If you have found the careers fair a walk in the park the next challenge you may want to consider is a conference. As with anything if you haven’t done this before we would recommend giving the Opportunities in Surgery office a call to talk through what you need to do but this should help guide you in the right direction.

When planning conferences there are a couple of key things you need to consider before you start:

Why are you running the event?

You need to decide what the focus is (i.e. skills acquisition, networking, careers/ knowledge based, ideas sharing/ problem solving etc.) and what you hope to achieve. It may be as straight forward as providing skills and knowledge about surgery for students. It can be helpful to actually write down in 1 or 2 sentences regarding what you want to achieve as it can help keep a conference on track and gives the conference team an agreed focus.

Who is responsible for the event?

From a management point of view and financial – this is normally a team (management) and likely to be the society (financial).

Who is your audience?

This may seem obvious but you need to consider if you are targeting all year’s just clinical or just pre-clinical years and consider if you want to open the conference up to other medical schools. The audience should help drive the content of the day.

Getting Started

Planning

Once you have got a clear idea of what you want to achieve you can start looking at planning the event. As with all events be realistic as to how much time this will take and make a careful, but realistic financial plan and stick to it. You will need a core team to take responsibility for the planning of the event and a larger team (possibly the committee) to be involved on the day and to bounce ideas off. Allocate areas of responsibility to the core team.

Someone needs to take the overall lead and have sight of all aspects of the day. Other roles will include: Financial officer (budget and sponsorship), Speaker liaison (inviting speakers and facilitators), Delegate liaison (managing booking/answering delegate queries), Advertising and PR and Facilities officer (booking rooms, catering, AV etc).  Everyone needs to be involved in the planning stages and agree the topics to be covered and format. 

The team leader should make sure that all jobs are agreed in person and emailed to the team member like you would expect from a committee meeting – while this may seem over zealous it is important that everyone knows what is expected of them and when.

Space

Decide on the rough format early on and get rooms booked as early as possible, make sure you book enough space for people to eat, listen to lectures, sponsors to have stands, workshop spaces if applicable and a registration area. It can also be helpful to have a small breakout room for speakers to wait/eat etc. Once this is decided jobs can start getting done. A number of things will need to happen simultaneously.

Budget

Put together a budget at this point and be realistic, if you are charging a fee for the conference include an estimate for income. Hopefully you will not be charged for room hire but will have to pay for catering, some AV, publicity, printing etc. Get the figures from quotes/price lists etc but err on the side of caution. Once the event is over it is useful to compare the actual costs to the budget as an aid to planning. Be sure to include some contingency funds for unforeseen costs.

Sponsorship/Funding

Try and get some sponsorship for the event and think about what you can offer in return. Look at other universities to see who supports their events. Medical Defence organisations, publishers and equipment companies may either be able to provide equipment, funds or goodies to go in delegate packs. Try and approach named individuals and be prepared to negotiate.

Programme

Put together the draft programme of speakers and workshops incorporating breaks and start inviting! It is normal to offer to pay speaker expenses but if you stick to local speakers these should be nominal. This is a good time to decide what else you want to include in the day, e.g. poster competition, conference dinner, drinks reception.

Think about the start time of the event – if people need to travel far it is better to start around 10am, this also gives the team time to sort out venue problems before delegates arrive. Once most speakers are confirmed you can start publishing the programme and advertising the event

Speakers

Provide speakers with a clear brief of what you want covered, how long they have to speak, how questions will be dealt with and check what AV they need in advance. It is good practice to brief speakers cautiously about the time allotted to them, if the programme has 10 minutes they should aim to speak for about 7 minutes to allow for introductions, change over etc. We provide speaker with a requirements sheet where they list AV requirements and provide a short biography for the programme.

If possible have speakers email any presentations in so that you can check that they are compatible and will run. A good timesaver for plenary sessions is to merge all the presentations into 1 document with holding slides in-between. This way the next speaker just has to press 1 button to start their presentation.

Catering

It is standard to include catering at all day events – speak to the venue caterers and see if you can arrange a package for the whole day. Ask if you can swap bottled water for jugs of water or water fountains. See if you can issue delegates with vouchers for lunch rather than pay per head for a buffet, this minimizes wastage and can save money.

Advertising

Most of your advertising is likely to be via email and printed posters. This will keep costs down. Advertising in journals or publications is costly and not always effective. Make sure that the website/booking area is ready before the advertising goes out and includes a draft programme on the booking area. If you are planning to open the event up to other medical schools networks like the MSLC are vital for advertising events.

Booking and Delegates

If you can arrange an automated booking system this will save considerable effort and time but if not an excel spreadsheet will serve as well. Remember to ask delegates about dietary requirements, and access needs and be prepared to cater for them. Keep an eye on numbers and make sure you have enough room to accommodate them.

Packs, Badges and freebies

Your delegate pack can contain so much more than just the programme and speaker biographies. At the College we include careers leaflets, advertising sponsor’s flyers, pens and notes pages. Start accruing the contents as early as possible. We can provide you with careers literature; your society may have pens or bookmarks that you can include.

Think about how you are going to package the delegate pack and if you can get bags or folders sponsored for the event. If you are using more than just a lecture theatre for the day include a map highlighting the key rooms.

Make sure that delegate badges are easy to read and make sure you have blanks available on the day. Consider colour coding badges for Delegates/Speakers/Sponsors etc. Make sure you include feedback forms to evaluate the day.

On the Day

Draft in extra helpers to act as runners. Get to the venue early or if possible set up the night before. Make the conference team easily identifiable. Have spare programme’s/floor plans. Make one person responsible for looking after speakers, one person in charge of venue/catering/AV issues and a team to register delegates. There should also be one person in charge of timekeeping who needs to stay in the main conference sessions.

Make sure that everyone has their mobile phone with them and charged up. Try to enjoy the day – with good planning the day should run itself.