Event website launch

The Department of Organization and Strategy hosts an event on the 17 - 20 of November 2010. I was approached to put "something" online. Academic conferences are not sexy and the best example is the main conference website for the event entitled "THE ENTREPRENEURIAL PROCESS IN A CHANGING ECONOMY".

To promote the conference the Department used a database of around 4000 emails. Over a third bounced back to the sender when trying to invite the people who's email addresses where inactive or wrong, the person responsible commented in the meeting. Since things are complicated I want to make a quick round up of what I did.

First I created a mini website that contains an overview, the program, details about the avenue and how to get there and a link to the registration form. The department uses Formstack for the registration process. It's for free if you don't have more the 50 registrations.

The second thing I did was to create a facebook page under the SBE profile. One person in the department is going to take care of this page, posting updates and keep invite people. The page will also be promoted using Facebook Ads. How easy it is to implement a fabulous "LIKE BUTTON" into the event page cannot be underestimated. It's really easy and a desperate attempt to integrate some interactive feature to an otherwise static webpage.

The third promotional activity is to publish a news item or press release. A fourth option is to get glimps of the conference into the TalkinBusiness magazine.

The hardest part was to get the content right. Since the program is not fix except the main points and no visual elements are available it is hard to build a website. But the result looks ok. The graphic on top of the main page takes the style guide literally.

I also had an interesting meeting with two nice woman from METEOR. METEOR consists of six different research programs and was intended overcome the old "silo" thinking by an interdisciplinary approach. They assist almost 200 PhD students and update the website regularly. To publish seminars they use an Access database. The data is displayed using an iframe on the Seminar page. Conferences are updated by editing pages directly. When asking about their experience they reply "updating takes a lot of time and is not easy" and "lots of work needed to be done before you can actually publish something."