Conferences, Workshops, and Meetings for Affected Individuals

Conferences, workshops, and meetings are effective ways to teach your membership about your group's condition and to create and strengthen your members' sense of community. Creating these events involves two major tasks: determining the scope and objectives of your meeting, and doing the logistical planning for the event.

Determining the Scope and Objectives of Your Meeting

Conferences include many sizes and types of event. They can be as simple as an afternoon session with a speaker followed by some social time or as extensive as a lodgings-based multiday event with a mix of speakers and activities and with meals served on site. Consider these issues as you plan conferences:

• Your members' interests
• Your goals for serving your membership
• Costs
• Available resources

When creating a new conference, survey your members. Ask them what they want from a conference, how much time they would want to spend, how far they would be willing to travel. Ask them what they can afford, and get a sense of how many interested members would require financial assistance. Even if you know for certain that your members need a certain kind of conference or educational experience, the starting point should be what they want.

This is initial part of planning is where you can ask open-ended questions, such as "What time of year works best for your family?"

Your Members' Interests

Ask them what they want. This is their conference, and it cannot succeed unless it meets real needs. Some questions to consider: Do they want a one-day conference or something longer? Do they want to meet on a weekend or weekday? Are there particular holidays that could coincide with this conference? Are there holiday periods you should avoid? What can they afford?

Answers to these questions will help you get a sense of how many people will actually come to a conference, a crucial starting point for planning location and activities.

Your Goals for Serving Your Membership

This is where you reconcile your sense of what your members need with what they want and where you use what they want to create a curriculum for getting it to them. They may say their top need is to learn how to work for a cure for their children. This could translate into a conference in which they get talks about the current state of research from scientists along with workshops about informed consent and donating tissue.

Costs

Travel distances, lodging options, speaker costs, and supplies for the meeting will all figure into your final budget. It takes time to establish the details of this budget, but you'll need to start with a ballpark figure. As you consider what your families want and what your organization needs to share with them, you need to go beyond what families can afford and have a good sense of what your organizations costs will be. Consider name badges, signs for the conference site, packets for the members, registration forms, mailing costs, equipment rental, honoraria or gifts for your speakers, day care.

Available Resources

Consider in-kind and financial donations your organization can obtain. Is there a church that can offer space for your meeting? Are there manufacturers whose products your membership uses routinely? As with costs, you'll revisit resources as you do logistical planning, but a general sense of whom you can tap will help you scope your meeting effectively.

Logistical Planning

Logistical planning revisits the same issues as setting scope and objectives, and you will also get feedback from your members in this phase, but the questions you ask will come with a range of options, as opposed to be open-ended.

There are several major aspects to planning a conference:

• Site selection
• Date selection
• Budgeting
• Funding
• Managing the timeline
• Post-event communication

Site Selection

Are your members clustered in one area? How close is your organization's location to the majority of members? What people resources do you have for the nitty-gritty of planning and working with the conference site?

What are your space requirements? You've already decided whether you need a church basement or a hotel; do you need multiple rooms for concurrent sessions? For exhibitors? For socializing?

After the Conference

• Send thank-you notes to all the volunteers, speakers, contributors, vendors, and other people who participated in the conference.
• Send thank-you notes and evaluation forms to the attendees.
• Did you realize in hindsight that you should have done something differently? Write it down!

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