If you’re running an event with multiple sessions you may find yourself with a capacity problem, especially when seating in your session rooms is limited.
As an event organizer it can be impossible to predict how popular some of your event sessions will be with your attendees. This makes scheduling sessions in appropriately sized rooms a big challenge for you.
So what can you do to ensure that you schedule sessions into rooms that are fit for purpose?
Separate Your Sessions Into Categories
When people attend conferences with sessions, they typically attend to follow a particular product line, topic, or industry area.
Rarely do they flip-flop in between different topics because they’re usually coming for a purpose driven by a company or personal need to learn about a particular topic.
Categorizing your sessions into topics can help your attendees make more sense of your agenda and they can find sessions that are appropriate to their needs.
Categorization gives your agenda structure, but also limits the possibility of attendees mistakenly adding sessions that sound like something they’re after, but actually aren’t to their agenda. In doing so, frees up a potential seat for attendees who actually should and need to be in that session.
Using Just Attend, you can create up to 2 category levels. The first category topic is called a “track”. This represents a learning pathway for attendees to follow. If they’re interested in employee wellbeing, you can associate sessions that match this criteria to that track.
You can also add a track description so that attendees can learn what types of sessions are expected to be available when following the track. This helps them decide if the content is going to be relevant to their needs.
The 2nd category is Level. Level is a measurement category and usually used to describe session detail or depth.
Some sessions may be targeted towards beginners, while others to more advanced practitioners. An attendee who is just getting into the subject area may not want to be bombarded with acronyms and jargon they don’t have a foundational understanding of.
Setting the level allows the attendees to select the sessions more appropriate to their level of understanding. In turn this means that attendees get more value from your event and speakers get less walk outs.
Don’t Schedule Similar Sessions At The Same Time
As we now know, attendees prefer in the main to follow a particular session track. Therefore, it is important that when it comes to scheduling sessions on your agenda that you avoid scheduling sessions in the same track at the same time.
Doing so creates conflict in the attendee mind. They will see 2 sessions at the same time that they really want to go to and will make them anxious.
There are a few ways the attendee might try to mitigate this. If you’re recording sessions for on-demand viewing, they’ll more than likely pick the session they really want to see live and then return post event to catch up on the session they missed.
If you don’t record sessions, then they’re more than likely going to add both sessions to their agenda and then make their mind up on the day of which one to go to.
This can be totally fine if you have large sessions rooms where capacity isn’t an issue.
However, if you do have room capacity constraints then double booking sessions on a personal agenda can create the following problems:
- You could end up moving a session you think is going to be busy to a larger room, only to find that it is poorly attended and another sessions could’ve benefitted from being in that room.
- You might have excellent attendance in 1 session and poor in the other spoiling your speaker’s experience.
- Attendees may feel they were at a disadvantage and have had less value from your event than they’d hoped.
Here at Just Attend we understand these challenges and this is why we’ve created a drag and drop session scheduler that color codes sessions by their primary category.
Using unique color codes for each session topic, you can quickly identify if you have any sessions in the same topic running at the same time.
Make quick and easy adjustments simply by moving sessions around the calendar until you’re happy with the outcome and press save.
Schedule Sessions Based On Attendee Attendance
Some events cater for different types of attendee demographic. For example your event could attract business buyers and technical engineers.
If your event is multi-day, you may find that a certain demographic purchases more tickets on day 1 vs day 2.
You can use this intelligence to load your agenda with content that meets the desires and demands of the dominant attendee demographic in attendance each day.
When you sell tickets using Just Attend you can see what types of attendees are planning to attend based on their ticket purchased.
You can then use this information to structure your agenda to appeal to them and make sure they don’t miss out.
Prevent Attendees From Double Booking
Even if you’ve done all this it may not be enough to prevent attendees from squatting on sessions. You may want to take a more restrictive / admin controlled stance.
With Just Attend you get real time data on the number of attendees that have reserved their seat at a session versus the seat capacity in the room scheduled.
You can use this to take proactive action to re-room a popular session. However, we know that there it is more than likely that some of the people who’ve reserved their seats will change their mind.
If they do, they may not remove their reservation and may simply add another session to their agenda.
This means you won’t know the true expected capacity.
One setting you can enable is ‘Prevent Agenda Overlap’.
When enabled, if an attendee attempts to add another session to their agenda that conflicts with another that is already present in it, they will be prevented.
They will need to remove the conflicting session first before adding the session to their agenda.
Of course, no system is fool proof and you will have to contend with late decisions on the day, walk-ins and walk outs etc. However, using these strategies effectively give you a better chance of ensuring your agenda is structured and attended to its best ability possible.
