Planning a Conference? Follow These 13 Steps

At the Adobe Max Conference in 2019, I knew exactly where to go for the best breakout sessions as well as what to tweet and who to interview to amplify the reach of our reporting. The keynote speakers included photographer David LaChapelle, filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan, artist and designer Takashi Murakami, and musicians Dave Grohl and Billie Eilish. I watched hundreds (if not thousands) of people engaging with dozens of brands at the booths; I sat for a free professional headshot; I video-recorded Mr. Doodle drawing on the lobby wall; and I watched Vampire Weekend perform to close out the multi-day event at the Los Angeles Convention Center. One year later, at the height of the COVID pandemic, I attended another conference — online. You’d think, with an all-digital event, organizing the sessions, the keynotes and the attendees would be easy, but it wasn’t; although I didn’t receive a confirmation email when I purchased my ticket, I did receive a marketing email days later that asked me to attend. What!? I made note of the company’s poor customer segmentation and personalization, and decided, if my registration had actually been received, I’d attend anyway. But on the first day of the event, I couldn’t log in. I contacted support via chat and email, and didn’t hear back until the following day; I missed half the sessions I wanted to attend. By the time they “found” my registration, I was so frustrated I only wanted my money back. That took a month. And this was a story of two very different conferences. Now, you might think this is the difference between an in-person and an online event, or between an Adobe event and an event hosted by a smaller organization. But neither is true. While most of us can’t afford to invite the world’s most famous people to speak or perform, we can all identify and deliver speakers and sessions that would entice and enrich the lives of our target audiences. All we have to do is follow the time-tested best practices for planning a conference. 

Your Checklist: 13 Steps to Conference Planning and Hosting Success

Need to know how to plan a convention? In case you missed it, as part of Customer Management Practice (CMP), we at Customer Engagement Insider (CEI) have the benefit of decades of in-person and online conference planning experience; the following checklist is based off our collective expertise.

Step 1: Start Small, Plan Ahead, and Take Your Time

As with anything new, it makes the most sense to host a smaller or simpler event before planning your dream conference. And while you could read this article, develop a plan, invite your contacts and wing some presentations in the next week, I promise the results would pale in comparison to what you could achieve with strategic, careful planning. So choose a date well into the future, take your time, confer with all your internal experts, and follow the remaining steps in order; you’ll know when you’re prepared for organizing a conference.

Step 2: Determine Your Theme, Target Audience and Ideal Participant Number

Before you pick a date or location for your conference, you need to clarify which audience you’re targeting — and with what; At CEI, for instance, we might host one conference on digital marketing, one on customer experience, and another on employee experience, with a different target audience for each. 

Pick your theme wisely. At this stage, you don’t have to finalize the official name of your event or the SEO title of the conference homepage, but you do need to determine why your proposed conference makes sense. Is your audience excited about a new, paradigm-shifting technology? Does your industry need assistance in a particular area of your expertise? Are your customers or partners seeking networking opportunities? 

Conduct competitive research. Find out which keywords and topics similar businesses are targeting through their conferences and content marketing. 

Then, once you know who you want to fill your seats, and why they should be filling them, conduct secondary research on past conferences for similar audiences, on similar topics, to assess the appropriate number of total attendees you can expect; this will inform your location and venue, as well as your date.

Step 3: Pick a Date and Location

Whether you’re starting small or looking to enhance an established process, you have to pick your location and date carefully, and early. (Terry Powell, a Forbes Council member, recommends “planning at least a year out, or maybe two years!”) The sooner you establish and publicize your date, the sooner you can start soliciting registrations — and preventing your target audience from signing up for a competitor’s event the same day/week. Likewise, the sooner you select a location, the more quickly you can determine a conference date and length. So, research: 

• When your competitors are hosting their conferences
• When during the year you (and/or your competitors) have had the best conference successes
• How long your target audiences prefer their conferences
• Where your target audiences live, work, and prefer to attend conferences
• Where the country’s or world’s most popular conferences are held

Industry consensus tells us that a conference with around 300 attendees should last at least two full days; bigger, more broad-based conferences could last a week, while smaller, less sophisticated conferences could be completed in a day. 

To determine what your audience is looking for, conduct original pre-conference surveys — and analyze the results alongside the results of any past surveys, as well as your UX and CX data and competitive intelligence.

Need help conducting your surveys? No problem. Research and request a demo from at least two of these 17 tools delivering expansive, customizable survey capabilities (some even for free):

1. Alchemer
2. AskNicely
3. GetFeedback
4. KwikSurveys
5. Latana
6. LimeSurvey
7. Picreel
8. ProProfs Survey Maker
9. Qualaroo, a personal favorite
10. Qualtrics, probably the most robust and the most well known
11. QuestionPro
12. SoGoSurvey
13. SurveyLegend
14. SurveyMonkey, the one everyone I know uses
15. SurveyNuts
16. Typeform
17. Zoho Survey

Based on the results of your surveys and other research, you can pick a location (hint: hard-working professionals like to enjoy their conference retreats during off hours). And, finally, choose a date that:

• Doesn’t conflict with any other major events being held at your location
• Is during the fall or spring, when fewer workers take vacation
• Is during the week, since attending a conference is a work duty
• Is toward the end of the week, so attendees can extend their stay to sightsee post conference

(Oh, and by the way, with all due respect to Terry Powell, founder of The Entrepreneur's Source, planning a conference for a year or two years is probably excessive; of course, conversely, it is better to delay and do it right than to rush and ruin an opportunity.)

Step 4: Assemble Your Conference Committee and Start Strategizing

There are a lot of components to planning, promoting, hosting and leveraging a conference, and from here on out (if not before) you’ll need some support. Build out a team of top performers who specialize in the following areas:

• Event planning and hosting
• Finance and accounts payable/receivable
• Project management
• Data analytics
• Digital marketing (including content creation, social media, email, digital advertising, etc.)
• Graphic design
• UX web/app design
• Media (Audio/Video)
• Customer experience
• Sales
• Sponsorships and partnerships

To identify the best fits and ensure full commitment, don’t assign roles; instead, send out a companywide email or other internal communication requesting participation — and from your inventory of interested employees, staff the project team with your most diverse, eclectic mix of experts. Then, to maintain enthusiasm and kickstart a long planning process, schedule your first conference meeting as soon as possible; together, you will complete the remaining steps.

Step 5: Get Organized

As with any project, you need to assign roles and responsibilities before getting started. Early in your first conference meeting, clarify your expectations for each member and for the team as a whole. Then, coordinate with the group to set a timeline for each stage of the conference hosting process:

1. Planning the conference
2. Promoting the conference
3. Hosting the conference
4. Bragging about the conference

Be sure to include your schedule not only for content development and distribution but also for strategy and review meetings, daily ‘standups’ (I recommend Slack), and any working group sessions (e.g., to create a list and schedule of content creation or web design assignments based on the digital marketing strategy developed during a team strategy meeting).

Then, assign your project manager to the essential task of adding the conference project to Jira (or your other project management software), including:

• Team members (providing only these employees project access)
• Workflows
• Tasks
• Review and due dates
• Assignments (i.e., who’s assigned to each task)
• Any project notes or resources

With the right project management platform, everyone on your team can stay on task and on time — and you can say goodbye, once and for all, to project spreadsheets (seriously, they’re archaic). 

Step 6: Set Your Budget and Select a Venue

Once you know your conference location, date and target participant number, you can develop your project budget, led by your finance and event planning/hosting experts. With your project budget, you can find and book your venue — and begin your outreach to potential vendors. 

When creating your budget:

• Don’t assume you’ll be able to finalize mutually beneficial event sponsorship deals in time
• Don’t assume your attendee, exhibitor/table and sponsorship fees will cover your costs
• Calculate estimated income from all revenue sources
• Determine your registration fee based on expected attendance (and any profit goals; not every conference needs to be designed for revenue)
• Create a list with a line item for every anticipated expense

Then, for easier planning and monitoring, and to ensure you’ve covered everything, divide your expenses into the following core categories:

• Venue
• Accommodations
• Transportation
• Catering
• Activities and displays (e.g., an after-dinner concert, trivia night or live art-making installations)
• Marketing materials (e.g., on-site banners, brochures and merch giveaways)
• Speakers
• Workers

Finally, when selecting your venue, focus on the following nine key considerations:

1. Venue size — if it’s too small, no one will be comfortable; if it’s too big, you’ll waste money and give participants a bad first impression
2. Location — if it’s too far off the beaten track, you may limit attendance; if it’s in the center of a big city, you may increase revenue from tickets sold but miss out on business opportunities with distracted attendees
3. Atmosphere — if it’s too stuffy, you may create anxiety among certain audiences; if it’s not nice enough, you may turn off your highest-value customers or partners; but if you choose an alternative type of venue, like a museum, historical site, theater or library, you’ll likely intrigue and inspire your participants
4. Transportation — if your venue isn’t near the area’s major transportation hub(s), find out if it offers free shuttle service; if not, set up a corporate account with a car service
5. Facilities — are there large auditoriums for the keynotes, vendor booths and extracurricular activities, plus smaller rooms for narrower topics and breakout sessions?
6. Accommodations — can your guests stay on site, or are there hotels nearby?
7. Amenities — a pool, gym, bar and restaurant is what you’re looking for, not a getaway resort with open swim-up bars and gambling 
8. Catering or other included services — you can drastically reduce your total conference costs by choosing a venue that can deliver delicious, sophisticated, diverse and diet-sensitive food and drinks, as well as dedicated on-site staff to handle food service, security, climate control, IT/AV and/or janitorial services; otherwise, your venue will need to be surrounded by restaurants for all the off hours, and you’ll need to find a third-party event hosting company to manage the logistics alongside your internal event planning and hosting specialist
9. Technical specs — you can book the next Plaza or Beverly Hills Hotel for a conference that completely flops because the venue (or event hosting company) doesn’t have the right IT, audio, video or lighting equipment, enough charging spots or high-speed WiFi

Make a list of your venue must-haves for your meetings. When negotiating, ensure you’ll be permitted to conduct a dry run/walkthrough. And if you find a favorite venue just out of your price range, suggest a multiyear contract for a lower per-year fee.

Step 7: Establish Your Conference Tone, Objectives and Goals

With your roles and responsibilities, budget and venue in place, your team needs to brainstorm and agree on the tone, goals and objectives of the conference — based on your pre-established theme and your customer and competitive research, and before you hone in on the specifics; the outcome of step 7 will determine the effectiveness of your conference. 

Common convention objectives include: 

• To promote your products or services
• To increase brand awareness
• To position your brand and/or CEO as an influencer or thought leader
• To generate positive press
• To generate revenue
• To generate new leads
• To book meetings and create new partnerships
• To educate, inspire and empower your industry/sector
• To give your sector’s/industry’s workers a break from their typical work weeks

From these (or other) objectives, you can derive your goals — and, using participant data from past conferences, your data analytics specialist can set realistic benchmarks for the following common conference KPIs:

• Number of sales
• Number of social media mentions
• Number of media mentions
• Number of sales meetings booked
• Number of new partnerships initiated
• Number of tickets sold/Number of new leads generated
• Number of new customers/Number of repeat customers
• Total income
• Total revenue
• Total number of participants/Total number of new participants
• Participant satisfaction (you can determine a satisfaction score, similar to the customer satisfaction score used by CX teams, through your post-event surveys)

Finally, align the tone of your conference with your brand style, corporate vision and core values; otherwise, you may get called out on social media for being inauthentic or disingenuous.

Step 8: Find Your Conference Sponsors, Partners and Vendors

For many companies, there’s no conference without sponsors, partners, vendors or grants; conferences aren’t cheap, even online, and sometimes the money simply isn’t there. 

For other organizations, money isn’t an issue — but collaborating with other brands is simply a smart strategy.

Either way, make three lists:

1. Preferred and alternate sponsors, or non-competitor industry peers, who might help finance the conference for brand mentions (at different amounts, for different sponsorship levels)
2. Preferred and alternate vendors, who create inspiring and/or paradigm-shifting products and might pay a fee to set up and work a booth (at different amounts, for different booth sizes and locations) or host an extracurricular activity
3. Preferred and alternate partners with whom you might be able to arrange mutually beneficial collaborations 

To create your list: 

1. Of sponsors, refer back to your competitive and customer research to identify brands that most frequently sponsor similar conferences 
2. Of vendors, refer back to your competitive and customer research to identify brands that appear most frequently in participants’ answers to post-event survey questions about the best booths or nontraditional activities
3. Of partners, task your project team’s sponsorships and partnerships specialist with selecting your existing and prospective partners most likely to engage in potential partnership conversations related to the particular conference  

Then, task your digital marketing and graphic design specialists with the creation of three external but unpublished, consistently displayed and branded documents breaking down the benefits associated with each sponsorship/vendor/partner tier.

The sponsorship tiers for an in-person conference, for instance, could be broken down as follows:

• Platinum (Limited to your chosen number) — $50,000, for a private meet-and-greet with the keynote speaker or headlining performer; an official mention during the opening ceremony; your logo or tagline on digital ad banners, the conference homepage, and in-person displays, swag giveaways and printed handouts; social media and email marketing mentions; and a large booth or chosen activity
• Gold — $35,000, for everything in the platinum package except the meet-and-greet and opening ceremony mention, with the option to select three of the five available logo placements
• Silver — $20,000, for everything from the gold tier but with only one logo placement choice
• Bronze — $10,000, for everything in the silver package, without online or in-person logo placements
• Copper — $5,000, for everything in the bronze package, with either social media or email marketing mentions

(Needless to say, for an online-only event, the tiers would be priced significantly lower and include only digital offerings.)

To fill your ‘trade show’ room with occupied booths (and eager attendees), be sure to price your tiers competitively; again, rely on your competitive research, and divide your booths based on the following criteria:

• Size
• Electric/IT/AV hookup
• Proximity to the entrance or exit

The top-tier booths would be the largest, with full tech hookups (by specification and installed), closest to the entrance or exit; the bottom-tier booths would, obviously, be the smallest, with no equipment provided, in the least trafficked locations.

To kickstart your partnership conversations, develop your tiers based on your typical arrangements as well as your conference-specific capabilities. At CEI, for example, our partners (though we call them “sponsors,” sorry) can choose from online events, market studies, advertising, reports, webinars and analyst services packages. For your in-person event, you could offer (potential) partners speaking opportunities on the main stage or in breakouts; or, you could create a third-party content package (a binder left on or beneath each chair before the opening ceremony), offering partners space for their own branded reports or advertising. 

For guidance, download our media kit, which features detailed information on our services, performance, demographics and various partnership/sponsorship tiers.

Then, coalesce again as the conference committee to strategize the best approaches for conducting your sponsor, vendor and partner outreach. For sponsors and partners, I recommend more traditional methods, like emailing or calling on the phone to schedule a meeting; for vendors, get creative, using text, social media or even digital ads.

Step 9: Confirm Your Conference Speakers and Headliners

Some speakers are harder to book than others. (Obviously, most of us can’t afford Billie Eilish.) All speakers want to know what they’d be paid. And many speakers care just as much about how speaking at your conference could impact their reputation and credibility. As always, it’s your responsibility to entice them. How you do that is up to you, but I suggest offering:

• Compensation (speaker fee)
• Transportation to and from the venue, before, during and after the conference
• Full hotel accommodations for the length of the conference
• Catering for the length of the conference
• Supporting equipment
• Fulfillment of special requests, within reason
• Paid and organic promotion through all appropriate digital marketing channels

Whether you’re booking an industry thought leader, inspirational speaker or celebrity for your keynote, your keynote speaker should get the VIP treatment. They are, irrefutably, your biggest draw. 

For your other speakers, negotiate for best prices. 

But first, once again: 

1. Refer to your research to identify the most popular speakers from past conferences and other events
2. Compile lists of preferred and alternative keynote and closing speakers as well as preferred and alternative speakers for the rest of the conference
3. Create a speaker-specific ‘media kit’ similar to that shared with potential sponsors

Once your team’s equipped with the necessary data and materials, you can begin your outreach.

Step 10: Create and Finalize Your Agenda

As you perform your speaker outreach, draft a simple conference agenda template, including separate timelines for each day and generic placeholders like “opening ceremony,” “keynote speech,” “breakout sessions,” “extracurricular activities” and “buffet dinner.”

Your first day 1 draft agenda, for instance, could look something like this:

Day 1

• 6 AM - 8 AM - (Buffet) Breakfast
• 8 AM - 8:30 AM - Opening Ceremony
• 9 AM - 10 AM - Breakout 1
• 10:10 AM - 11:10 AM - Breakout 2
• 12:20 PM - 1:20 PM - Breakout 3
• 1:30 PM - 3:30 PM - (Food Truck) Lunch
• 4 PM - 5 PM - Optional Activities
• 5 PM - 6 PM - Free Time
• 6 PM - 7 PM - Themed Cocktail Hour
• 7 PM - 8:30 PM - (Buffet Dinner)
• 9 PM - 11 PM - Optional Activities/Open Bar

Then, based on your conversations with prospective speakers, partners and sponsors, along with your preexisting knowledge of your target audience’s demographics, core values, areas of focus, needs, goals, pain points and buying triggers, develop additional draft agendas with increasingly more specificity. (Don’t have the necessary customer info? You might need Segment, Amperity, or Simon Data.) 

Depending on your progress booking speakers, you might set your daily agendas according to your confirmed speakers’ preferred topics or the topics you hope your speakers will cover. Ideally, you want to finalize the full agenda no later than four months before your conference date. And you don’t want to announce your speakers or publish your agenda until you’re sure of what you’re including — because there’s nothing worse for your branding than overpromising and underdelivering or having to rescind an announcement made prematurely.

Step 11: Develop, Design and Launch Your Conference Landing Pages, Registration Site and Participants Hub/App (and/or Invest in One of the 17 Best Conference Platforms) — and Give Participants an Early Start on Their Networking

All the conference marketing content you create, and all the emails, texts, social media posts and ads you distribute to promote that content, should include calls to action (CTAs) to visit the conference homepage, register for the event, or sign up for the app. All of these link destinations, then, have to be built for UX before you utter a public word about your plan.

Specifically:

• Your landing pages should be designed to ‘squeeze’ new leads (registrants) from the users who arrive at the page — and, most likely, you should have an in-navigation organic SEO landing page and a Noindex, Nofollow paid landing page
• Your registration site should be accessible to anyone who completes the form on one of your landing pages and pays the admission fee; it should serve a similar function to self-service portals, with all the logistical information necessary to plan, book and execute your trip
• Your online hub and/or app should link from the registration site, designed with gamification and streaming capabilities to enhance conference participant engagement as well as pre- and post-conference networking

Of course, all of this is easier said than done — and most companies don’t have the resources to develop their own app or online community. Fortunately, there are numerous virtual, hybrid and in-person conference hosting platforms that can help you streamline this 11th step. 

Research and request a demo from at least two of these 17 options:

1. Accelevents
2. Airmeet
3. Bizabbo
4. Communique Conferencing
5. Cvent
6. eventcube
7. EventsAIR, which we use at CEI
8. FILO
9. GoTo Webinar
10. Hopin
11. InEvent
12. Intrado
13. ON24
14. Orbits
15. Tame, whose website most caught my eye
16. vFairs
17. Whova, a personal favorite

During your investigation and conversations, ensure the conference platform you choose offers customizable conference alerts, so your participants — and your conference committee and onsite workers — are never surprised.

Step 12: Create, Test, Implement, Iterate and Optimize Your Conference Marketing Strategy

As soon as you’ve finalized the destination of all the links you’ll include in your conference promotion, use my guide to crafting killer content (and writing a blog post like this one) to start developing your conference-specific content creation and distribution strategy. 

When creating the content marketing strategy for your conference, be sure to:

• Adhere to your brand voice and style
• Prioritize your value proposition and key differentiators
• Segment and personalize based on user behavior, demographics, funnel stage and other variables
• Award innovation and creativity
• Include all marketing efforts planned for the days of the conference — to increase onsite engagement, expand and enhance brand awareness, and maximize virality
• Include all marketing efforts planned for the days, weeks and months following the conference’s conclusion — to convert the conference participants from leads to customers, to generate new revenue, to upsell existing customers, and to spark enthusiasm about your upcoming conferences

To create the strategy, follow these three steps:

1. Establish Your Content Marketing Goals

To ensure clear direction for your content marketing strategy:

• Define goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based (SMART)
• Start with your overall business goals, proceed to your long-term strategic marketing goals, and conclude with your content marketing and conference-specific goals
• Identify the digital marketing KPIs against which you’ll measure your performance and the quality of your content and promotional tactics 

2. Outline Your Content Development Process and Distribution Channels

Before you begin planning and then creating custom content, you need to confirm with your conference committee how the content will be produced and disseminated. Be sure you have an answer to every one of these 12 questions:

1. Who will be responsible for the content strategy?
2. Who will be responsible for the content creation?
3. Who will be responsible for the content reviews and approvals?
4. Who will be responsible for the content posting and distribution/promotion/marketing?
5. Who will be responsible for performance monitoring, analysis and reporting?
6. How will the content themes be determined?
7. How will the content deadlines be determined?
8. What types of content (e.g., blog posts, white papers, landing pages, or videos) will be created? And what unique step(s) does each type require?
9. At what cadence will the content be released?
10. Where, when and how will the content be promoted? 
11. At what cadence will performance metrics be reported?
12. At what cadence will content iterations and optimizations be implemented?

3. Develop Your Editorial Plan and Content Calendar

Your last preliminary step before commencing content creation is to flesh out your content marketing ideas. 

1. Interview internal stakeholders on topics that would appeal to your conference’s target audience
2. Refer back to your past post-conference surveys to identify the content types and distribution methods preferred by this audience
3. Ask your high-value clients and influencers what inspired them to visit your site, request a demo, make a purchase or promote your brand
4. Spy on your competitors — what concepts or content types do you see that you haven’t touched on or tried? 
5. Collaborate with your conference speakers, partners and vendors to leverage cross-promotional opportunities
6. Identify all the SEO keywords and social media hashtags and accounts associated with your industry as well as the theme, primary topic(s) and agenda of your conference

Then, with your content plan ‘in hand,’ create your editorial calendar; within your project management platform: 

• Build out a master calendar for your conference marketing
• Establish timelines for the entire project and each campaign
• Map out workflows for each campaign
• Add each task for each campaign
• Assign roles and set deadlines for each task

Finally, let all your digital marketers loose, host periodic meetings to monitor progress, and don’t reign anyone in (and close out the project) until everything from your new speaker announcement template and press release to your conference displays, swag giveaways and post-event surveys have been put together and put to good use.

Step 13: Nail Down All the Logistics and Plan for Worst-Case Scenarios

As you oversee the full-scale production, and as your writers write, your designers design and your publishers disseminate, your event planning and hosting specialist should be coordinating with your venue and all necessary third parties to confirm all logistics and ready the internal team and external event staff for all planned occurrences and any unexpected circumstances, including — but certainly not limited to — what to do if:

• A registrant can’t attend and wants to cancel
• A speaker cancels last minute or arrives too late
• A presentation is running past its allotted time
• Too few registrants attend the conference or a specific session or activity
• An issue arises with the venue or another third party
• A security concern or medical emergency emerges
• You lose electricity, WiFi or another essential technology
• You receive significantly more press requests than expected
• A member or members of your internal team fall unexpectedly ill

In these cases:

• Refer the registrant to your cancelation policy
• Have backup speakers ready to present, if necessary
• Establish and communicate the process for warning speakers of diminishing time, and adhere to those guidelines
• Open the event to friends, family and the public, through word of mouth only
• Ensure your internal event planning and hosting specialist is in constant contact with any third-party event host and readily available to address any participant, sponsor, partner, vendor or speaker concerns
• Ensure the venue has a backup generator, and bring extras of any tech you intend to supply
• Establish and communicate the process for press to gain access, cover specific parts of the conference and schedule interviews; prioritize existing media relationships and the best strategic opportunities; and set up a conference room for postgame-style interviews, if necessary
• Have backup staff trained and ready to take over

Finally, your events specialist should be: 

• Conferring and establishing a good rapport with venue security
• Building out internal conference communication streams, providing all staff in attendance with access to and training on simple collaboration apps like Slack or Trello, as well as your event layout tool 
• Training your check-in staff on handling long lines, unruly attendees and your event check-in app 

With thorough and proper prep, you won’t even need a day-of-event checklist.

Don’t have an event layout tool or check-in app? That’s probably pretty common, especially for newcomers or first timers, so don’t worry. Catch up now by demoing at least two of the top options in each category.

For event layout, consider:

• AllSeated
• Planning Pod 
• SmartDraw
• Social Tables

For event check in, take a look at: 

• Attendium
• Boomset
• Certain Event Check-In
• Guest Manager
• OnArrival by Cvent
• Social Tables Check-In

Most — if not all — of the tools and apps referenced in this 13-step convention checklist offer numerous integrations with CRMs, CMSs, CDPs and more; any that don’t most likely offer an integration through Zapier (one of my favorite companies).

Need More Conference Planning and Hosting Insights?

Sign up for updates on future CEI conferences. When you attend, take notes.

And in the meantime, read these books on planning and hosting successful conferences and corporate meetings:

• The Power of Participation: Creating Conferences that Deliver Learning, Connection, Engagement, and Action, by Adrian Segar
• Into the Heart of Meetings, by Mike van der Vijver and Eric de Groot