Conference planning report
January 28, 2016
The call for proposals is out. We’ve just extended the deadline to February 12, since we don’t yet have enough to make a full schedule (28 proposals as of January 28).
We did receive a presentation proposal from Shannon Pritting and the ILS Review Group. My concern with including this as a regular conference session is that most everyone wants to hear the update, so I don’t think it would be fair to put it up against other sessions. Let’s talk about the options for making this work.
The keynote speaker will be Wesley Eisold. He is a musician and owner of an independent publishing company, Heartworm Press.
Vendor registration/sponsorship letters have gone out, and responses have already started coming in.
Opening the conference bank account has proved to be more difficult than expected, but I should be able to get it finalized next week. I would like to draft guidelines or maybe best practices for future conference chairs, for example, what type of documentation is expected, checks vs debit cards, keeping copies, what banks we’ve worked with in the past, are account fees acceptable, how long we’re expected to keep account open.
Based on issues with registration last year, Logan and I have agreed that in order to get the member rate, a person must have a current, updated membership before filling out the registration form. I think we need to give advance notice that this will be the policy so that people have time to renew their memberships, and wonder if we can we set a deadline for membership applications/renewal before conference registration? For example, if registration closes on May 20, by what date do they need to have submitted their membership application in order for it to be processed before registration closes?
