My experience of organising a community conference - CollabDays Finland 2023

On Saturday, the 9th of September, over 100 eager attendees, 22 speakers, and a couple of dozen organisers, volunteers and sponsors gathered in Helsinki to spend a beautiful autumn day - inside - at CollabDays Finland.

I've been an attendee and a speaker in hundreds(?!) of online and live conferences and meet-ups during my career. I've also co-hosted two user groups; one (ACM Teams) has already retired, and the other (Teams Finland) is still going strong. I've also been organising some live events in the past, but this was the first time I've been organising a whole-day conference. In this article, I'll share my experiences of how we made that happen and what I learned.

Planning the big day

Get help! And I don't mean professional help but colleagues and friends to organise the event with you. We were a group of five: Sari Soinoja, Jussi Mori, Katja Jokisalo, Terho Antila and me. Sari is my dear colleague; otherwise, all organisers work in different companies. Luckily, we all live near Helsinki, so it was easier for us to, for example, have a live planning meeting and check out the venue beforehand. During the event day, we also had big help from our volunteers: Timo Pertil? , Emad Yazdankhah and Shuning Miao ????

Have a place to plan the event. We did it in a Shared Channel in Teams, and I can recommend that to everyone! Inviting people to the channel with all the permission policies was not easy... But in the end, having all the discussions and materials in one place with easy access paid off.

List all the things you have to consider and share responsibilities. For example:

• Sponsors, sponsor materials and agreements
• Money, invoices, payments, possible taxes, etc
• Event website, CfP website, registrations website
• The venue and everything related to it
• Catering and all other refreshments
• Call for speakers and selecting speakers
• Attendee registrations
• Social media accounts and posts
• Speaker, sponsor and attendee communication and instructions
• Depending on your event and budget: speaker and sponsor dinner arrangements, speaker gifts, hotel and travel arrangements, etc...

We did most of the planning asynchronously in Teams. We also had a couple of Teams meetings with a clear agenda, which helped to address all the open questions. We had a live meeting when we selected the speakers and when we checked out our venue.

If all organisers take their responsibilities seriously, do what they promise in time and communicate actively in Teams, it will be a smooth ride. I was happy (and surprised) with how smoothly our planning process went. We had some minor hiccups, but nothing was forgotten or left at the last minute. The most time-consuming things were a call for speakers, including the speaker selection and replacements for speakers who declined their session after being accepted, finding a venue with a suitable price tag (Kalliolan Setlementti ??) and hunting down the sponsors.

Sponsors make it possible

Community conferences are free for the attendees because we want them to be accessible to all. The venue, the catering, hosting the speakers and small things like lanyards cost money. If you've attended a conference and seen sponsors standing by their booths - they are the ones who pay for the event.

In the Finnish Microsoft scene, there is not the same traditional third-party product offering as in middle Europe, for example. At first, we were unsure where and how to find enough sponsors for our event. In the end, we were very happy and lucky to get 7 awesome sponsors, and we were able to cover the costs of the event - community events aim to +-0 balance at the end. Huge thanks to Sulava , Ydentic , Advania Finland , PointFire , Experts Inside AG , Solu Digital and App Power ????

The next time you're an attendee at a conference, visit the sponsor booths, talk with them, and ask about their services and products. You don't have to buy anything - but you might spark interesting conversations and find common ground on how the sponsor might help you with some challenges your organisation is facing.

And a note to the organisers: Take good care of your sponsors! We got good feedback on our info e-mail, and we also offered the possibility of setting up the booth the evening before the event. What we could do better next time: longer sponsor sessions and ask the speakers to encourage people to visit the booths and sponsor sessions actively.

Creating a compelling session line-up

Conferences (even the commercial ones!) rarely pay for speaker travel and-or accommodation. That's also the case with CollabDays - the budget has no room to cover those costs. Think about that when you see an international speaker line-up: they all travel to another country, to stay at a hotel, at their own expense. That's why I was so happy to see so many MVPs and rockstar speakers around Europe join our conference! International speakers also attract attendees and sponsors, which is good from an organiser's point of view.

Choosing the sessions was hard. We had 20 session slots in 4 different tracks and got 6x the session proposals. To keep the balance, some great sessions had to be left out to fit another session to another track. The theme of your conference and a possible attendee profile you're looking for will define the sessions you'll be accepting. A declined session might be an excellent one, but it was not the right one at this time.

The session list was not anonymised, but we actually didn't look at the speakers before choosing the sessions. We went purely topic first. A good and clear session description is crucial - and yes, we notice if it's a direct copy-paste from Chat-GPT...

We also valued a promise of live demos, and if a session was meant to be technical, level 200/300 sessions over a level 100 session. These make the session usually more attractive to the attendees.

TOP3 tips for organising a community conference

Communication is the key

Be sure to be open and precise in your communication while planning the event and in the information you share with the speakers, sponsors and attendees.

Create hype beforehand with social media posts and speakers in WhatsApp/Signal group. Write and send precise info emails, but do not spam. We sent info emails to speakers two months, one month and one week before the event.

Next year, we will also focus on better attendee communication. We had more no-shows than we anticipated. Luckily, we still had a nice amount of people, and the sessions had a great audience. We also shared the leftover food as takeaway in the afternoon. Sadly, people don't care about the registrations as a commitment to join - and that's the heritage of all the online conferences during the Covid era.

During the event day, ask speakers to encourage users to visit the sponsor booths, fill out feedback forms, and guide them to the next sessions and lunch. The attendees will listen. We also got feedback that a loud sound or a cowbell should be used when the sessions are about to start so people know to head to the session rooms ??

Reuse and automate what you can

We didn't start with an empty desk - we had some excels and vague plans from SharePoint Saturday 2020, which was cancelled due to Covid. But basically, we still had to do everything from scratch. The next year (2024) planning will be a lot easier because we can utilise most of the same templates and instructions.

• Use Canva or Microsoft Designer for event visuals
• Use Chat-GPT/AI to create automatic social media posts based on the CfP information
• Google/Bing event preparation checklists, budget Excel sheets, etc
• Copy the best ideas from conferences you have attended or spoken in before!

Think about the event schedule

The conference day will run past so quickly. There is never enough time to hang out with everyone. From our experiences from other events, we wanted to have good breaks between sessions and, of course, have a legendary SharePint mingle after the event.

We decided to have 60-minute session slots with 45 minutes of speaking and 15 minutes of Q&A time. We got feedback that it was sometimes considered too long. Our experiences from 45-minute speaking slots have been that the questions will still come after the session, so if you only have 15-minute breaks between the sessions, it will lead to running from one session to another.

Choose a speaking slot that suits your event. It can be 30, 45 or 60 minutes. Consider the Q&A time and communicate with the speakers how to use their allocated timeslot. Make sure people have time for proper breaks between the sessions. Longer breaks allow people to mingle and speak with the sponsors - you want to leave time for that as well.

After this experience, will there be a CollabDays Helsinki 2024?

We asked that in our feedback form, and 100% of those who answered said yes! So let's see - stay tuned ??

#CollabDays #CollabDaysFI #CommunityRocks