Conferences

A conference puts a programme in front of a room: the sessions, the people giving them, and the delegates who came to be there.

There is a lot holding that up. Speakers to brief, a programme to build across tracks and rooms, tickets at more than one price, and delegates who each booked something slightly different and expect the day to know it.

Ready to run yours? Set up your organisation, publish the programme, and open registration at the prices you set. Talk to us about the first one and we will get it on.

Run a conference

Step one

Set up your organisation once

Start with the organisation behind your conferences. Add your name, branding and the people who help run them. Every conference you create after this starts from the same place.

  • Make it yours

    Add your name, logo, colours and public organisation page. They carry through to everything delegates see, from the conference page and ticket in their inbox to the badge they receive at the door.

  • Bring in your team

    Give each person the access they need. Organisation admins look after the wider organisation, while event managers can focus on the conferences they run.

  • Get paid directly

    Connect your payment account and registration money goes straight to you. If the conference is free, there is nothing to set up.

  • Run more than conferences

    Recruitment fairs can live alongside your conferences in the same organisation and calendar. Turn on what you need and leave the rest alone.

  • Speakers belong to you, not to one day

    Add a speaker once with their title, photo, biography and links. They stay with your organisation, so next year you can invite someone you already have instead of entering everything again.

  • Give speakers their own login

    A speaker with an account can take attendance for the sessions they are leading. That is all they get. No staff access, and nothing else to manage once their session is over.

  • Set the time and place

    Choose when each session starts and finishes, and where it takes place. It can be ten minutes or an entire afternoon, in a room at your venue or on a link connecting people from anywhere.

  • Run several things at once

    Put sessions into tracks so your programme can run across multiple rooms or streams at the same time. Name a track once, and you can use that name again the next time you need it.

Step two

Build your programme

Add your speakers, sessions and tracks, then arrange them around the day you are running. Speakers stay with your organisation, so the things you create can be reused for the next event.

Step three

Open registration

Decide what you are selling, what each ticket includes and what you need to know about the people coming. As people register, your delegate list builds itself.

  • Sell more than one kind of ticket

    Create as many ticket types as your conference needs, each with its own price, availability and sale dates. Free tickets work just like paid ones.

  • Decide what each ticket includes

    Choose which sessions come with each ticket. A workshop can be included with a two-day ticket without being available to day-pass holders. Leave a session open and everyone attending can join it.

  • Ask what you need to know

    Collect whatever you need before the event, from job title and school to dietary requirements. Choose how people answer: short text, a list of options, or yes and no. Their answers stay alongside their details on your delegate list.

  • Let one person book for several

    A head of department can book five colleagues and pay once. Each person gets their own ticket, answers their own questions and receives a link to turn their place into their own account.

  • Check people in at the door

    Your team scans tickets from a phone or a laptop at the registration desk. Every arrival is counted as it happens, so you know how full the room is before the first session starts.

  • Print a badge for each kind of ticket

    Design a badge and attach it to a ticket type, so a speaker, a day delegate and a full delegate each arrive at something different. Card, A6 or lanyard, printed in a run or one at a time.

  • See who was actually in the room

    Delegates mark themselves into a session from their own phone, from a quarter of an hour before it starts. Attendance is a record of who turned up, which is rarely the same list as who registered.

  • Watch the day while you can still act on it

    Arrivals, tickets sold and session by session attendance, while the conference is still running. When it is over the same numbers are the record of it, and they export.

Step four

Run the days

Doors open and the programme you built starts running itself. Check people in, hand them a badge, and watch the day from the same place you planned it.

Run your next conference on Slate

Tell us what your programme looks like and we will have your workspace set up and branded in time for the next one.

Talk to us
  • Your own workspace, at your own address
  • Conferences and fairs on the same calendar
  • We set the first one up with you