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<font face="Verdana">Hello EOB,<br>
<br>
I'm afraid that I'm unable to join your meeting live as I'll be on
vacation. However, I wanted to update you on the conference.<br>
<br>
Overall, it went quite well. There were about 125 attendees, four
vendors, and ten sponsors (including EventBrite). On the
conference evaluation, people reported positive experiences at the
conference. Most attendees who completed the evaluation were from
public libraries in technical positions (sysadmins, technical
services, etc.). Networking and program content were the
predominant reasons for attending.<br>
<br>
Evaluations were largely positive, with people answering "Good" or
"Excellent" to most aspects of the conference. The areas of
weakness for us were communications and internet access. Negative
comments on communication mostly dealt with our lateness in
getting information out, for which I can take much of the blame.
This also adversely affected our sponsorship numbers. I don't
imagine that North Carolina will have that issue, though, given
that they're starting earlier. The internet access was
insufficient at times, an issue I'm told is common with this
conference. We thought that the facility had sufficient bandwidth
(100MB down/25MB up), but unfortunately the sheer number of
devices helped contribute to its failure at times. Future
conference might consider bringing in outside companies to provide
more bandwidth, although that comes with significant costs.<br>
<br>
I've attached the full results of the conference evaluation. We do
plan to send out a survey of the last few years of
sponsors/vendors to see how we can better reach out to them.<br>
<br>
We do not yet have final figures from the Conservancy on the
financials. However, based on my figures, I believe that the
conference will net $6,000-7,000. Registrations were down, as were
sponsorships, but fixed costs were lower than previous
conferences. We saved significant amounts of money by borrowing
projectors from local libraries rather than using ones provided by
the venues. If this is a possibility with future venues, I highly
recommend it. It may even be worth the EOB purchasing a few
projectors itself. Given current conference configurations,
four-five projectors are sufficient (one for each breakout room,
one for the main room, and an extra). For about $3,000, EOB could
get five projectors, some adapters, and wireless presenters, which
could save significant amounts of money on technology rental for
future events. Transportation could be an issue, movie.<br>
<br>
The hotel was fantastic, something borne out by the evaluations.
The staff were extremely helpful and detail-oriented. They also
gave us financial breaks in several instances, including waiving
the $25,000 food and beverage minimum despite us being $4,000
below it, charging us for only a single day of technology rental,
and striking a deal on room rentals.<br>
<br>
One new item added this year was the option to purchase guest
meals. While this wasn't used much, it was appreciated but those
who purchased the tickets. I believe that this would be used more
if it were people were notified earlier. It is relatively trivial
to setup the ticket option in EventBrite for this.<br>
<br>
The committee did fantastic work on this conference. All of the
pre-planning helped the conference itself run very smoothly. We
had no major issues during the conference itself, which was great!
Thank you to the EOB for taking a chance on the local conference
planning team. We'd never planned a conference like this before,
but I believe that the results were good. We greatly appreciate
having had this opportunity to support the Evergreen community.<br>
<br>
Please let me know if you have any questions.<br>
<br>
Cheers!<br>
Buzzy<br>
<br>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
<br>
************************************<br>
Library Director<br>
Hood River County Library District<br>
502 State Street<br>
Hood River, Oregon 97031<br>
541-387-7062<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://hoodriverlibrary.org">http://hoodriverlibrary.org</a><br>
<br>
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