Organizing a Conference

Once you have been asked to find a venue and organize a con­ference, there are certain key points you will need to know and decisions that will have to be taken before you can actually make the booking.

The first, most important point, is the number of delegates at­tending. Is it a big conference - say for fifty or 100 people - or a small board meeting for just six, because it makes a big difference to the size of room and all the arrangements. So number one is the number of delegates.

The next thing to decide is what you actually want to achieve with your conference: either it is a training session or a sales lunch. You may get all your sales people together and you show them a new product. That is very different from a training session. So you obviously want to know what you want to achieve at the end of the day.

Then you have to decide how long your conference is to last, how many days you anticipate you're going to need and what time of the year you want to hold in. The type of activities and func­tions can be dependent on the weather, for instance if you intend to hold an evening garden party.

Another point is where the conference is going to take place. Before you can decide on this, you must know where the people that you are expecting to attend will be coming from. Will it need to be reasonably central - near to an airport, near to good railway connections, or easy to get to by road? Are there adequate car parking facilities?

And of course you need to know who is actually paying for the conference. Are the delegates paying for themselves or is the com­pany paying? Usually the company pays for the main part of the conference and the delegates pay for their drinks and telephone calls and peripherals.

Once you've decided on all that and you've found your venue, you'll have to think about the things that you'll require while you're there: things like conference room size, how you're going to want the room laid out. If it's very informal you won't need a very big room, but if you need everybody with desks you'll need a larger room. If you have a very large meeting in the ballroom you may need people sitting in rows like in a lecture theatre. You'll also have to decide whether you need syndicate rooms - that's small rooms for fifteen to twenty people, and if you're going to use syn­dicate rooms, how many rooms you'll need. You then come onto your conference equipment. If someone is giving a presentation, will they need overhead projectors, flip charts, slide projectors?

You also need to know what refreshments your delegates will require. If you've got your delegates sitting in a conference all morning, by the time they get to lunch time they're going to be very thirsty, so you need a break in the middle for a cup of coffee (and a chance for the delegates to stretch their legs.

You need to find out the dining requirements - will they be privately dined or is it okay for them to sit at small tables in the main dining room? Perhaps you want a gala dinner on the last evening to make it more of an occasion.

Then you can get down to the menu arrangements - what are you actually going to eat? This is very much determined by how much time you've got for lunch. At lunch time delegates often have only forty-five minutes to an hour, and so they'll want a fast buffet service where they can have as much or as little as they want. In the evening you are more relaxed, so you can spend a couple of hours over the meal and have a formal one. Another thing you can do is, if the delegates need to work through lunch, you can have a finger buffet brought in.

Another thing to consider is accommodation and how many of the delegates will be staying. If you've got a conference of twenty, perhaps only ten require accommodation. Perhaps, some of these guests are very important people, so you'll want to put them into better rooms than the ordinary delegates. So you must work out a rooming list.

And finally, if this is a residential conference, are the dele­gates going to have any leisure time? For instance, they're here for two days. On the first afternoon there's a free period - they ha­ven't got any work to do in the conference. The delegates might want some activities organized. Perhaps they want to go out and see the local sights, perhaps they want an organized sporting activ­ity. If the delegates are here for a long time they might want to go to a local pub. Will they want a disco or a casino set up, or will they want a party?

So when you have all this information you can go about booking.

Task 4. Look through the text and find the English equivalents for: