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Conferences

This guide was put together by Claire Vincent to assist future conference organisers. Different things work in different areas, so please use it as a rough guide, and use your own creativity and imagination to make each conference amazing and unique.

What’s involved in running an ASCM National Conference?

Firstly, there’s no point in running a conference if you and your state are going to end up exhausted and burnt out at the end of it. In the early stages of conference planning, I was talking to Shawn about whether it was appropriate to be using Victorian Staff Worker time on a National Conference. He recommended that if I could use the conference planning to build the branch at the same time, then it would indeed be valid work. This was the most important piece of advice that I received when planning the conference.

I delegated as many jobs as possible—one branch member designed the flyer, after I’d given her the bare bones of the text to go onto it. Another two branch members were appointed as organisers for a pre-conference seminar. Another was appointed as head chef and food-organizer. Another organised a morning worship and liturgy. Then, I asked each other state/territory to prepare a session for the conference and a morning devotion. Add two exciting speakers, and the conference planning is done! My role was just to coordinate everything and hassle people to make sure they were doing things.

But what do I need to do?

So … some more concrete info about what I did to organize the recent conference.

Step 1
Pick the dates. There’s usually only one week that all states have in common for holidays at July.

Step 2
Book the venue. We chose about four venues and weighed them up in terms of price, location and facilities. We ended up with the one that was cheapest and had the least facilities, as cost seems to be a really big factor in whether people can come to conferences or not. In the end, people just treated the fact that they had to be a bit cramped, and in some cases sleep on lilos or on the floor as part of the adventure.

Step 3
Do a draft budget and set the registration fee. Talk to the Treasurer about this.

Step 4
Pick a theme (but conferences don’t have to have a theme). We picked ‘Ecology’ because Melbourne people were interested in this topic and it was easy to then to direct their energy into the conference.

Step 5
Draft up a tentative program, bearing in mind LOW ENERGY events—that is events that will be easy to organise and will not create too much stress later on.

Step 6
Get the flyer designed and distributed.

Step 7
Start asking people to do things!

Step 8
Appoint people to key positions. It is good to have a conference chaplain. Also, SCM conferences traditionally have a women's officer, men's officer and a sexual harassment officer. These jobs are not huge, and can be people who are attending the conference anyway. Their roles are to be there if people need to talk, and in the case of the Women's and Men's officers, to keep an eye on gender balance and behaviour at the conference. The sexual harassment officer exists as a contact person in case of an incident. Any other roles you think up can be appointed too?giving people official roles makes them feel good and ties them down to attending!??

After this stage, there was a bit of a lull until a couple of weeks before conference. Just occasional phonecalls to check how people are going, and phonecalls to confirm bookings and speakers. Also, regular emails on the list—try to stir people up with some quirky emails about ‘HOW MUCH FUN WE’RE ALL GOING TO HAVE ON CONFERENCE!!!’ and ‘GUESS WHAT? WE’RE HAVING A CONFERENCE!!!!!’.

A few weeks before conference starts, you probably can’t avoid some slight chaos. People are really bad at returning application forms, so you won’t really know who’s coming until the day the conference starts. Which is stressful! Things to organize at this stage are:

• Billets for before and after the conference
• Airport pickups—I made use of SCM Friends for this
• A venue for the JGC meeting
• Shopping for the conference food, stationary and other consumables
• Photocopying—handouts etc.
• Transport to and from the conference. We went down on the train, and then hired a charter mini-bus to take us to the site. It worked really well, and turned out to be the cheapest option ($217 total for the two hour bus rides, plus about $10 each on the train).