EAGx Boston 2018 Postmortem

This is a belated postmortem for EAGx Boston 2018, for the benefit of any future organizers interested in our experiences.

We took three months to plan this conference. We began planning in late January 2018, and it took place on Saturday, April 21st, 2018. Videos of the speaker presentations can be found here.

General recommendations for organizational purposes and governance:

We recommend that you first check out this document, and pay special attention to the timeline.
Make sure it is clear who is responsible for each task, possibly designating leaders for categories like food and speaker outreach.
Make sure someone is taking notes whenever your team meets. Possibly assign this role to a specific person.
Meet at least weekly to keep everyone accountable, in person if possible.
Substantively, do not be overly sensitive to cost; returns to amenity quality are large.

Contents

Venue
Speaker Outreach
Funding
Web Presence
Audio Visual Services
Food
Marketing and Design
Presentations
Day-of Execution
Financial Breakdown

Venue

CEA’s advice to secure a venue many months in advance of a conference is well heeded. That was impossible on our time frame, but we did secure some early, though less than ideal, options on Harvard’s campus. These were unattractive spaces with upfront fees (~$1,000) for using them, which we thought we could avoid since we knew at least a few grad schools that offered free, high quality spaces (e.g. Harvard Law and Business Schools, MIT Sloan). Our final venue choice — MIT Sloan’s Tang Center — came through rather late due to difficulty getting a hold of any Sloan students. We ultimately chose it because there was no reservation fee and it was our best aesthetic option. The main drawbacks of the space were its small size and lack of accessibility.

Tickets sold much faster and with much less advertising help that we expected, and we reached our capacity of 144 attendees very quickly. We advise conference planners with CEA backing to be prepared to accommodate 200+ attendees. Do not be pessimistic about your ability to advertise; people are looking for these events.

On the accessibility front, the Tang Center is tucked between two one-way streets and a major highway and surrounded by construction. Many attendees had difficulty finding us, especially since our space was on the third floor. We recommended favoring ground-floor spaces i...

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