Quick Start Guide: A Conference With Panels or Sessions

Get your conference online quickly with Festology!

Set the timezone
You’ll only have to do this once, but it’s critical! It makes sure your calendars work with iCal, Outlook, and Google Calendar, and it allows attendees in other timezones to stay in sync with you.

1. Go to “Series”.
2. Set your “Default Timezone”.
3. Click “Save Settings”.

Add the conference
You’ll be doing this once a year if you run an annual conference. Once your conference is set up — it should only take a few minutes — you can move on to creating your schedule.

1. Go to “Series Setup”.
2. Click the “Create New” button or click on the default series in the series list.
3. Add your conference title as the “Series Name”.
4. If it’s an annual conference you can use the year as the “Series Name (Short)”. It will appear in your URL.
5. Add the dates for the series.
6. At the bottom of the form, select “Published”, then click “Save & Close”.

Add a venue
You might only have one venue — such as a convention center — and that’s OK, but you’ll want to add it to power your site’s maps, mobile maps and connections to social networks like Foursqaure.

1. Pick “Venues” under “Event Items”.
2. Click the “Create New” button.
3. Add the name of the venue and the address. Don’t worry about room numbers or halls — You’ll add that specific information for each session/panel on a separate event page that corresponds to each session/panel.
4. At the bottom of the form, select “Published”, then click “Save & Close”.
5. If you have more than one venue, repeat this section until your venues are entered.

Add panelists
Your session might have a speaker, or it might have a group of panelists and a moderator. It’s easier if you tell Festology about them now, and save yourself a step later.

1. Pick “Participants” under “Event Items”
2. Click the “Create New” button
3. Enter the name of the speaker, panelist or moderator.
4. At the bottom of the form, select “Published”, then click “Save & Close”.
5. Repeat until all of your panelists are entered.

Create your sessions/panels
Now that you’ve created the people who will play key roles in your sessions or panels, you can create the sessions/panels.

1. Go to “Events”.
2. Click the “Create New” button.
3. Enter the title of the panel, the start time and an end time (if there is one).
4. Select the “Venue” you created from the pulldown list, and specify a room number or more specific location at the venue if there is one.
5. Click on the “Participants” tab, and drag the panelists/speakers/moderator for this panel to the box on the right side. You can also give the participants roles in the blank space below their names (such as “Moderator”, “Panelist” or “Keynote Speaker”)
6. At the bottom of the form, select “Published”, then click “Save & Close”.
7. Repeat this section for additional panels or sessions.

At this point, you’ve created a website with venues, panels and speakers. You can continue to add images or video, or you can go back to the sessions you’ve created and sell tickets.

Related posts:

1. Quick Start Guide: A Film Festival
2. Quick Start Guide: An Ongoing Film Series
3. Quick Entry Guide: A Meeting with a Keynote Speaker
4. Creating a Second Event Series