How This Tight-Knit Association Saved 177 Organizer Hours Managing 59 Speakers

If you are reading this, you likely know the pain of selecting and managing your speakers, sessions and content from end to end. The smaller the team, the taller the task. This presentation is dedicated to the tight-knit organizations seeking to maximize their effort.

Thank You

Special thanks to Kristin Shoop for sharing her association’s success story with us to help fellow associations who face similar challenges in their event planning.

ACES: The Society for Editing is the nation’s leading organization of editing professionals, educators, and students. ACES is dedicated to improving the quality of the written word and the working lives of editors. ACES sets standards of excellence and gives a voice to editors in journalism, government, business, and beyond through top-notch training, networking, and career opportunities.

ACES had been managing speakers and content with a mix of spreadsheets, docs, and email chains. But what they saved in money with free tools, they spent in time (and headaches).

Their process presented challenges like:

• Potential presenters from government or other secure environments were not allowed to use Google.
• No communication mechanism meant that responses had to be managed in a separate email account.
• Many columns had to be added to track which communication each submission had sent or received.
• The potential for human error was big.
• There was no central place to store helpful documents or FAQs.

Overall, the ACES way of managing speakers was inefficient, time-consuming, and lacked the professionalism they rightfully deserved.

Prior to adopting Sessionboard, the team at ACES had been spending three hours on average managing each speaker. With 59 speakers participating in their event, that’s 177 organizer hours being spent on mundane manual tasks.

In other words, ACES was using 23 eight-hour work days just on speaker management.

And that’s not even counting the five to seven days they would typically commit to their session submission evaluation process.

“It was all-consuming for my team and me, given the number of times we spent hopping from spreadsheet to spreadsheet to email, triple-checking our work. We knew there had to be a better way.” - Kristin Shoop, Events and Professional Development Manager of ACES

Is there a solution that saves organizer time while providing a central location to call for sessions, manage evaluations, on-board and communicate with selected speakers, collect their details and content, and build an event agenda?

Create a simpler, cleaner, and more effective speaker and content management process that provides a centralized home for their event planning and boasts a professionally branded experience for their speakers via the portal.

Organizer Hours Saved: 177 Hours        

With 59 speakers at their annual conference, the ACES team saved 66% of their time by implementing Sessionboard while creating a highly personalized and engaging process for their speakers.           

The ACES team was able to reinvest that time saved into the  quality of their conference, allowing them to focus on building the most impactful and memorable experience for their members.        

By streamlining each step in the process of managing speakers, sessions, and content, the ACES team was able to re-allocate hundreds of hours to much higher impact areas of their event.

Better events start with better organization and the right tool makes all the difference!

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About Sessionboard

Sessionboard is a next generation speaker & content management platform that simplifies the complex workflows and disjointed communications that exist around speaker and content management. From call for papers, abstract evaluation, awards, applications, agenda building, speaker onboarding and communication, Sessionboard helps event organizers work smarter, move faster, and improve their ROI.

The results? A faster-growing event, more productive staff, seamless collaboration with speakers and more time back to do what you do best—building epic experiences.

Ready to see for yourself what sets Sessionboard above the rest when it comes to Speaker & Content Management? Schedule a free demo with us today!

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