OrbitCon Transcript - So You Want to Run a Conference

OrbitCon Transcript - So You Want to Run a Conference

https://the-orbit.net/orbitcon/2018/04/11/so-you-want-to-run-a-conference/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-fZwCbCl5o

Panelists: Lauren Lane, Jessica Xiao, Brian Fields, Chelsea Du Fresne, Stephanie Zvan



Stephanie:
	Hello everybody. Welcome back to OrbitCon. This is the first conference for The Orbit blog network. This panel is called, "So you want to run a conference." We're doing this panel in part because lots of people have decided they want to run a conference and pretty much every one of them - all of ourselves included - have discovered that it's a little bit harder than you might think. So we're here to give you kind of an introduction to what you should be thinking about when you're thinking about running a conference and some of the things that you really just don't want to leave to the last minute.

	I'm Stephanie Zvan. I'm your moderator for this panel. I have helped run two conferences (two regional conferences for Minnesota Atheists), and I've done the first of the Secular Women Work conferences. We'll put on the second one this summer and have for the past several years run a track of programming at Skepticon.

	And I will ask each of my panelists to introduce themselves really by just telling us what conferences and/or other events you've worked on. Brian let's start with you.


Brian: Hi yeah, I'm the I'm Brian fields. I am the founder and president of the Pennsylvania Freethought Organization Coalition. We underwrite the Pennsylvania State Atheist/Humanist Conference, which ran in its fifth year last year. That was where I started learning how difficult conferences really are, and we've also run a lot of charity projects: things like Atheists Fight Hunger, which we featured at our conference - and that's a challenge in and of itself.


Stephanie: Yes we'll talk a little bit more about that at the end, if we have time. Chelsea!


Chelsea: I'm Chelsea Du Fresne. I was a student leader at Campus Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists at the University of Minnesota and then, through that, ran a conference called Skep-Tech, two years. So that was fun, and that was sort of a science, tech, and weird atheist con. And then I was one of the organizers of Secular Women Work and will be one of the organizers for Secular Women Work 2 this August.


Stephanie: Jessica?


Jessica: My name is Jessica Xiao. I used to work for the American Humanists Association. And one of my years, in 2015, I ran a conference called Common Ground with Xaverian missionaries, which was basically kind of a bringing together of secular and faith leaders in working together for social justice. Also done some work while I was in university organizing conferences around my degree and with Journalists for Human Rights. I also helped out with the AHAcon and various other just kind of behind the scenes organizing.


Stephanie: Now Lauren, I think people are least familiar with your work. Can you tell us what you did?


Lauren: Oh my god. Hello internet! My name is Lauren Lane, and I run a little conference called Skepticon. I've been doing that for the past 10 years. So it's been a minute, and that's what I do.


Stephanie: All right, so... as each of you ran your first conference, what did you find you were completely the least prepared to do? And I am not just gonna go down the line. Anybody who wants to step in can do that on this one.


Lauren: Everything. Yes.


Stephanie: Go ahead, Brian.


Brian: I was unprepared for the amount of time it takes to put together a conference. I had unreasonable expectations as to how much work was done and found myself with very little sleep trying to put a conference together in three months, which was brutal.


Stephanie: And... so, just for reference, if somebody's like running like a simple one-day conference, you know, maybe half a dozen talks... it doesn't take nearly that long right?


Brian: Even a one-day conference takes an extended period of time: in investment, in preparation, and marketing. You can't just expect people to turn around and /know your conference exists/, in that three-month period, let alone attend.


Stephanie: Chelsea? Haven't heard from you on this one.


Chelsea: I think well, I was a little bit unprepared for the amount of marketing involved like Brian said. Because... so the second year Skep-Tech was running, the student group that we were associated with kind of, like, died - the month before the event, which is not great timing. And especially when you're like relying on other people to do marketing for you that's like... that there so the whole situation can go totally sideways before the event even takes place.


Stephanie: So Lauren or Jessica, did you want to get more specific than... everything?


Jessica: Sure so I also agree regarding the marketing but also just having to work with so many people all the time. I think that's a huge challenge because, as the person who is the lead of the conference, you have to invest the most energy into it. You put a hundred percent of your energy into it, you'll get 50 percent back from everybody else, so you have to constantly be driving that inspiration for other people to help make this conference come to fruition. And I think that's one of the most exhausting things for me personally just because it's so much emotional involvement. I think people don't realize that part of the conference until the day of, and then they realize - or the day before the conference even - they start kind of feeling the jitters and the anxiety and the heavy sense of everything is going to go wrong when actually I think on the front end it generally looks less of a mess than you might think it looks like but that's because you're just so invested. So I think that was the biggest challenge.


Stephanie: How 'bout you, Lauren? I know you like everything as an answer but...


Lauren: I do. I don't think I could say anything more beautifully than Jessica did. I mean, it's so much work, and not just like writing emails, and pointing to other people, and coordinating this and that. It's just like emotional labor, like staying motivated, wanting to keep doing it, and wanting to keep people... to also be motivated to do it. It's just a lot of work, and you have to pace yourself.


Stephanie: Alright so... Somebody has heard all this and is like, "I don't need sleep. I don't need a social life for the next six months. And I wanna run a conference." Where should they start?


Lauren: I kind of see running a conference is like writing an essay. You want to make an outline of what you want. Like what does this conference look like? Is it one day, is it three days? Does it have a dance? Does it have panels? What does that look like? And then start from there. Cuz that will find your needs. Like what kind of venue you need: do you need big one, a small one, can you do it online? It's a good thing to brainstorm what you want it to look like first.


Stephanie: Brian, what say you?


Brian: I think the first question someone has to ask themself when they start, before even, "What does it look like?" is "Why do you want to run a conference?" For myself, I found that that the best conferences you can put on are ones that tell a story. Where from the first speaker to the last speaker, you have a message that you're trying to put out there, whatever it is. So what's your message? What's the reason? Are you trying to raise money? Are you trying to put forward a cause? Are you trying to have fun? Whatever the reason, you should know going into it: why? Why do you want to do it?


Stephanie: Okay Jessica?


Jessica:
	Who the conference is for, I think, is a really major driver of why we should be doing something. And it should always be working together with the end goal of some sort of impact. Like there should be a, "So what's next?" after a conference not just a, "So I went to this thing. What now?" There should always be a decision on an outcome. And so from the decision of what that impact is going to be, you can kind of work backwards and start building from there. But you have to have a theory of change, which is a very non-profit / social sector word for... having the idea of how things come about, how certain outcomes come about... so that you know how to precipitate those outcomes. And then so, you just try to execute that initial action in order to get to those types of results.

	If you're running a conference for a particular organization, you have to think about whether it's for their PR or whether it's for the people to be educated or informed. Because that could end up meaning that your conference is for a totally different demographic, or it could also just mean your content, the the design of the conference, is gonna be completely different depending on which of those outcomes you're going for. I think those are really important places to start, like Brian said: the "why" of the conference. If you don't have any of that then I don't think there's a...

	Oh and the other thing is, even if you do have an idea of why you're running the conference, do people want you to be running this conference? I mean, we all have these ideas that we might want to execute, but are are they going to be serving some sort of larger purpose? That's something where we have to check our egos and talk to the people who are actually running to this conference, on behalf of supposedly, and make sure that democratic representation is not just a check off a box but something that you're intentionally cultivating in your conference planning.


Stephanie: Chelsea? Anything you wanna add?


Chelsea: Yeah sure. The "Why?" and the "What's the goal?" is probably the first thing you should ask. But immediately, the second thing you should ask is, "Who with, and how?" Not just how are you going to organize it, but what is the structure of the "who with", right? Whether it's are you gonna all be under one person that's going to be top-down, or is it gonna be like you and two friends, and is it really gonna be a collective, and who's gonna decide when you have a fight - because you will - who's gonna be the final vote on what needs to be decided. I think if you decide that right from the beginning, it's gonna be much smoother in the long run.


Stephanie: All right.


Brian: And after that, not just "Who with?" but "who you want to come." What are your attendees going to look like?


Stephanie: All right. So we we touched, very briefly in there, on the subject of money. Anybody want to talk about how much they spent on a conference? I can tell you we kickstarted the first Secular Women Work and raised just over thirteen thousand dollars directly and then got some in-kind contributions from some organizations on top of that. That was for a three-day conference held on a public university campus working with a student group, so we got pretty good rates on a lot of that stuff.


Brian: Our first conference was eighteen thousand dollars. The last one we just did was around thirty thousand dollars - that's not including the Atheists Fight Hunger stuff.


Stephanie: Was the first one a one-day or...?


Brian: All were three-day.


Stephanie: Okay.


Chelsea: Let's see... I don't remember how much we did Skep-Tech for, but because it was a student conference, it was way cheaper than normal, so that's an important note. If you're a student and you're planning on running a student-led conference, you can do a lot with a lot less than thirteen thousand dollars, but you're probably gonna need at least a couple thousand dollars - especially the longer the conference is. I think Skep-Tech was seven, but I'm not really sure. Yep, but that's because the university subsidizes a bunch of stuff.


Jessica: Common Ground was also partly university subsidized. I don't remember exactly the budget from three years ago, but I know I spent half of what my budget was. And part of it was because it was subsidized. It was only a one-day event. A lot of the speakers were waiving honorariums, for example. And making sure that it was accessible for students.


Lauren: The very first Skepticon was student run, and it was on campus. I think it maybe cost $3,000 or below. And the most recent Skepticon, I wanna say, was low 30s, if not upper 20s. I don't remember the exact number.


Stephanie: And where are you getting that money? Well actually, no. How much of that do you need before you really start even seeing ticket sales?


Lauren: *chuckle* Ticket sales.


Stephanie: Skepticon is free.


Brian: I started doing planning on less than a thousand dollars. Planning on getting the money in ticket sales and making the money back, but I don't recommend that, to anybody who's listening, AT ALL. EVER.


Chelsea: Especially for your first conference! Don't assume ticket sales. For Secular Women Work, it was easy, relatively, because we did the Kickstarter. Some portion of people have to buy their tickets before the event, which is not particularly common among conferences, and then Skep-Tech was always free so it was university money and some... I mean, if you beg to enough atheist organizations, somebody will give you money and call it a grant.


Lauren: The bulk of fundraising for Skepticon is done in the months leading up to. And I wanna say during the weekend, we have maybe two thirds or above of what we actually need to pay for things, and we know that during the weekend, we will fundraise the rest. It's very scary, fundraising, no matter how you slice it.


Brian: Yeah, I don't think anybody sleeps well that last couple months before the conference. And primarily it's because you're worried about the money.


Lauren: And everything else, really.


Brian: Yeah, but mostly the money. I mean, the first year, I'd agree with you. But in the last few years, I've had enough experience with conferences that I know where everything's at, and I'm pretty confident the event itself is gonna run fine. I'm mostly worried about making sure that we have the money to pay for it.


Stephanie: So let's talk venues. What kinds of things should somebody starting out a conference be looking for in a venue?


Brian: Don't do it yourself. Ever. There's actually resources out there. You can get people to help you find venues. I have a contact, and people can follow up with me if they like. But there are people who actually are paid to go through your requirements for space and help you find a great deal with a hotel.


Stephanie: Okay, so you use a hotel for for PASTAH Con?


Brian: Yes.


Stephanie: Okay.


Brian: I mean if you have access to a university, that's great I'm just saying...


Chelsea: Yeah, universities a gold mine.


Stephanie: They are, but they are much more of a slog in finding what you're looking for.


Lauren: There's so many elements you want in a good venue. You want it to be affordable. You want the people who work at the venue to be nice to you and, as atheists, they can sometimes not be. You want somewhere where maybe you can negotiate the price. You went somewhere that is accessible to all people. You want somewhere where the signage that you put up will be readable and findable. You want it to be close to highways and airports and bus stations. There's a lot of things to want in a venue, so it's kind of like finding a glass slipper.


Brian: Yeah about the transportation thing... if you're not thinking about that, you should. Remember, you have to not only get people to come and stay at your event, but you have to get your speakers in there. Having something that's accessible, especially if you want people to come in from a long distance, it is really important.


Jessica:
	Yeah and if it's for an annual conference that moves from the city to city, then you definitely wanna look at those options about accessibility location wise: close to public transportation, close to airports, things like that. But you might also want to decide which region has been underserved recently. For example, which region could use a conference like this as an immediate need. But also which cities are most affordable for people to come into. And which cities maybe have the most speakers that you want that year peripherally - that would be a great bonus for you, if you happen to have a lot of speakers in that same area. So those are some things to look into if you're running an annual conference that moves or travels from year to year.

	If you're looking at the venue itself, some things that would be great for a small conference - or a large conference - is accessibility. So you wanna make sure there are large hallways. You want to make sure that the doors aren't super heavy, or that there are automatic doors. You wanna to make sure there are ramps. That things aren't super far away from each other. That perhaps the venue will be very accommodating to having bathrooms that are for all genders. So things of that nature. Of course, you can't really find that in every single region of the United States perhaps, but to make more of an effort to try and incorporate those elements of inclusiveness... I think are really important for making sure that people who want to go to your conference can attend.


Chelsea: A lot of those feeds into just knowing your audience. For example, Minnesota Atheists runs a conference every year, and it doesn't really make much sense for them to prioritize an expensive hotel versus, say, a community center because they don't have a ton of people who fly in for that conference. But it /is/ good to prioritize places that are accessible by bus line. It's just knowing what kind of person is gonna show up, where are they from, and how are they getting there. And then feeding that into something that fits your budget.


Stephanie: All right anybody want to add anything about venues before we move on?


Chelsea: Don't take the venue's word that they are accessible. Send someone to look at it.


Brian: Scout, double check, and plan, and make sure that everything is laid out exactly the way you need.


Lauren: Negotiate, always and forever.


Brian: Contracts are negotiable. They are. When you're handed a contract, don't be afraid to point at something and say, "Hey, I want to change this."


Chelsea: Also related to the note of accessibility, but specific to the venue contract... Make sure that if you're going to change the bathrooms to all-gender bathrooms, make sure that that isn't going to cause an issue with the venue before you do it. For example, the facility that we organized Secular Women Work at before, doing something like that... they would approve of the concept, but they will not let you put paper or signage on the walls, and they will immediately take it down and come and yell at you - because they think it's a fire hazard.

Brian: You want to make sure they put that in the contract. Sometimes you can say, "Well these bathrooms that are near our conference areas, we'd like to do that with..." If they're giving you push back you can say, "Well, just just /these/ please."


Stephanie: All right then. Let's talk about speakers. How do you go about picking your speakers, and Chelsea I know you have some really really super strong feelings about this. You want to start?


Chelsea: I've got a very strange method of picking speakers. I've got this master document that if I read an obscure article somewhere and I really really like it, I'll always record the person's name and how to contact them. And so, it's just kind of grown over the years. But I would say for the beginning of the event, I think you should pick something like five people that would make sense as headliners. Prioritize headliners first, and ask yourself what kind of person encapsulate this event the most. The way that we did it for Skep-Tech was we booked people before we booked venue, before we booked anything else. We booked people first because we were very specific about the people that we wanted to headline, and we worked with them with their schedule first, before anything else basically. I'd say that would be the first thing I would start with is: remember everything and prioritize people that you like first before anything else.


Stephanie: Who would like to add to that?


Jessica: Consult the experts on the topics or the content that you're trying to get for your panel. Are you consulting with people who primarily look like you and grew up in the same sorts of conditions as you did, or are you reaching out a little bit further than that? That might sometimes require extra effort. It might mean not reaching out on Facebook, or over email, or LinkedIn, or whatever usual methods of communication you use, but choosing to go to places where you think you'll be able to find people who will actually be the experts on the topics that they're speaking about. I'm thinking from a very social justice perspective, so I'm thinking about race issues, and feminism, and things like that. Sometimes I think that a lot of conference organizers might be of white male leadership in the atheist movement, and so you hope that they would reach out in different means that are non-traditional to find the experts to consult with on who would be a good person to come and speak about this topic. Of course, to not make it tokenism or performative and intentionally cultivating this sort of relationship and communication from the very beginning of your conference and doing things with representation from the topics that you you want to have represented. Was that a sentence? Okay.


Stephanie: Lauren or Brian?


Lauren:
	I also have a creepy document, so Chelsea you're not the only one. Whereas I won't forget who I saw, who might be great. I actually keep a google document of people that I hear about or read about that I think might be interesting for future conferences. I follow people on my Skepticon team. There's about six or seven of us, and we all have our own documents or lists of people that we talk about. We also do a little bit of networking. We ask people that we know and trust their opinions and ask who they think would be good. We ask our audience who they think would be good and they want to see on our stage. Then once we have all of those names together, we kind of go through and talk about them. People make their way to the top. Then we look at what topics they talk about. And from there, well what's this year gonna be about? Then we choose the slate of people that we're hoping will say yes to us. And... as I'm saying this out loud, I'm like wow Chelsea's way smarter than me and has a better idea of how to do this!

	Our top 20-30 picks, we reach out to those people in a tier system. Tier one: we would really like these people. Tier two: these people would also be awesome. And go from there and see who says yes. Picking your speakers is probably one of the most important things you'll do for your conference because who you choose to put on the stage and have everyone listen to... is gonna represent your con and what your values are.


Brian: I steal. I don't know how else to put it. I go to conferences. When I hear people that have a compelling story. The theme that I've always tried to build for our conference is building a community, and that means for me, having a wide range of voices from the community talking about what it means to be atheist/humanist community. So I steal. I go to conferences. I hear great speakers, and I'm like, "I want you to come speak at my conference." I hear about stories and things that happen around the United States, and I say, "Hey, they are talking about something that I think speaks to our community." That's how I build my my roster. One way to not end up in my conference is to write me saying, "Hey, I want to come speak at your conference." Nine times out of ten, there's somebody of a particular persuasion who has the latest take on the street epistemology, and they just want to come tell everybody about it. And the answer is no.


Stephanie: That never happens to any of the rest of us.


Chelsea: I've only ever had white dudes email me to come to cons. Has anyone ever had anyone who wasn't a white dude?


Brian: I wasn't gonna say it, but... yeah.


Chelsea: Yeah, it's always- Cuz it's either: I hear your name through the grapevine as an, "Oh, this person would be really good at that," and you need somebody to talk about fundraising or whatever; or it's white dudes emailing me about things I don't need.


Stephanie: I have actually had somebody who was not a a white dude solicit a spot - actually at this next Secular Women Work - although she was going to be there anyway. She was just saying, "Here's my expertise and I think this is an important topic."


Jessica: Let me know if this is wrong but... a lot of this is just is very intuition based. For me, I know that a lot of it is just... I have an eye for connecting people and I'd like to say that this is because I'm a very lazy person. I'd rather get all the cool people who have the talents and the brilliance and connect them and make them do things so that I don't have to. So all I have to do is have that map in my head. And so it's like cooking rather than baking where you're just tossing ingredients in, and slowly it forms the whole that is the conference. It is like writing a narrative. It's like painting a picture. You're sculpting the whole. And all these emergent properties come out of putting particular people together. It's putting together a puzzle without really knowing what the - I mean you have kind of like a fuzzy notion of what the end result should be or what it should look like. That's what you're continually approaching with the people that you decide to put into your conference. I don't know is that it an accurate description for you.


Chelsea: Yeah. I'd say putting the right people in the right rooms is basically your job as an organizer.


Brian: Sometimes in the right order. The order of your lineup does count. Our second year, we did our conference in Philadelphia, and we started out... I can't even remember who all... It was first thing in the morning, but one talk, right after another, right after another. It was like they were building on each other, about the topic we were talking about at the conference. I have to admit that I didn't exactly plan it that way, but when it came out, it was like I had done magic. I can't even explain it.


Jessica: That's fantastic.


Stephanie: All right so... We have had some very high-profile speakers recently revealed to be... not really great people, and not necessarily people we want to endorse. Do you have - or in response, are you building - strategies for for vetting your speakers?


Chelsea:
	I ran into a situation like this, at the second Skep-Tech, where we invited a writer for Scientific American, where all their primary content seemed okay... But unbeknownst to us, they were publishing a bunch of racist content on third party websites - trying to keep it like below the bar basically. We didn't find out until weeks before the conference and, of course, probably uninvited them and said, "Okay yeah, you're never coming here."

	One of the lessons leading up to that is: do a deep dive google search - like a really deep dive google search - before you ever contact anyone and always contact a bunch of people in the movement before you book someone. Especially if you don't know anything about them. And at least one of the people you can't contact about that should be somebody who knows them well and is a woman. If they're an opinionated woman of color, even better, because the people who are shitty, tend to be shitty to those people first.


Jessica: Yeah, do your google searches as much as possible. What else could I add to that? It really is important to have that network. That comes with time. That comes with experience. That comes with... I don't want to say friendliness because I don't think that's what it requires. You don't have to be a social butterfly or super outgoing or extroverted. I am NOT a huge people person, but I care, and I think that caring about things deeply and having goodwill and that intention... that you want to make your conference a very spectacular product that has impact on people's lives... that that will come through, and that will, in itself, translate into friendliness. That's how you develop trust in the community, and just gossip a lot.


Stephanie: I can't argue with that.


Chelsea: Yeah, gossip more.


Jessica: Gossip more! Information asymmetry is like the number one reason why companies are so powerful and why capitalism is such a shit show.


Stephanie: That kind of thing has generally been my approach. Does anybody have anything they want to add to that?


Jessica: Oh, one other thing I really appreciated... This is from being a speaker at California Freethought Day last year... This one person who has been accused of sexual assault in the atheist movement, Richard Carrier, was invited to California Freethought Day, and I didn't know whether to trust David Diskin or not - the organizer of the conference. I didn't know whether I could report it to him and feel comfortable that something would happen, so I was just gonna out it at the conference. But a couple of days ago, I guess somebody else brought it to his attention, and I really appreciate it. He called all the different speakers and asked for their opinions on Richard Carrier. He reached out to women in the secular movement to get their perspectives and opinions on this. So that he could understand the harm caused by having this person platformed at his event. And so, he was last-minute removed from the conference. I thought that was a pretty decent way of handling it.


Stephanie: I know California Freethought Days is experimenting with a slightly more formalized way of vetting their speakers, as is the AHA now.


Jessica: Yeah, I hope they're learning from it!


Stephanie: Yeah, we'll see how that goes.


Chelsea: Maybe one last rule for me would be... Don't book speakers who give talks in places that you would never go to. If anybody gives a talk at Mythcon, for example, don't book those people. You don't even need to check their background to know that. If there's a speaker who will tolerate being on stage with a white supremacist or somebody who's absolutely awful and do co-events with them, ever, don't book them.


Jessica: Yeah, that's a pretty good general rule to follow.


Stephanie: All right then, to completely change the topic... You know you're not doing this kind of thing alone. What kinds of jobs do you generally need volunteers for when you're doing a conference?


Brian:
	One of my favorite job titles for my volunteers is "speaker wranglers". The the way to make sure that you stay on schedule and keep the conference running is making sure that your speakers are where they need to be, when they need to be there. I have trusted volunteers that that are responsible for making sure that they can locate the speaker that's up next and sit on them. Then, in turn, keep the speakers where they're supposed to be. That's something that a lot of people don't think about. My first conference, we lost a speaker for an hour and a half - which anybody who's run a conference will tell you is pretty brutal. Turned out, he was napping and not responding to the door.

	Really what's vital is having somebody to manage your volunteers, someone who is good at organizing who understands the job of the conference, who's going to be your point person to make sure that the volunteers are on shift and doing what they need to be doing. That job I've usually given to a very trusted volunteer. It's so important that you know that person really well and know that they're capable of doing the job.


Lauren: Super important is having someone who's good with money, that you can trust to have you all on budget and tell you, "We need to fundraise this much more," or, "Hey, I found this on sale." Someone to keep track of all your money, make sure that it's done right. Finding someone to do that it key.


Brian: I have a hard time delegating that job.


Lauren: I went to art school, so numbers are... not my thing.


Stephanie: Jessica or Chelsea?


Jessica: If you want your conference to be interactive, it would be great if conferences would have facilitative volunteers who would help start conversations or to help make the space very warm, and nurturing, and inviting. This could include being that person who does the social media, the Twitter, the Facebook, to make sure that the conversation continues online and offline. These people would have to be different. Definitely very culturally sensitive, but also very sensitive to different types of personalities and backgrounds. I think it would have to be designed within the conference set up as well, to accommodate for different preferences. Because some people like to speak and be out there, and others need a little bit of encouragement, and then some people just really would prefer not to interact in those sorts of ways at all. I think that having volunteers who would be able to navigate that and kind of facilitate people building a relationship with each other would be great. Not necessarily something that most people think of right away. We always need people at the registration desk, for example.


Chelsea: There's an endless list of things that people can do at these conferences like that. The list of tasks will never run out. Something that I know I have neglected is somebody who will make sure that the people organizing the conference eat and drink and take breaks. Somebody who tells them to sit down. This often usually ends up either being the fellow organizers, or the significant others of the organizers, but it probably would function better if there were an actual volunteer for it.


Stephanie: So let's talk about that marketing because I know this is - aside from the time when I'm working on something like a Kickstarter, where I have to pay some attention to it absolutely every day - this is one of my weak spots. What kinds of things do you do, to get the word out about your conference?


Brian:
	We have a local coalition of groups that puts on our conference, so we're lucky in that we can use the network that's in that coalition to... by word of mouth get everybody to know, "Hey there's going to be a conference here. This is where you go for..." and all that stuff. Also social media we use a LOT. We've paid for Facebook advertising, although I don't know that that really helps a whole lot, and Facebook is becoming less and less useful as a marketing tool - with a lot of changes they've made for more small and volunteer events. But social media is still vital.

	Going on podcasts in the movement and talking on shows. Earlier I said something about having a compelling story. If you can take that story, and go to a podcaster, and tell that story, that goes a long way to helping with your marketing too.


Chelsea: I'd also say one of the easiest ways to do marketing - cuz it's not something that I'm naturally good at - would be ask people to do marketing for you, but in small bits and pieces. For example, if you invite a blogger to be a speaker at your event it should pretty much be required that the blogger needs to post about the event, with enough time for people to actually figure out where it  is and want to go. Having your event advertise itself is sort of a passive but easy way to get the word out.


Brian: We have a volunteer when we organize our conferences that's responsible for coordinating with the speakers before the event and being their hospitality coordinator when they get there. They're responsible for doing intake of information. For following up and making sure that you know travel is taken care of, and hotel rooms are booked, and all that other stuff. Usually I have that volunteer, every now and then, go to the speakers that're coming and say, "Hey, can you do something about us? Can we come on the program?" That person is usually responsible for continuing to follow up and do marketing.


Stephanie: Lauren, I know you've done some interesting things with Skepticon and marketing.


Lauren:
	What!? Yeah, all of those things and more. I don't think there's anything we haven't tried to market for Skepticon. I think we're lucky now that we're 10 years old, and people know what we are. It's a lot of word of mouth happening. I think that is really what truly has been keeping us sustained this long and continues to keep us around. In the beginning, we were on a college campus. We would have posters up. That's not necessarily something you can do anymore. We have advertisments on blogs. We have our speakers reach out to their communities.

	We try to do some local outreach. If there's local groups, we'll contact leaders of the local groups and tell them, "Hey, we're having a con. Love for you to come." And y'know the benefit of having Skepticon is it's free. "It costs you nothing. We're down the street. Come find us. We wanna hang out." We also do like community events. We have blood drives, food drives, to get more of the local yokels on in, to hang out and be around and see what we're doing.

	Many things... I would say try anything. It's really worth it. What're ya gonna lose? Maybe some time. Well whatever, you're already spending a lotta time organizing a conference. What's another 15 minutes right? Right.


Stephanie: Does anybody want to add anything to that?


Jessica:
	I coerce my friends into helping spread the word. For campuses, it's easy because there's a lot of different student groups, so you can always immediately reach out to students. Outside of that you can always reach out to particular communities, like Lauren said, and local groups and things like that. I think that that's the best way of having your conference spread, making sure your reputation or your credibility is at the level where people really are enticed to come see you.

	It's not about just the approaches that you take, or the different distributive channels that you use for marketing, but what your messages are. As long as there's a value-add to it. That value-add might be different from the different people that you're trying to attract to your conference. Depending on the local group that you're speaking with about coming to the conference, or the students that you're asking to come to your conference, you might have a slightly different message and a slightly different value-add. Those are very important things to consider. Make sure that your messaging is always consistent across all of these different platforms, but also make sure that they they enhance or amplify the parts of the conference that are really of value to the people who you would like to come.


Chelsea:
	The way that I've usually done it before is that... I'll have a shared google doc of pretty much everybody I've contacted about the conference, and what their response was, and whether or not they posted about it or talked about it on social media. Doing that is really useful.

	Something that we do with Secular Women Work... It doesn't really work if your conference is free because then you can't waive the fee to get in... If you're really interested in targeting a particular local group and making sure that they show up and get in, offering them like five (or whatever) free passes to get in usually drums up a lot of interest. Allowing people to get in the door that really really need the conference, in order to pull a bunch of other people, who also need the conference and might also pay, is important.


Brian: I don't know if everyone else on the panel might reflect this a little bit, but I've noticed that there are usually two big surges in sales when you do marketing. The first is when you announce that tickets are available. You get you get a ton of sales. Then it levels off, for a while. And then you get a bunch of sales in the last two to three months right before the conference. And I wanted to offer that up as a tip. I think that most people would probably agree with me on that, I think, maybe?


Chelsea: Yeah.


Brian: The reason why I wanted to offer that up as a tip is... There's a lot of work that goes into planning a conference. If you're marketing the entire time from the moment you announced, to the moment of the conference - and that's all you're doing... There's a lot of other stuff that you have to do. I found, to save my own time and energy, to focus my marketing on those humps in sales. Right around the time of release, and then the last three months before the conference. In the intervening months I spend my time doing other stuff.


Stephanie:
	Excellent. We do have a couple of questions though.

	We already talked about speakers. We didn't really talk about starting with diversity and inclusivity... Although, I think building a list all the time actually gets you there a whole lot faster than if you just sit down and start to think about people. We do have a little bias that men and white people tend to be the people at the top of our heads when we start making a list, and it actually takes a deeper dive to do that. Keeping track of people as you run across them is a pretty good way to do that.

	Greta asks, "Can you talk about scheduling social time and downtime?" Lauren, I'm gonna punt this one over to you because you run SkeptiProm, well Skepticon and SkeptiProm.


Lauren: Both are very important events. Scheduling is something that, as Skepticon has grown from a one-day, to a two-day, now a three-day event, we've really had to experiment. What we've found is that as far as scheduling, you want to build in really long meal breaks. Because if you don't allow your participants time to eat and sleep, they won't. They won't, and that's not good. That's not taking care of people that are coming to your conference. Also just, always giving more time. I think we have long lunches. We don't have early mornings. It's a rough weekend being at a con. You really want to build in as much sleeping time, eating time, as possible. Times between speakers to get up and pee. You want to make sure that you're being kind to your attendees. Does that help?


Stephanie: Yeah. Anybody want to add anything to that quickly. Otherwise, I'm gonna ask us to move into telling horror stories. Go ahead Chelsea.


Chelsea: This feeds into accessibility stuff too. Make sure that you always have a room aside that's like a quiet room, where people can just go and chill. Have a volunteer there to make sure that that's what people are doing. I think in every conference I've ever run where we've supplied that room, it's always been used - used in ways that I think allowed people to continue going to the conference. If they're having a moment, it's better to offer them a place to gather themselves up. I would say probably ten minutes is the minimum amount of time between talks you should ever have. If you think people are going to be feeling good and able to receive information when there's no break between talks, that's not true.


Lauren: One more thing I want to add is that if it's a weekend conference, put things on Saturdays that people really really don't wanna miss. Because they have to travel in and then back out of wherever you're at. if you put everyone's favorite thing on Friday night, there's gonna be a lot of mad people at you. If you put everyone's favorite thing on Sunday afternoon, there's gonna be a lot of mad people at you.


Brian: I agree with that wholeheartedly. We sell weekend tickets up to the week of the event, and then at the door (or right before), we sell day tickets. By and large, the biggest sales and the largest attendance is always Saturday.


Stephanie: All right we have just a few minutes left, and as promised, I would like people to tell me horror stories. Because if we haven't talked everybody out of running a conference at this point. We should probably try harder. It doesn't even have to be a big horror Story. Just one of those things that you found yourself going, "How did I get here?"


Jessica: I didn't have a videographer the week of the conference.


Brian: My hotel, one of the years, lost our BEO for Sunday morning. Our banquet event order. It's the description of what you're supposed to be doing. So our entire Sunday morning room setup wasn't done at all, and we had to have our speakers vamp while they were setting up the room and setting up seating, so that everybody could get organized and be where they needed to be.


Lauren: I've had a speaker just not show up for the weekend, go dark. I thought she was dead. She's not. She's fine, by the way. I've had an attendee threaten another attendee with a gun, and I did go tell that attendee to leave. That was super scary. I've had all kinds of things; you can google them if you really want to know. It's on Wikipedia people, look it up.


Chelsea: I had a a white dude who showed up and decided that that was a really great opportunity to threaten a bunch of famous bloggers in person, so that was great. You know that note about figuring out whether or not you're a collective, or a hierarchy, or whatever when organizing? Yeah I figured that out because somebody had assumed that it was a hierarchy, and they were at the top, without talking to anyone else in the group, and decided that they had total control of the conference and would pull funding if they didn't get every whim catered to.


Stephanie: My favorite one still is the conference that we ran with somebody's stalker in attendance - a staffer's stalker in attendance - because as long as that stalker was at the conference, we could quietly but thoroughly keep people on that person and make sure they never got close to the person they were trying to stalk. If we kicked the stalker out, we wouldn't know where the were anymore. Ran an entire conference that way.


Chelsea: That person lied to my face, which was icing on the cake. It was just so overt.


Stephanie: Anybody got anything else in that line?


Chelsea:
	I think we've had facility stuff. We posted directions on a wall with a piece of paper and they got really angry at us. They were like, "Well you have to finely read the contract that you signed." I was like, "Okay."

	So here's one of those things where it's like... apologize before you do something wrong and then they'll say, "Oh no, it's fine," and then you can do it anyway, whether or not it's on the contract. Because the very next sentence was, "Oh by the way, we have a bunch of excess food that we're gonna use for lunch tomorrow. I know that's not how any of the paperwork is done. Can we just a lunch tomorrow even though we haven't done the paperwork for it. She said, "Oh yeah, sure."


Brian: I had a hotel, at the last minute, tell me they had just booked a Christian conference right alongside ours. That was fun. The good news is: the bartender and the staff told us that we were, by far and large, much better behaved than the other group.


Stephanie: Oh we always are. We always are.


Lauren: There was a weekend where we didn't have any programs for a Skepticon the day before. We had to stay up all night at Fed Ex, printing and folding them.


Jessica:
	I was not an organizer for Secular Social Justice, but I was the emcee, and that was a very interesting event. I did not really look at my emcee duties until the week of the event. And while I'm looking it over, I'm finally deciding to ask the questions of the organizer, for certain parts of it that I think I need to probably fill in, or be able to talk to the audience about. And being that it is a social justice conference, I asked if we were going to do an acknowledgement of native land, of being on native land, and it was said that, "Oh this is a great idea."

	I wanted to make sure that we were speaking with indigenous communities locally to know exactly what the proper protocol or way of respecting them would be, which is of course... preferably to have somebody of that community come and represent and speak about the fact that we are standing on stolen land. So Friday night the day before the conference, a friend of mine, an indigenous activist, and I were contacting - she was helping me contact all the people that she knew - so that we could find somebody to come into the conference for two minutes and do a native land acknowledgement. I offered up part of my travel stipend - because it was not fixed into the budget to have an extra person come - but it's also very deeply disrespectful to try and build something like this into a conference at the very very last minute because you're not working with the local community.

	Unfortunately I wasn't able to get anybody to come. But just the fact that I have this support network and people who are willing to help me try and do the right thing as an ally... I'm just very very grateful for. Because if she had not helped me that night to craft a message that I felt comfortable sharing on stage the next day...

	It feels like it's a self-invented crisis, but it also isn't. It's an important thing that that organizer had lacked to design into the conference itself. So that was a fire that I put out from a very different angle per se.

	I think one of the most important elements of conference planning, probably for all of you guys, is that it's about reducing points of uncertainty, trying to predict as many possible paths and outcomes of your day as possible, and make sure that intentional decisions are being made about every single minute, of every single one of them. You don't know exactly what you're not going to anticipate, but the fewer points of stress that there are for you on that day, the more easily you'll be able to handle them and adapt to those situations. You have to be experienced, empathetic, and imaginative. The empathy and the imagination help you to prepare yourself for thinking through the multiple outcomes. With experience, because you've run a conference before, you already understanding some of the potential uncertainties and things that will come up. And then you'll be able to adapt to situations as they develop, a little bit better every time.


Stephanie: All right. I was gonna ask for for closing statements, but I feel like that's really a pretty good place to leave it. Just one more thing after all of those horror stories, assuming we haven't still scared anybody off... Would you run another one?


Jessica: Of course.


Chelsea: Once you start, you don't really stop.


Stephanie: Yeah. All right. Thank you all so much, and thanks to our audience for tuning in. This is the end of tonight's OrbitCon. Join us again tomorrow morning, 10:00 a.m. Central Time, and we will see you then thanks everybody.