To help first-time organizers of technical and scientific events, we put together a complete step-by-step guide for organizing events like congresses, symposiums, journeys, and seminars.
Event Organization Is Nothing Without Planning
Planning is essential for scientific events in general, whether it’s a symposium, a seminar, a journey, or a congress.
At this stage, you need to think about who you can count on to organize your event, plus set the dates and venue.
For event organization to be effective, the team needs to plan a budget that meets the expectations of both organizers and participants.
People
You need to decide who will be part of the organizing committee, since these are the people who will guide the other steps and delegate tasks.
Select the people who will make up your staff — those who will help with check-in, event promotion, and choosing vendors like caterers and bakeries.
These people can also help you land sponsorships and partnerships!
If your event includes scientific paper submissions, it’s important to also choose who will be the paper reviewers and the editorial board, to set the submission rules and evaluate papers according to defined criteria.
Organizing events isn’t easy! During planning, put together a list of these people’s names and reach out to them in advance so they can help with your event.
Event Venue
Depending on the size of the event — for 100, 300, or even 500 people — you need to book the venue well in advance.
This way, you avoid unexpected issues. It’s also important to choose a venue that comfortably fits the number of people — never pick a space at its capacity limit.
Your event’s success also depends on how satisfied participants are.
Schedule
As part of planning, you need to clearly define every stage of the event, including key dates: registration deadlines, the paper submission window, the evaluation period, and, of course, the event date itself.
Keeping all these dates in mind and building a calendar with the help of spreadsheets lets you plan ahead and figure out which tasks need to happen within each deadline.
It also lets you plan flight purchases and travel dates in advance for any speaker who isn’t from the city where the event will be held.
Program
If you plan your event’s program well — with clear topics for talks, short courses, and panel discussions — you’ll be able to list the speakers you want at your event.
Remember to define a program that’s relevant to your audience!
The earlier you finalize your program, the earlier you can reach out to speakers. And once you’ve built your speaker lineup, you can promote it on social media to grab participants’ attention.
Finance
Last but not least, structuring your finances is essential for everything to go as expected!
At this planning stage, you should estimate costs — covering materials, badges, shirts, notepads, venue rental, coffee break catering, and speaker travel and lodging, among other things. Event organization is nothing without a well-planned budget.
Knowing what you’ll spend lets you see whether you need to raise external funds, like sponsorships or research grants, or whether registration revenue alone can cover expenses.
Registration
Registration is a crucial point in organizing an event! That’s why you should think of strategies to increase sign-ups — in other words, attract more people. This includes setting a price that’s accessible to your event’s audience.
If you’ve already held previous editions of your event, it’s extremely important to announce the new edition. But how do you do that?
The tip is to keep your participant base updated after every edition of your event. That way, you can reach out to them by email or social media before registration opens, attracting a good number of participants.
Tools that simplify registration are another way to boost sign-ups. Using a tool that makes registering easier increases the number of participants at your event.
Promotion channels are extremely important for boosting ticket sales! You can map out Facebook and LinkedIn groups, or even list your event on platforms with event calendars, like CNPq.
Thinking About the Participant Experience
It makes complete sense to have a quality tool suited for selling registrations! You should always think about the participant experience before, during, and after the event, right? So if registering for your event is slow and complicated, you risk having them give up on attending!
When announcing that registration is open, it’s essential to explain where to register and what steps participants need to follow. In other words, you need to answer anything that could raise doubts.
If your event already has a recognized rating, like a Qualis score, or is already well known, make sure to highlight that quality and promote it to participants and speakers.
Sales
As part of your event organization schedule, you need to make registration deadlines very clear to participants.
Defining deadlines and pricing tiers is essential, especially to attract more participants! By offering a promotional price for the first tiers, you can already have funds to invest in what your event needs.
You should also define your event’s payment methods. Some tools let participants pay by bank slip or credit card. Some events need to issue GRU payment forms or handle payments from companies wanting to take part. That’s why it’s important to pay attention to payment methods that match your audience.
Event Promotion
One of the key factors for the success of any scientific event is promotion. Hours of planning can go to waste — after all, what’s the point of a well-organized event if nobody shows up? You need to think about the strategies you’ll use to reach as many people as possible.
Use Technology to Your Advantage!
We live in an increasingly technological world, and we can use that to our advantage — not just for creating and organizing events, but also for promoting them.
Social networks like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook have become key to marketing and promotion strategies over the past few years — the days when printing folders and flyers was the only option are long gone. Use them to reach a much larger number of people. You’ll save a lot of money while contributing to sustainability.
Thanks to how easy it is to interact on social media, you can also build a relationship with your audience before, during, and after the event. Use these networks to ask your audience for suggestions and measure how far your posts reach — this will help you create more content and improve things before the big day!
Remember, information spreads very fast on social media, and promoting your event is essential, leading to a significant increase in new registrations.
Papers
Scientific Committee
It’s very important to have a clearly defined evaluation process. Organize your scientific committee and define the main person responsible for it, who will stay in contact with paper authors. If you need a larger team, it’s a good idea to have scientific coordinators handling each thematic area of your event, if your event covers multiple subject areas. The scientific committee also includes the paper reviewers, who receive papers and decide whether they’ll be accepted.
It’s important to send these invitations to your scientific committee in advance, stay in touch with them, and keep good communication and organization so evaluations flow much more smoothly.
Submission
Paper submission at an event can happen in several ways. The most common is asking participants to send papers by email. In this case, the scientific committee sets the submission rules and creates an email template participants should follow, along with the required file format.
If you want to make this submission process easier, use a tool that automates it. How does it work? It’s simple! Instead of sending an email, each participant submits their paper directly through the platform. This makes life easier not just for participants, but also for organizers and reviewers, who get access to the full list of submitted papers.
Evaluation Modes
You need to define the criteria and methods for evaluating scientific papers. Some events use more advanced criteria with numeric scores to rank evaluations. Others simply mark a paper as approved or rejected.
Some events opt for a simple evaluation — a single approval is enough to accept the paper. In that case, you can have just one reviewer approve it.
For events that need more thorough review, peer evaluation is recommended. This requires at least two people to evaluate the paper and decide whether it should be accepted. If there’s a tie — one approval and one rejection — a third person gives the final decision.
For stricter, more rigorous events, the method most accepted in the scientific community is double-blind review. Neither does the author know who’s evaluating their paper, nor does the reviewer know who the author is, preventing any interference in the evaluation.
Making Evaluations Easier
It’s very important to make organizers’ lives easier. Having a tool that automatically distributes submitted papers to reviewers avoids a lot of manual work. This can also make it easier, later on, to announce evaluation results and which papers will be presented.
Presentation
Paper presentations happen after evaluation results are announced. This is when you build your event’s scientific program. You need to define the length of each presentation — for oral presentations, how many papers will be presented in the morning and afternoon sessions, and for poster presentations, how many papers per room.
After building the presentation schedule, share it with reviewers and participants in advance, so they can plan ahead and show up at the chosen location, date, and time.
Execution
Staff Training
Keep in mind that organizing an event isn’t something you do alone. You need a trustworthy team to help you. Team members need to be in sync, which isn’t always easy.
Finding the right people and successfully training them for your event can be a challenge — but once again, technology can help. It’s always a good idea to look for software and apps that support this.
These tools can make training easier and improve your team’s development in the roles they’ll play throughout the event’s organization.
Keep in mind that you need to look out for the satisfaction not just of your audience, but of everyone involved in the team. Creating a relaxed atmosphere and moments to unwind helps — a team that’s happy with their work will definitely perform better.
Try to fully integrate your team with the event’s goals and themes, making clear that they’ll be part of the impression the event leaves on the audience. Build a strategy and a game plan to keep the team focused and motivated, and split larger teams into smaller groups with specific tasks for each.
Your team needs enough people to get every task done — but too many people can sometimes cause communication problems that get in the way of your event’s organization.
Check-in
Check-in is a crucial part of your event! It’s the first step toward success, so it demands a lot of responsibility.
Be very careful with the team responsible for this task — remember, if check-in is poorly executed, it can cause problems for participants. Registrants who don’t go through check-in, for example, won’t be able to get their certificates.
Check-in isn’t just for controlling participant access — it can also be used to track how many people actually attended your event. This lets you build a database and improve your strategy for future editions.
It’s ideal to eliminate waiting, and there are steps you can take to speed up the process! Ditch paper, use a check-in app, and split registrants into categories — like paid and unpaid, for example.
Check-in is also when registrants receive their kits, badges, and all the materials handed out to participants.
Using queuing theory, you can optimize the system, improving service and reducing wait times while speeding up service. Queues form when demand for a service is greater than supply — in this case, that means participants waiting for check-in.
A practical way to optimize service is to use a single line with several people checking participants in, instead of separate lines. That way, if there’s a problem at one check-in station, the line keeps flowing.
Separate lines
Organizing separate lines carries some risk! If there’s a problem with one of the staff members checking people in, everyone in that line suffers, since the whole line comes to a stop.
Single line with multiple staff checking people in
With a single line, even if one staff member has an issue, no participant is affected, since service keeps flowing.
Using this method, your event’s check-in process will definitely be faster.
Post-Event
Certificates
Issuing certificates is a very important step in organizing your event. It’s considered a prerequisite for any successful event and should be planned in advance. Certificates confirm that a participant attended activities such as submitting a paper, presenting a paper, or attending a seminar.
Many organizers run into trouble creating certificates and figuring out how to distribute them to registrants. Manually made certificates take a lot of time and turn what could be a simple task into something potentially problematic.
Getting a certificate matters to almost every registrant, so it’s very important that your event issue certificates efficiently.
Issuing Certificates
The first step is choosing how the certificate will be issued. Printed certificates cost a lot more. You often need to split certificates into categories — short courses, panel discussions, seminars, and so on. On top of that, you need to count hours attended and distribute certificates accordingly, which can also become difficult — imagine the amount of paper this whole operation would generate.
So always prefer digital certificates — the issuing cost is lower. Digitally, certificates can be generated automatically, sent by email to participants, or made available for download through an event platform. This completely eliminates printing costs.
Once you decide how you’ll issue certificates, you’ll need to create them. To speed up creation, there are ready-made templates available for download online. There are also free tools with several certificate templates, like Canva, an online tool for creating certificate designs, and Microsoft PowerPoint.
Proceedings
Proceedings are documents generated after a congress or event ends. They’re the main record of your event, containing the papers presented, along with the talks and lectures that took place. Proceedings compile all the knowledge generated at the event, making this another essential step in organizing your event that needs to be planned.
Why Proceedings Matter
For researchers, having their abstract or paper published in the event’s proceedings adds value to their academic CV. Proceedings give your event credibility and help researchers get recognized for their scientific output.
Proceedings preserve the memory of your event. By publishing them, you let professionals and students access the content even after the event ends. The content from a given congress becomes public and easy to access, boosting the event’s image and helping organize future editions.
How to Publish Them?
As technology advanced, the way proceedings are published has changed. In the past, proceedings used to be printed into hundreds of books. Later, organizers moved to physical media like CDs and DVDs, which was also time-consuming and expensive — imagine needing physical media for every participant at your event.
With the internet becoming widespread, the opportunity arose to publish proceedings virtually, making it easier to organize scientific events. The best way to publish your event’s proceedings today is online. Publishing this way makes organizing easier and significantly cuts costs.
Online publications also improve reach, engaging even people who weren’t at your event but might be interested in the content.
One option some organizers use is posting proceedings as a PDF — but even though it’s a faster method, some small issues remain, like difficulty searching for a specific paper or opening it on tablets and phones.
So what’s the best method? Today, the best approach is using digital platforms built for publishing proceedings online, which make organizing your event easier. Through these platforms, the content you produce shows up in search engines like Google, and stays accessible on every kind of device, including mobile.
Publishing quality proceedings matters a lot for you and for your congress’s reputation! Publishing them well is a way to democratize the scientific knowledge produced at your event and build a good relationship with the scientific community.
Satisfaction Surveys
Running satisfaction surveys is a practice that opens a channel of dialogue with your participants. It makes participants feel more valued, and it gives you a better shot at getting future events right by identifying mistakes and what could be improved.
Knowing what to improve tends to reduce mistakes, and efforts get better directed toward making the right adjustments — organizing your event more efficiently and satisfactorily.
Even3 was created to simplify the organization of academic and scientific events. With this platform, all the tips above become much easier to put into practice, removing manual work and letting you focus entirely on the quality of your event.
