Conference how-to guides

Short guides that walk you step by step through everyday tasks in the organizer panel. Each one shows where in the SF-CONFERENCE system to find a given feature and how to use it, on screenshots of a real panel rather than as a dry list of options.

The guides are written for people who are organizing a conference, a congress, a training course or a convention and are sitting down to the panel for the first time. No technical knowledge is assumed: where something needs a module turned on or a setting made in another part of the system, it says so plainly. Order matters too. Every guide runs from the first click to the moment the attendee sees the result on their own side.

Where to start

At a new event the natural order is this: first build the registration form, because it decides what you ask attendees and how much taking part costs. If the event is residential, add the accommodation catalogue before you open sign-ups. The accommodation field in the form has nothing to show until the hotels exist. At the end come payments and invoices and the event website, which is what an attendee sees first.

Once registration is under way, more guides come in handy. Adding an attendee manually handles registrations that arrived by email or phone, invitations and discount codes bring in guests and partners, the attendee survey collects feedback after the event, and workshop sign-up takes people onto the slots they choose.

Sponsors and exhibitors usually do not register, yet they pay too. You bill their packages with a payment without a participant, with its own payment link, a proforma and an invoice.

Academic conferences usually start earlier still, with the content: collecting papers along with the review, or an external form for talk proposals, which works before registration has even opened.

The whole format, from the call for papers, through reviews and conference fees, to participation certificates, is covered start to finish by the how to organize a scientific conference guide.

An online event plays by slightly different rules, because the room is a stream link. The whole road, from the form to the survey, is covered by the how to organize a webinar guide.

An event with a hall and a reception desk adds entrance control: entry tickets with a QR code and scanning them with the mobile app or a USB scanner. The whole path is described by the how to organize an in-person event guide.

Trainings and courses follow rules of their own: a small group, invoices for companies, completion certificates and repeat editions of the same programme. The whole cycle is described by the how to organize a training guide.

System how-to guides

Each of them describes one action in the organizer panel: where to find it, what to click in what order and what the attendee ends up seeing. A few minutes to read, with the doing along the way.

General guides

General guides look wider. Instead of one feature they describe a whole event format from the idea to the wrap-up, together with the decisions that have to be made outside the system and with the places where the organizer panel genuinely helps.

What else you may be after

The guides describe single actions in the panel. If you are after a description of what the system can do at all, look at the features page or at the separate descriptions of the registration form, attendee management, accommodation or papers and review.