Non-Profit Groups Organize Conference in Kansas City

This case study documents the solution to provide an interactive, online ability for conference organizers to collect workshop proposals, conference registrations and payments, along with sponsorship requests. My role on the project included branding, designing and building the website, as well as writing content for the conference, such as news releases, event flier, and webpage content. Additionally, my work included testing and integrating the website online payment with PayPal for registration.

Overview
KKFI 90.1 FM community radio and Friends of Community Media in Kansas City will host the national 15th Grassroots Radio Conference on August 18-21, 2011. The conference offers community radio producers and promoters a chance to connect with each other, learn new skills, and discuss media issues.

Conference organizers agreed to work with a solution that would allow conference presenters and participants to sign up for activities online, which reduces the difficulty of managing the conference.

Situation
Grassroots Radio Conference organizers have agreed to use an online registration and payment process for the conference. The process will collect all conference registration information in a single place, easing the tracking of 150 conference attendees. There are three methods of payment -- online credit/debit card, online e-check, and mailing a check.

The process uses open-source Ubercart e-commerce tools connected to PayPal for the online payment portion. Using the Ubercart with PayPal completely removes any credit card or payment information from the GRC website. This arrangement is the easiest and most secure way for conference organizers to process payments.

Solution
- Key Success Factors
The Grassroots Radio Conference website is built using a fully-functioning Conference Organizing Distribution (COD) of Drupal, the largest open-source content management system. The ready-built site has a feature that allows conference schedules, registration, and sponsorships to be customized from items submitted directly by those audiences. The key success factor in building the site include:
  • Working closely with the conference organizing committee to ensure information about the conference is posted promptly and clearly.
  • Branding the site with consistent colors and logo will enhance site, thus improving the adoption of the new website. Drupal's sharp learning curve for those unfamiliar with HTML and web concepts makes it a difficult choice unless you have a resource available to handle the administration. However, the COD allows a Drupal administrator to quickly build a higly functioning conference website.
  • Develop a simple process to allow a different person to manage each of the key conference areas, namely, workshop proposals, home stay requests, conference sponsorships, and registrations. The site integrates with PayPal to allow payment using various. Since payment security is crucial no credit card information is handled by conference organizers except for the day of the conference.
Click Image for full view of website home page
- Conference Site Features
COD developers created a simple questionnaire to help conference organizers make decisions about how to use the COD features. The functions of the website depend on how much interaction conference organizers want to engage participants. In other words, if organizers choose to have participants register and pay with a hard-copy form, then the registration feature would not be used.

  • Session submission, voting, and moderation - Attendees can submit session proposals, complete with track and experience level, and vote for the sessions they'd like to see at your conference. COD provides a workflow for moderating sessions, making it easy to go from session submission to a list of accepted and fully scheduled sessions. Do you want to allow participants to submit session proposals online? Do you want to allow organizers to vote and approval proposals online?
  • Session schedule grid; personalized attendee schedules - COD makes it easy to build a grid schedule of sessions times and rooms. Each attendee can add a session to her own personalized conference schedule.  Do you want to allow participants to signup for and track their session schedule online?
  • Easy event registration and attendee management - COD's built-in registration workflow makes it easy for people to sign up for your event, enter user profile information, and pay registration fees. Event organizers can manage attendee lists and keep track of who attended.  Do you want to allow participants to create their own profile with pictures? Do you want to allow online registration payment?
  • Easy sponsors management - Sponsors make your event possible. With COD, sponsors can enter their organization's information and logos directly into the website . Sponsor organizers can approve and publish sponsors with a single click. Multiple sponsor tiers, dynamic logo resizing, and various sponsor displays are built-in. Do you want to allow sponsors to signup for their sponsorship online? Do you want to allow organizers to approve sponsors online?
  • Community features - Network with other attendees in advance by flagging yourself as their friend, fan and someone who would like to meet up. Share ideas and plan your time in the forums. Do you want organizers and presenters to contribute to a conference blog? Do you want organizers to contribute and publish conference news directly?  
  • Communication tools and forms - People interest in attending or sponsoring the conference can provide feedback or questions through web contact forms. Who should have access to this email account?
- Site Development
  • Site layout and branding - wireframe and mockup. The site layout uses a common layout found on other COD sites.
Click for full view of diagram

  • Site Structure and Content Map. There are so many excellent conference websites. Picking the best way to organize the information was easy!
Click for full view of diagram
  • Model the registration process. This seemingly complicated diagram shows a single path on information flow for the online registration process. This diagram helps the conference registration organizer understand how things work with the Ubercart e-commerce and PayPal components.
Click for full view of diagram
Benefits
The successful deployment of the COD site for the Grassroots Radio Conference provided the following benefits.
  • Improved access to and sharing of information – workshops, registrations -- are available online so conference organizers can vote on workshops submitted directly by presenters. This was an important feature, given the grassroots, democratic nature of organizing the conference.
  • Clean site design through simple navigation and consistent branding.

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