A conference planning guide is intended to break up each step of organizing your conference into manageable parts. Some guides tell you to begin by asking questions of your intended audience so that you can gauge what events will be most effective and most valued. This can be done using surveys at the end of a previous year's conference or by contacting past participants and asking them to complete the survey later on.

Conference planning guides can also provide you with some insight into how to divide the work of organizing the conference. If you are applying to host a conference for an organization, you should check with them to see what tasks they will handle and for what tasks you will be directly responsible. For example, while you may be responsible for the logistics of organizing the conference, senior members of the organization may be responsible for inviting speakers, monitoring the events, and reporting back with suggestions for the following year.

Each organization has its own timetable and consequently requires its own conference planning guide. The timetables will include specific dates, such as when applications are due from parties that wish to host the conference as well as deadlines by which registration information must be made available. You should consult your organization's schedule early so that none of these deadlines take you by surprise.

Be Aware of the Venue's Requirements When Planning a Conference

If you are hosting a conference, your priority is serving your own organization--but you must also be prepared to accommodate the conference center that you are using. They are likely to have their own guidelines with respect to deadlines and protocols. One of the issues to which you must pay strict attention is the venue's security policies. Some conference centers, for example, will require that you have multiple forms of identification in order to enter. Understanding and respecting their requirements about vehicle registration or other security measures will facilitate the seamless operation of your conference.