Planning a conference? Here’s what we learned.

4 min readMar 17, 2017

On October 14, 2016, Tim Grace and I hosted the first annual #BrightConf. This was an ambitious feat, as we had just finished with our Techstars demo day two weeks earlier. Here’s what we learned…

Recruit speakers early

People love sharing their knowledge, but are also incredibly busy. You need to put a lot of effort into recruiting speakers early on. To start, we focused on locking in a few high profile speakers — once we locked them in they helped anchor the event and made it easy for other speakers to commit.

We recruited the rest of the speakers throughout the month leading up to the event — a testament to the amazingly helpful people in our network.

Rick Zullo, Samara Mejia, Ablorde Ashigbi, Guy Turner, and Brian Luerssen

One surprise — speakers love to help recruit other speakers.

Promote early, promote often

Once we had the bulk of the speakers lined up, our biggest concern was that we wouldn’t sell enough tickets and waste these people’s valuable time. We started talking to everyone we knew about the conference and enlisted help of friends in our network to spread the word. I shared the conference daily on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. We even included a mention of the event in our demo day pitch to 500 investors at the House of Blues (a two-fer as TroyHenikoff would say):

One thing we figured out way too late was the value of promoting the event on Facebook. Here you can see we started promoting the event *10 days* out:

I suspect we would have sold a 100 more tickets had we started promoting the event on Facebook a month out. A post introducing each speaker every few days would be an effective way to draw interest and get people sharing within their network.

Conferences are 90% logistics

You’ll need to coordinate every detail with your speakers, moderators, volunteers, event staff, local press, vendors, etc. Create a spreadsheet or use a tool like Trello to track everything — speakers, sponsors, agenda, and budget.

You’ll need to collect bios and headshots from your moderators and speakers to post on the event website, registration page, flier, in social media, etc. You’ll need to coordinate session content between speakers and moderators.

Badges — don’t forget that you need to create them for your speakers and moderators. If you use Eventbrite for event registration, it’s likely that you’re not going to ask your speakers to signup. Eventbrite makes it easy to print badges, but don’t forget the ones for your speakers :)

Your support team is critical

Tim Grace introducing the the investor panel

Continuing on the point above — running an event is hard, and you’ll need a lot of help. Consider this short list of things to coordinate throughout the day:

Registration and check-in
Speaker and moderator check-in
Food and beverage setup and teardown
Facility setup and teardown
Photography
Videography
Speaker A/V
etc

Talk to people that have hosted similar events before. Read Medium posts with helpful lessons learned ;)

Have fun!

People are spending the day with you, so make them feel amazing. Make sure wifi is easily accessible. Serve delicious food and great coffee.

Keep the momentum

Send thank-you notes to everyone that helped. Send a thank you email to attendees. Ask for feedback.

Edit the photos and videos. Publish the session recaps. A surprising amount of work goes into an event after you’ve shut off the lights. Honestly, this is the one thing we fell down on. We were exhausted and immediately had other projects to tackle. Lesson learned — dedicate someone to event wrap up.