Tips and Tricks for First-Time Tech Event Organisers
This summer I was part of the organising/admin team of the very first JSHeroes conference, a not-for-profit community event run by the Cluj JavaScripters community on June 8th and 9th, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Our mission was to promote community-based learning and collaboration, and to support open source technologies. We organised the conference because we felt it was a natural next step. As simple as that. And this is how it went:
We had a few major categories of people involved in this event: the organisers, partners, sponsors, community supporters and volunteers on one hand, and our speakers and participants on the other. Through the marketer lens, these are our personas. Everything we communicate is for each of them.
We figured the only way to approach our roles and tasks was from a holistic perspective, meaning: we developed the “fullstack” state of mind. And now that it’s all done, we’ve all drawn some lessons learned and we have a few tips and tricks for other first-time event organizers.
I think we estimated only about a third of our tasks and roles, when we started :)
An overview of our roles/tasks, would sound like this: Speakers recruitment, Invoicing and bank transfers, Financial overview | Budget keeper, Accounting (outsourced), Travel for speakers, Volunteers management, Sponsorships & partnerships, Marketing and Community partnerships, Social Media, Communications and linking all information, Ticketing & Communication with participants, Website development & constant updating, Designer, Photos & Videos (oursourced), Venue & food, The manager and The overall leader.
We had weekly meetings for updates about the conference. The rest of the time, almost all the team was volunteering, after job-hours. It took around 3 fully dedicated months to put it all together.
We recommend one full-time person for all participants-oriented communication: marketing and communications, community partnerships, ticketing, website updates, social media.
We also think it’s best to have a role model. Our was, of course, JSConf.
Another traction source is an almighty event hashtag. The right hashtag has great power!
Everything that’s great about a conference will be communicated by attendees and reach the organisers instantly!
Also, keep all your info, plus documents and visuals, fully organized in a cloud account with access for all the organizing team.
All tasks and aspects are interrelated, so if most of your organising work is remote from each other, it’s better to over-communicate your updates.
It’s extremely useful if the marketer, the designer and the website developer keep close to eachother.
Communicate to other tech communities about your event plan and updates. We contacted around 80 JS communities, and from more than 20 we received excellent advice and help.
Be transparent. It’s the only way to grow - together.
Use your data analytics. Learn from them. All the time. Don’t forget!
Try hard to respect diversity in speakers. For us, it was very difficult to get women to apply as speakers. What worked best was contacting women communities and using twitter mentions (our suggestions: @GirlsinTech / @womenintech / @WITWomen @learningcode / @coderinheels / @GirlsWhoCode @girldevelopit @BlackGirlsCode / @wwclondon / @womenwhocode / @adaslist / @abidotlocal / @anitaborg_org / @ghc / @womentechmakers /)
Tech contests have good traction for tech events. Ours was a crypto challenge.
Here’s some documents that can be useful for you:
Our social media calendar | List of JS Communities | Women who Code communities | A MindMap of our tasks and roles ⬇️
We know it’s tough for an organiser to just relax and enjoy his work once the event started, but we kindly ask you to sit down, have a good look around you, and say to yourself: “Damn, we did this! Wow!”
if this article was helpful, let us know 👏
