Here are four key features that were created over the past few months to:‍

• Save you and your team time
• Make your process easier
• Better communicate with your speakers, evaluators and your constituents

‍Here’s what one of our partners said about the update:

Subsessions

Problem We Heard
Many of you structure your agenda with smaller sessions/breakouts within a larger session. It’s a common way of constructing your agenda if your sessions feature multiple speakers with smaller intervals of time.
Yet most systems (if you even have a system - besides a spreadsheet of course) either cannot support this common structure or make it very hard to manage. Oftentimes, you can’t tie these subsessions and the speakers that belong to those breakouts to the overall parent session. That creates even more work to display it correctly on your website or mobile app and it makes the communication with those speakers wonky as well. ‍

The Result: a lot of wasted time. 

The Solution
Our “Subsessions” feature allows conference managers to create and manage specific topics within a larger parent session, making it easier to organize those complex presentations. Each subsession can have its own title, speakers, description, format, and timing, and speakers can only upload content to their relevant subsession, making it easier to keep everything organized for AV needs. 

Subsessions can be created from scratch or converted from existing sessions, and rescheduling the parent session will automatically keep the subsession times in sync. This can be a huge time saver if your decision to break up your session into smaller parts comes after you’ve already built your initial agenda. 

Additionally, bulk downloading subsession content is easy and content is automatically nested under the parent session's content, saving time for the AV team. This keeps you and your A/V team in sync from start to finish.

Overall, subsessions are a useful tool for organizers, speakers, and AV teams looking to streamline the management of complex presentations.

The Result: More time to work on the most critical of areas of your event.

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Embeds

Problem We Heard

Building a website for your event is a huge project, but it takes more than just design and copy to make it impactful. You have attendees and potential attendees visiting your event page to see the details of your occasion, so communicating who they can expect to see, what they can expect to learn, and when they need to be there is essential.

The Result: Failing to provide this information is a big missed opportunity for everyone involved.

The Solution‍

With Sessionboard's Embeds feature, you can export a feed of your agenda, sessions, and speakers to place in your app or website. The feed automatically updates with any changes you make in Sessionboard, and can be created with HTML styling or in other formats such as JSON, XML, and iCal. You can choose which speaker or session fields to include and create multiple embeds for different purposes. 

The Agenda and Session List embeds allow you to display sessions and speakers in a grid or list format and provide more information with just a click. This feature is beneficial for those looking to seamlessly integrate their event information into their website or app.

Content Uploads, Downloads, and Comments

Problem We Heard

Collecting, organizing, and managing content may be one of the most difficult challenges event teams face. From getting speakers to submit it on time and in the right format, to sorting out any discrepancies with the presentation material pre-show, to finally delivering it to your A/V team… there are so many steps to manage.

The Result: Missed deadlines, angry A/V teams, and a dreaded blank presentation screen when the session starts.

The Solution

Well, Sessionboard simplifies the process of collecting presentation and audio-visual materials for conference sessions. With a 2GB file size limit and built-in tools to manage versions and comments, our solution lets you easily manage session content, upload and update files, and communicate with each other via the event portal. 

Speakers and event administrators can upload content to their sessions, and admins can easily download the session content of their choosing. Comments can be added and viewed on session content within the portals, making it easier to communicate updates and changes.

Content Uploads/Management benefits:

• Speakers can upload content or view submissions easily and see the count of files uploaded to their session, along with the count of comments on those files.
• Multiple files can be uploaded at the same time.
• Commenting is a quick and simple way to communicate between speakers and event admins.
• Admins can upload content at any time, see all content uploaded to sessions, and download the session content of their choosing.

Multiple Submission Forms

Problem We Heard

Not all events and their sessions are created equal. Unique situations arise all the time for event organizers, and cookie cutter environments don't always cut it for event organizers with multi-layered submission processes. Oftentimes your left trying to make your workflow fit into a platform that has no flexibility.

The Result: Details and nuance are missed with other platforms and you're forced to revert back to time-consuming manual tasks.

The Solution

Submission forms are an incredibly useful tool for organizers as they build out their show. There are tons of uses for them, and oftentimes you need more than one submission form when working with more complex workflows.

Conference administrators and event organizers at large can now customize the questions and instructions for different kinds of applicants, e.g. lightning talks forms vs. a form for your roundtables.

Create up to 20 session submission forms that can be graded in evaluation plans, displayed in portals, and edited by admin users.

Coming Next Week...

We have another massive feature being released next week called Custom Portals. Stay Tuned for details...

Conclusion

Whether you’re looking to manage the complexity of sessions within sessions, trying to communicate your speakers, sessions, and agenda to your attendees, or in need of a content management tool that can help you ditch the outdated world of spreadsheets and drive folders, Sessionboard has you covered. 

If you’d like to learn more about our platform and how it’s saving event organizers like you hundreds of hours per event, let’s talk. 

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.

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