A number of years ago a publisher I know started a conference program. The first conference was hosted at the New School; a college, in New York City and broke even. Over the following years conferences grew to account for about half a million in net income a year for this publisher.
Conferences provide immediate revenue from prepaid registrations and qualified names for a publisher's direct marketing campaigns.
A conference needs;
- Speakers - for whom the host is expected to pay airfare, hotel, meals and transportation and
- Attendees - which are usually gained via a direct mail and internet advertising campaign and
- A location - which can be a hotel conference room or a university lecture hall
- Handouts for the attendees
Registration fees
- Sponsorship Fees
- Exhibit Income
- Book sales
- Tape sales
If you are planning to begin a semianr program the appropiate software can make your life a lot easier. Conference software will track participants, generate conference badges, take credit card payments, provide a financial summary of conference revenue, and send automatic conference registration and reminder emails.
The following three vendors market seminar management software;
These include;
The Media Services Group
Media Services solution is part of a hosted solution that can also handle royalties, book sales, inventory management subscriptions and production management. A total ERP solution for book and periodical publishers.
SolutionDymanics.net - the Midwest USA VAR for Knk's Microsoft Navision's Publishing Software
KnkPublishing Event's management module is tightly integrated with Microsoft's Dynamics Navision ERP software. For more information on the Knk offering visit http://www.knk.com/
Regonline.com
Regonline is a online hosted solution, that charges a fee based on the number of seminar attendees. For small events the price is $4.75 per attendee.