson, we'll see how to add a Presenter's details, add a Registration type to their contact record, and add a Presentation item, along with their biography and resource document. We'll also use this Presenter record for the rest of the Presenter Management lessons.

Let's learn more by watching the video below.

Once you know who'll be presenting, the next step is to communicate with them. The best way to do this is through a Merge Doc, in which you can confirm their details, information about their session, registration details, accommodation and more.

You can opt to send out these Merge Docs automatically when your Presenters register, send them manually, or schedule them to be sent at a particular time/day. (You should always test your Merge Docs to ensure all necessary information is included and displayed correctly. Likewise, it's always good to test links and attachments as well.)

In this lesson, we'll learn how to enable the right features and add the correct information into a Merge Doc to make sure presenters are well informed and can contact us if needed. Let's find out more by watching the video below.

Presentation items need to be allocated to sessions to be part of the Agenda. There a couple of ways to do this. Items can be allocated to sessions through the Agenda Panel or in the presenter record itself in the Attendee Panel. The process is quite similar in both cases... and very simple!

Allocating an item to a session also lets you see all the session and speaker details in the Agenda builder, which is very useful when there are different Presentation items and Speakers you want to include in one session.

In this lesson, we'll learn how to allocate Presentation items using both methods, and also take a quick look at Concurrent Session Blocks.

Let's check out the video below to learn more.

EventsAir allows you to publish your Agenda on the website and on the Attendee App so all your delegates have access to that information. Both allow you to click on each session to see the details, including the Speaker and Presentation item if those have been allocated.

The website allows two different types of Agenda: either a list of days with sessions, or a tabbed agenda, displaying each day as a different tab. The latter is very useful for an event that runs across multiple days.

In this lesson, we will add the Tabbed Agenda to the website, as well as a Speakers list. We'll also have a look at the Agenda and Speaker Search in the Attendee App.

Watch the video below to find out more.

Reports, exports and filters are an extremely important part of Presenter Management due to all the moving parts you need to track. Reports help you accurately retrieve presentation and speaker data, and you can also create customized exports to get exactly the combination of data you would like.

The Data Validation feature allows you to easily cross-check and identify potential problems: Presenters with No Registration, Presenters with Overlapping Sessions, Presenters with Review Conflicts, and more.

In this lesson, we'll learn how to run some of these reports and apply the right filters.

Watch the video below to see how these features are used.

In this topic, we've covered various aspects of Presenter Management such as:

- Gathering necessary information and items/documents from your presenters

- Confirming and requesting further information using Merge Docs

- Ensuring presentation items are added correctly

- Using checklists to record completion of necessary steps

- Allocating presentations to sessions and publishing your agenda

- Using reports and Data Validation tools to track and manage the process.