What Makes a Good Conference? Part IV: The Schedule.

Organized time is organized opportunity.

GSM:TABRITMIA

[Note: I will be citing the state, the theme of the conferences, and the month/year, but not the name of the conferences or the names of the host(s) or organization(s).]

A good schedule has all the information available to your attendees when they arrive to the venue or in the email about the day of the event.  It is understandable to have a skeleton schedule of the speakers, including the time and the room, if relevant, or in the case of certain training sessions, the day/time of what subject(s) are covered, prior to the attendee’s registration.

At the naturopathic conferences, their “events” page had a link to their skeleton schedule, but when I got to the venue, they had additional entertainment events and special sessions located at various breakout rooms listed on their flyer.  These were very helpful since knowing about them in advance resulted in an opportunity to visit one of the colleges: Some alumnae from a naturopathic university in Arizona during one entertainment event at Utah in 2016 interacted with me so much, I decided to crash their school’s alumni event to get a feel of their alma mater, and I toured the campus two days later when returning home!

Even at the Tennessee training in January, the instructor had handouts of what we were going to learn each day. Although some days would run short and others would run long, it was not so out-of-bounds to throw me off-guard, and I had time to think about what to buy from the display, which would be a small book about herbal remedies.

In contrast, I was disappointed that the Georgia training in October 2021 ran extremely long for me.  Even though I was prepared and read carefully the starting time of the event in their email, there seemed to be issues for some of the other attendees since they didn’t make it for thirty minutes to an hour after the official start because of missing that detail, slowing the pace of the course, and delaying a side-talk I was supposed to have with one of the instructors.  I was looking forward to that because I was expecting to spend a good ten to fifteen minutes on a critique of my medical kit and possibly considering buying some of the merchandise they had for sale, but everything ran so late that the instructor’s family came over, cutting my conversation to a disappointingly brief two to three minutes, forcing me to forego buying anything as it was packed before we could talk.  In a situation where I am there to learn plus the venue has items for sale, I focus on learning first then what to buy second.

The conference at Texas had its own issues, starting with the hotel where the main venue was located being adjacent to several major highways where one could get lost easily going to the entertainment venues, which I mentioned at the Venues section of this work.  They chose to have lunch at a nearby Mexican restaurant on the day of the main event, but I had enough of trying to navigate unfamiliar territory to be interested in getting lost again (as well as to have a comfortable bathroom break) and to risk a difficult time socializing in a loud restaurant: When I got the schedule from their organizer, I never got advanced notice in the email of their VIP schedule of their entertainment venue, for which they ran so late at the burger joint by the lake that one of the organizers was warning the host of the time, and all I got was a skeleton schedule of the presenters at the main conference venue, with no mention of the Mexican restaurant they were planning to go to or of any post-conference entertainment in their flyer.  The last-minute main conference information and previous bad experience at the VIP event was too much for me.

As an autistic introvert, it’s very important for the scheduling of events to have proper breathing room in order to be able to communicate with people, one-on-one, for ten to fifteen minutes, at least, if possible, as well as to give enough time at the end to shop, especially if a side-talk is requested of me to happen then.

Read the rest (nine parts total):

Part I: Backstory.
Part II: Planning and Announcements.
Part III: Venues.
Part V: Presentations.
Part VI: Got Food?
Part VII: Entertainment.
Part VIII: Aftermath.
Part IX: Summary.