Earlier this week, the non-profit group of which I am President, YITIS (Yukon Information Technology Industry Society), held a one-day tech conference in Whitehorse. Following are some of the lessons we learned and a couple of tips that will hopefully be of help to those who are thinking about doing something similar themselves.

1. Have a purpose

From the beginning, we wanted the conference to have a clear, simple purpose: to bring together leaders, managers and directors (basically anyone who makes technology decisions that impact others in an organization) for a simple, one-day event with speakers we’d fly up from down south. Anyone would be welcome, but that was our target.

As I’ve previously written, going to conferences in other places is really expensive. Our aim was to keep the cost as low as possible but still produce a high quality event that people would enjoy attending and obtain discernible value from.

2. Act on and share your idea

Something I learned was to get the plans rolling as soon as possible. Talk about your ideas with friends, clients and co-workers and see who is interested. Don’t ask for their help straight up; if they’re into the concept, they’ll volunteer and ask how they can get involved. Planning a conference is a lot of work and takes a ton of commitment over a long period of time (ours was close to a year) so you’ll only want people who are passionate and believe in the idea. Ignore the naysayers.

3. Hire a planner

As soon as you can afford it, hire a professional event organizer. If you have a lot of free time on your hands, you can probably organize the whole thing yourself, but you’ll likely go crazy doing so. I know I would have.

The hired organizer doesn’t have to do everything (which would lead to greatly inflated budgets) but there are a lot of things that happen behind the scenes – preparing the agenda, booking plane tickets, setting up payment processing, going after sponsorship, sending out communications, answering questions – which take up a huge chunk of time.

If those hours are volunteered, you’ll feel like you’re on a slowly sinking ship as the demands start to take a drain on you and your relationships. It’s not worth it, in my opinion.

4. Work your contact list

We used the full gamut of advertising and communications tactics – conference website, email messages, website banner ads, Twitter, newspaper ads, radio ads and blogs such as ours – to get the word out and encourage people to buy tickets. So, what worked best?

Going over the numbers, that is, comparing submitted registration forms against campaign dates and tactics, email messages had the best conversion rates. The website banner ads generated the most click-throughs, but it was personal and group emails that performed best in getting people to sign up.

The thing with email, at least we found, is that it takes time and you have to provide graduated value to the reader with each message. You also have to spread out the schedule of when those messages are sent. Too close together and it gets spammy. Too far apart and people don't place enough urgency in what you have to say.

Most importantly, the key with email is to be human and speak (err, write) to recipients in the way you'd wish to be written towards. Be real and don't be overly formal. Make a message that people will get excited about and want to share with their friends. Email is a highly social medium.

5. Make room for breaks

Finally, during the conference, make break time as important as speaker time. We had 30-45 minutes breaks scheduled between speakers that turned out to be of huge importance and value to attendees.

We all live in a small northern city, and a lot of us see each other on the street or in a store every few weeks, sometimes every day, but it was amazing to watch that big group of people get up from their chairs, grab a drink and something to eat, then just start talking to one another, over and over again. Getting people back to those chairs to welcome another speaker on stage was sometimes a challenge. A good challenge, of course!

In conclusion

So, in summary, if you want to host a conference of your own, just do it. Simply decide that you’re going to make it happen and start working on the idea today. Stay committed, stay focused and just see it through. Speaking from experience, the time, stress and effort are, in the end, worth it.