A Better Way to Handle Speaker and Content Management: A HEUG Case Study
By Lisa Churchill, Sales & Marketing Assistant, Conferon

In an age of reduced staff and budgets, Conferon has introduced a new service to help content, education, and curriculum committees work more productively. Conferon’s speaker management solution empowers clients to streamline processes for receiving, reviewing, and scheduling sessions and efficiently communicate with selected speakers.

The Higher Education User Group (HEUG) determined they were in need of a change and called upon Conferon to help. In the past, their 22-person volunteer group populated and coordinated individual databases to manage the multitude of session submissions, then gathered for a face-to-face meeting to organize the conference schedule. They also relied heavily on their chairperson to keep the team apprised of ongoing status changes and decisions.

Working with Conferon’s solution for their 2004 event, HEUG executed a complete content development process—from the Call for Papers to on-site guide formatting through post-conference online presentation material distribution—through an adaptable, centralized system. And Conferon’s personnel managed daily speaker communications, freeing the volunteers’ time. In the end, HEUG collected over 500 presentation submissions and accepted and scheduled 450 sessions. In this first year of using the service, HEUG’s investment was offset through significant time and cost savings.

According to Barbara Reinwald, Program Chair for HEUG, web access to real time, shared data eliminated the planning meeting and associated travel expense. “We’ve created a long-term development partnership between HEUG and Conferon,” she said. “In the future, HEUG will focus on making processes better for our content team and speakers, rather than recreate the wheel year after year. In HEUG’s eyes, the investment (in Conferon) has resulted in time and money savings, more professional looking web sites and improved speaker/attendee services.”

To help apply this type of savings economy to your meetings, call your CGS representative; they can assist you with developing a plan to better streamline your content management process.

Avoiding the Lines: Advances in Registration Technology
By Becky Stanley, Director of Marketing Communications, CGS

Reducing registration lines is a priority for attendees and show organizers alike, and today, one new method in particular is making an impact—Bar Code Confirmations.

Bar Code Confirmations combines affordable bar code technology with the ease of email to reduce registration congestion.

For example, last year thousands of registrants for North America’s largest exhibition, the International CES (Consumer Electronics Show), registered too late to guarantee receipt of credentials by mail.

This year, each pre-registered attendee received an email confirmation printed with a unique bar code, which they then scanned at one of the show’s several self-operated kiosks. In a matter of minutes, attendees were able to print their badges, lead retrieval cards and other credentials, and proceed directly to the show floor.

“Having the bar-coded confirmations made a huge difference in the demands on our registration personnel onsite,” said Shell Walser of CES. “The bar code kiosks were a perfect way to grant access to pre-registrants who otherwise would have stood in line to receive their badges. They were on the exhibit floor more quickly and our staff was free to help where they were truly needed.”

Some show organizers are using bar code confirmations exclusively and are avoiding pre-show credential mailings altogether. It not only saves postage costs, but also minimizes the reprinting of lost credentials.

To find out how to help make registration lines at your conference obsolete, contact your CGS representative.

A New ITS Logo
By Bill Martin, Vice President, ITS

Wow. Look at that ITS logo. Pretty cool, huh? We’re very excited!

Ever since International Travel Service started back in 1946 we’ve had the same logo—a lower case script ITS with a globe over the I. Our logo symbolized travel, which is what we did.

In the 80s and 90s, the business at ITS became more focused on city-wide convention housing and registration. So, we dropped the International Travel Service name and simply became ITS. We had a new name but kept the same logo.

In 1999, ITS merged with Galaxy and became ExpoExchange. The ITS name disappeared and our logo became the classic, well recognized lower case ‘e’ for ExpoExchange.

Now, after our combination with Conferon, the ITS brand name is back and it’s time for a new identity and a new look. We investigated numerous shapes, colors and designs with Conferon’s marketing department, Marketing Resource Associates (MRA), and our decision came down to three final concepts. We posted each design in the office and asked the employees of ITS to vote on their favorite logo…which is what you see today.

The new ITS logo symbolizes many things. The purple color is exciting, passionate, strong, and bold. The swoosh means swift, efficient and technology driven. Our letters are stoically blocked representing stability, trust and endurance, and the shape of a circle denotes our global presence.

We are proud of the new ITS logo and even more proud of what we think it represents. More importantly our employees seem to love it. As one pointed out: “Purple? Cool!”