When folks start digging in with Power Apps (at least in my experience) they want to accomplish something business-related – trying to add functionality that was missing in their daily activity, their processes, their interactions with others, etc. Power Apps is great at that.
What early Power Apps makers (non-IT) don’t usually consider at first is branding, design, or accessibility. They build something that makes sense for them alone. The scope is one person or one team – which is completely fine – rather than a wider organizational view. For many projects that might be the end of it: “Boom, it works. Process improved”.
In some cases, those relatively small, “home-grown”, simple solutions gain a broader adoption (it gets more popular than originally intended…) – which can bring with it additional considerations… One of those “now more important” topics is UX/design.
As the size and capabilities of an organization increase, app makers often have more policies to follow and resources available. Branding standards and corporate color templates seem to be the first elements that get added. Designers are part the mix. As more resources become available within the org, there can be a variety of UX/design roles that include researchers, designers, and more. These folks can bring creativity and experience to the table that notably improve the look, feel, and functionality of apps.
If they are available in your organization, learn what resources are available and when to get these folks involved.
Investments in design and UX can potentially yield solutions with higher usability and user adoption rates. The same usability goals and techniques that apply to Power Apps also work with other apps and interfaces – this includes custom development as well as dashboards and cards in Teams and Power BI…
In an organization with established development ecosystem, processes and standards are likely being leveraged. Folks know what teams and resources are available. The quickly growing non-IT Power Platform maker population however might not be aware of these resources if they’re not looped-in with the established development org. As a Power Apps enabled organization, strive to:
Learn the differences between the roles: UX, UI, designers (and others)
Understand the value UX folks bring to app development
Learn when to engage, how to best engage, and what to expect when engaging UX folks
With the popularity of Microsoft’s Power Platform and Power Apps, we’ve added lots of new folks to the maker community. These makers have new (or new to them) tools that enable them to build impactful business solutions but usually don’t have experience satisfying user experience needs of their users. The more you can integrate the UX expertise that’s available out there, the better the organization will be served by these dynamic app-generating efforts.
Note: This quick post was intended to make PA folks aware of UX resources… It’s a far cry from digging in to all the details, benefits, nuances, etc. that you’ll run into if you have the opportunity to work with that crowd. There can be a lot, but there’s also a lot of potential benefit for your users and more. Let me know what your experience is!
Aside from the technical topics (how to use it, how to enable it, etc.), there are logistical reasons this new announcement is good for individuals and orgs. With the new licensing and availability, we can jump in with a more measured approach. We can move forward with the “crawl, walk, run” approach we’ve adopted rather than committing funding or confusing users before we’re ready to deploy new capabilities.
First of all, individuals are now enabled to sign up and start using Copilot via several different options immediately. This gives self-motivated folks head starts to learn what they want and need to adapt in a rapidly changing environment. They don’t need to wait for their organization to sign up, they can use personal accounts (yes, with additional cost) to get the same functionality.
For small to medium sized companies, Copilot is now available without the 300-seat minimum, which was really irritating for the SMB crowd as it left them out in the cold while larger companies could implement more easily. For large companies, they can now implement on a more reasonable adoption path – starting with fewer folks to dig in and learn, figure out best practices, create or acquire learning paths and content, and more before committing significant funding to larger employee deployment and adoption.
As with any new technology, the best approach is a balanced one – even when product marketing is screaming to go, go, go!
Why should you participate in the community? Like ours, and many others. User groups, meetups, conferences and the like. We just missed the last outdoor Power BI meetup for 2023, but they’ll be back – probably at Surly again – until then, indoor places…
What is it?
Our event this coming Saturday November 11th: It’s a day of free training on topics in, around, and tangential to Microsoft’s M365: Teams, SharePoint, Planner, OneDrive, Viva, Azure, Power Platform, and more. The word cloud above is from session titles that will be presented on Saturday.
10 rooms, 4 time slots, 34 sessions. In person only. No recordings or online availability. Come mix it up with folks from all over the Upper Midwest – organizations big and small. We’ll have donuts and pizza.
Free Content
A number of us just returned from 365EduCon Chicago – the most recent in a handful of larger conferences and education opportunities that can require a substantial investment from employers and attendees. Community events like Community Days and our M365 Twin Cities event are FREE or have nominal fees. Community Days events are fantastic opportunities to learn – for the cost of your time – and have other benefits as well.
Come and hear from many of the same presenters you’ll see at the larger events. Get the latest news on what’s coming, what’s been released, what’s changed, best practices, case studies, and more.
Access to Presenters
Do you have questions about a certain topic? Check the schedule to see what’s being presented and who’s going to be on-site presenting. Even if they’re not talking about your topic, they might be a SME (subject matter expert) that can answer questions about something you’re working on or stuck on.
Networking
It’s not just about building a network for when you make your next job hop. It’s about building a peer group for the job you’re in. Sharing findings, best practices, what works, what doesn’t, etc.
Talk to people. Seriously as good as the content will be, the best thing you can do is talk to folks. Get outside your comfort zone a bit.
As of today: closing in on 400 registrations which will likely yield about 250 folks on site the day of the event.
Socks and LEGO
Vendors and sponsors love to give stuff away. There’s always swag. 🙂 Socks are still all the rage – I don’t understand why – but they are. Stickers and can koozies, pens, and more. Come and check out the assortment.
We’ve still got room for more. More sponsors and sponsor-driven content. I keep thinking of all the great content that folks could present.
We’ve got tracks and rooms with openings. I find it hard to believe there are orgs out there that don’t have value to add, skills and knowledge to highlight, and content to share. Who in the Twin Cities area or the Upper Midwest region are the go-to firms that can help with Viva, Copilot, or Power Platform? They’ve got to be out there (I can think of a number of folks that would be great fits…) and eager to reach potential customers. Microsoft is marketing hard along these lines. What say you partners?
Speak up, speak now! If we fill these sponsor slots, we can meet our budget needs for this event. It’s a particularly good deal for local orgs that don’t have to add on travel expenses. As much as our attendees appreciate folks coming from out of town, they also love being made aware of local folks that can help them out – sometimes right now, sometimes down the road.
Heck, even for folks coming from out of town the cost to join our event as a sponsor is a deal compared to larger events and we have an engaged audience already heavily invested in the Microsoft platforms. Come and get em. 🙂
Open tracks/rooms
Take a look at our schedule if you haven’t yet. We’ve got a few rooms and tracks where we’d love to round out the topic areas. Add your voice to an already awesome group of community speakers.
Microsoft Viva
Copilot / AI
Power BI
Power Platform
Developer
Session ideas and gaps
Have some thoughts in the areas listed above? Drop us a line!
What about these topics or others? This is just me spit balling – not even tossing ideas around with the team that would certainly yield more relevant topics and refine the ones listed here.
Microsoft Viva
Beyond the Intranet – Engaging your employees with Viva
Viva overview – A walk through Viva offerings and what to use when
Getting started with Viva – What it takes to skill-up and staff-up for your organization
Viva case studies – Recently spun up Viva in your org? Here’s what we learned in ours
Viva Best Practices
Copilot / AI
Microsoft Copilot – An overview of the various products, where they’re at, what’s on the way
Copilot stories and case studies – How AI is working for us…
Copilot Best Practices
Power BI
Power BI vs. Tableau – Pros and Cons
Power BI as a part of your overall data strategy and implementation
Power BI Best Practices and Case Studies
Skilling up your team for Power BI success
Power Platform
Oh my, there’s just so much to cover even with Power BI having its own track…
Getting started with Power Apps for Lists and M365
Building a Maker community and mentality within your organization
Need to Know – Admin’s Guide to managing the Power Platform
So. Many. Case Studies.
What the heck is Dataverse and why you should care
Power Platform tools vs. 3rd Party tools
Personally, I’m curious how consulting organizations are approaching Power Platform regarding doing work for organizations and/or/vs. building trusted advisor roles with makers via training and advising. Seems like opportunities for a broad spectrum of engagements.
Developer
Exploring the Pro Dev features and capabilities of the Power Platform
Extending M365: Where, When, and How
M365 Development Best Practices
Extending Power Platform Capabilities with Azure (Azure Functions, AI, and other specific capabilities – there are so many folks don’t realize)
What would you like to hear about?
“I really wish they had a session on…” Speakers, vendors, and others would love to hear what topics folks would like to see covered. We’re usually guessing (albeit with plenty of experience) on what you want to hear and when. We don’t know what stage your org is in and what’s relevant to you now.
Let me know!
Are you an attendee coming in a few weeks? What content are you looking for? What’s relevant for you or your organization right now? Let me know.
Are you a potential sponsor? Need a hand pulling some content together? Do you have someone interested in speaking that wants some coaching or help? Let us know – we’d love to get you started!
Community events: community run, community attended, community benefits. These events are fantastic learning and networking opportunities, but they can’t happen without the support of sponsors.
Our event
We’ve been running successful local events for over 15 yrs.
The Twin Cities is an established and engaged Microsoft community
Our next M365 Twin Cities event is on November 11, 2023. Aside from the recent COVID hiatus, we’ve been running successful events since 2008 – covering topics from SharePoint through the range of M365 products and anything that integrates with the platform including Azure, Power Platform, 3rd party products and services, and more.
Our audience includes folks from the Twin Cities metro area and across Minnesota, as well as lots of folks that come from across the upper Midwest and Canada. If you’re from Minnesota, you’re already familiar with the business and organizational landscape here, but it includes a rich variety of Fortune 500 companies, some of the largest private companies (including the largest) in the world, and government folks from all levels.
Pre-COVID we were getting 600-700 registrations (which translate to email reachable folks) and 300-400 onsite. That’s a typical registration drop off, but wonderful attendance. Our first event back post-COVID had not quite 400 registrations and over 200 people on-site. We were content with these numbers as a return event but are working to grow towards our previous numbers – though a lot has obviously changed in the past few years.
People were excited to be back in-person. Our sponsors in January were thrilled to be able to talk to folks again. There was a lot of excitement in the community.
We’re aiming to build on that.
Sponsorship Levels
We’ve got a handful of different sponsorship levels, but we’re mainly aiming for Company Sponsors and Track Sponsors where we can. If these don’t fit, let me know and we can look at other options that might fit.
We’ve got room for 6 5 track sponsors – who also get to present a session as part of that track. Tracks include: Viva, Teams, AI/Copilot, Power BI, Power Platform, and Development
The best opportunities are face-to-face – being on-site for the actual event, meeting attendees, and talking about your products and services firsthand.
Sponsors have tables set up in a wide-open space where attendees register and food is served – so attendees will know where you are and have reasons to hang around. We’ll also have plenty of time between sessions for you to visit with attendees.
Where does the money go?
Funds from sponsors go primarily to pay for the venue and food costs. The rest of the budget is for various operational expenses (insurance, printing costs, etc.) and thanking our speakers who volunteer their time and expenses to participate (speaker dinner, etc.). We don’t make money doing this.
Other Notes
Our local (‘ish) community is blessed to be large and involved. We have multiple larger events that happen throughout the year and plenty of smaller more niche groups as well. As part of Microsoft’s MGCI effort – we’re working to expand where we can, strengthen where we’re able, and aim to support users at all levels through community events.
If you’d like to talk with organizers and community members, join us for our M365TC #CoffeeCrew meetups that happen more frequently throughout the year. We try to move around the metro area so more people can participate easily. Join our mailing group.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all the sponsors we’ve had over the years. Please consider returning this Fall. New folks also very welcome to join the club. 🙂
Microsoft made some pricing announcements today at their Inspire conference that included a $30 charge per person per month for M365 Copilot (AI) licensing. First impression? That’s pretty steep… But let’s dig in a bit.
Not everyone is going to need it (at first).
It’s pretty easy to justify when you know your value per hour and can calculate how much time you’ll save using the new features of Copilot. In many cases it’ll be easy to justify $30 a month cost when you can measure savings directly: “Hey, that thing takes 15 minutes, I do it 10 times a month”… Done.
Other use cases likely won’t be that straightforward, but we’ll see how they manifest.
With this, I’ve already seen it come up in multiple conversations and threads… Know your users and review your use cases before licensing. At this price point, most companies aren’t going to license everyone – at least right away. And there will likely be other added licenses in the mix as well. Don’t expect the Microsoft licensing topic to get any less confusing in the near future (unless maybe we can use AI to help sort out your licensing use cases… Copilot for Licensing?).
SaaS pricing is hard
A little background. SaaS pricing is a challenge. Dig in a little bit and you’ll see plenty of threads talking about how hard it is for companies (especially startups) to price their products. M365, Power Platform, and the rest of the cloud services out there ultimately are SaaS offerings (Software as a Service) – though it may be a bit of a simplification. Microsoft and other big players in the space at least had some historical product pricing to start from that (may or may not directly) lead to subscription pricing used for SaaS.
The nature of cloud-based apps – as we’ve been talking about for as long as Microsoft has been in the cloud – is that we get regular, rapid, incremental updates. We get new features and changes basically weekly – for good or bad. (“Bad” only really for trainers and folks trying to keep up with it all…) This replaces the old 3-year-cycle of product releases from Microsoft where it was much easier to justify a price increase. You could easily put together the list of new and improved features vs. the last product (now 3 years old). Now, things move so fast it’s challenging to keep up and get a high-level view of increased value over time – it’s almost an expectation.
Stepping back a bit, as initial moves to the cloud resolved, it became fairly easy for most organizations to rationalize M365 pricing. Now, years later, not much (relatively speaking) has changed in the pricing, but much has changed with the offering and capabilities. Some organizations have moved up from one level to another, but many have also stayed with the same licensing since they first adopted M365.
Microsoft needs (or at least wants) new revenue streams (oh look, a stock price jump at the time I published this) and it’s harder to justify price increases when you’re incrementally updating your software – harder for end users to see. But incremental (smaller, but more often) updates are the norm with cloud-based software. Vendors then are forced to rebrand and offer bigger bangs to justify step ups in cost. Enter Copilot and today’s licensing announcements. Viva is in this same boat. And don’t forget the recent “Entra” branding for authentication and ID services – just wait.
Power Platform (as part of the Dynamics/D365 product group) has been working on this challenge for a while now. Initial feature offerings were heavily in the M365 integration space – leveraging tens of millions of users. They got the traction they were looking for and at the same time were building a ravenous (#PowerAddicts) community around it to pull the movement ahead even more. But they’ve been seemingly challenged to get a mass shift to newly licensed products and offerings. It does seem to be shifting, but more slowly than (I expect) they’d like. As Power Apps and its sibling products grow and Dataverse finds its space in the storage area – more folks are realizing the business value and making the move to additional licensing.
Cost of ownership
There’s more than the $X/month/user. There’s also the cost of managing and training – after you’ve spent time and money evaluating the technology. Don’t overlook that. Give plenty of time for architecture folks to review functionality, security folks to review risk, your tenant admins time to ramp up, and trainers time to produce the materials you’ll need. It wouldn’t shock me if early on we see a “you need to take this training before we’ll buy this feature for you” sort of approach.
Finally, $30 a month is a baseline. Many large enterprises are able to negotiate pricing, so keep that in mind. Sorry SMB. 🙁
Other offerings
Copilot is a consistent brand, but it’s not one single cost. There will be a collection of products across the Microsoft stack and licensing will be different and separate for each. Copilot for Business (from Microsoft-owned GitHub) is a nice example since it’s so different from M365 offerings. It’s still “Copilot” but a very different offering for developers rather than business users (though… there’s the “maker” argument for another day. 🙂 )
Bottom line is, start thinking about Copilot licensing across the stack. There will likely be additional offerings. We already know about several in the flurry of announcements.
Not everything falls under “Copilot” either. Teams Premium, while feeling like a bit of an overlap with Copilot, has its own licensing and capabilities. You may need one, or the other, or both – hence the importance of evaluating your environment and users before diving in.
Security
Microsoft is all over the security concerns. ChatGPT and others have highlighted the risk of playing with AI in the public domain and its collection of user data to learn and train itself.
Microsoft is working overtime to let folks how data is used, how their version of AI is being built, and how common components (LLM) are kept separate from organizational data (Microsoft Graph). There’s obviously going to be some risk with data in the cloud, but efforts and intention are in place. Each organization will need to evaluate the risks for themselves. As with other technologies, certain areas will be slower to adopt due to risk. We’ll keep hearing more from Microsoft and the community on this.
Recap
As the capabilities of software increase – so will the costs. This isn’t a bad thing. Microsoft and their industry peers are adding new capabilities far faster than they have in the past and many of them add great value for their users.
The challenge to us as consumers again falls into keeping up with the changes. As much as these new capabilities benefit us, we need to invest time and effort to learn how to best use them and reap the benefits.
It’s easy to get sucked into the hype. There’s a lot of cool stuff here. Just temper your expectations a bit to not get too frustrated or disappointed. We’re early in the AI application cycle. It’s going to take time to mature and polish implementation. Exciting times.
Another BIG event going on this week in the M365 world: M365 Conference 2023 in Las Vegas. It’s a 3rd party conference, though heavily invested and involved with by Microsoft by way of speakers, keynotes, sponsorship and other content. Lots of big announcements.
But not everyone can attend.
Not everyone can get there. Not everyone *wants to* attend or go to Vegas. And with a looming recession and/or economic outlook for many organizations, it might not be a great time to send folks to out of state costly conferences.
Now, I’m not trying to poo-poo these big events. They’ve got a ton of value. I speak at some of them. They’re a fantastic opportunity to step away from your day-to-day responsibilities (if you can…) meet with community (topic-wise, not geographic community) folks, spend time chatting, building broader networks, or meet and connect with Microsoft and vendor contacts. The coverage that larger events offer is also extremely important in that you can see so many sessions, workshops, vendors, and more in one spot. In addition to this week’s event, there are events like 365 EduCon that offer options in more cities throughout the year.
What I am saying is that local – usually community-run – events have a place, an important one – for many folks.
Community events like our M365TwinCities event (working on a Fall date…), the upcoming MN M365 User Group Spring Workshop, or even frequent M365TC #CoffeeCrew events fill important gaps in our communities. In upcoming weeks here in Minnesota we’ll be reviewing this week’s big announcements from Microsoft, offering more in depth coverage with workshop sessions, or just having a coffee and connecting with others. Similar groups will be meeting all over the US and the world doing the same thing.
SO. Get familiar with your local community. Join it. Take part in it. Contribute to it with your time and experience. And if there’s not a community you’re looking for – consider building one!
No. “Direct action” buttons aren’t a new feature or button type. It’s just a term I’ve used in conversations and sessions talking about Power Apps and more often than not SharePoint lists or Microsoft Lists.
The default experiences users see with Lists or wizard-created apps in Power Apps are to act on a record or item as a whole (see image below). This by itself is fine as it accounts for plenty of use cases. However, there are also times where users want to take a specific action on a record. For example, in the case of managing requests, users may want to take ownership of a request, quickly assign a priority, or close a request. These can be accomplished with buttons build specifically for those use cases.
Default list editing
In the default experience, operating on items in a data source (List, or other) the “close request” activity requires both technical knowledge and business knowledge.
The technical knowledge they need looks something like: Find the item, open/edit the item, change the value for the specific field from one value to another, and close/save the item.
The business knowledge users need, at a minimum, is to change *which field* to *which value*.
You’d hope both of these activities would be intuitive, but in many cases they are not. In most cases the process and user experience can be improved – even a little bit. Enter “direct action” buttons.
What does a simple, typical example look like? How about this? In a work request list, setting a request priority with a button click:
Two records with buttons to set each item to “High Priority”.
Logically, the example image probably has its priorities messed up (please rescue the raccoon before mowing the grass), but it illustrates a user wanting to take specific changes to an individual item.
Patch Command
The above items are in a Power Apps gallery. So, the code – in the OnSelect formula for the button might look something like this:
Once you get started down this path, there are so many options for makers to fulfill business needs with these approaches.
Intake lists (a generic term for request lists of all types) often evolve over time. These lists might start simply where “closing” a request is literally changing a status field from “open” to “closed”. As these processes mature, closing a request might turn into something like:
Change a status field to “closed”
Store the name of the person that closed the request (in a field separate from the modifiedby field)
Capture the date/time the request was closed (in a field separate from the modified field)
Send a notification to someone about the ticket closing (send an email, post to a Teams channel, etc.)
While the requirements get more complicated, all of these tasks can still be dealt with using Power Apps formulas or other approaches.
Alternate – JSON
There are ways to create buttons and actions within the List interface using JSON to implement view and column formatting. This is, by some, billed as another “no-code” approach, though it is not in my opinion. It is, however, an approved approach within the platform.
You may have noticed in the image above that the button can show up as enabled or disabled. This is accomplished by setting the DisplayMode formula to something like this:
The formula roughly translates to: If the item is already set to high priority, disable the button. If not, enable the button.
Refresh as needed
I haven’t looked into the details of the mechanics behind how screens and data sources work, but sometimes the screen updates right away after a Patch, other times it doesn’t. So, try the Patch and see if the screen and controls update the way you want. If they do, great! If the data doesn’t update quickly, you could add a Refresh to your button to force the data to refresh.
The “trick” here is that the refresh isn’t of the controls, but of the data source: Refresh(DataSource)
Ramblings
I’ve been trying to figure out why it’s taken me so long to get a post out. It’s not technically challenging. In fact, it’s quite simple from the Power Apps perspective. From an experienced maker or pro-dev perspective, creating buttons is second nature. Power Apps offers plenty of power and flexibility in this department.
I think I just wanted to give enough context for makers to understand that while the concept is simple, the potential and implications can be huge – both in the capabilities makers have and in the improved experience for users. For makers, using something like Patch is a next step after working with the default form and the Save/Cancel options that come with the default experiences offered by Lists and wizard-created Power Apps.
It’s not rocket science. But plenty of folks just haven’t gone here yet. After almost every session where I mention “direct action” buttons, people are super excited about the possibilities. When they figure it out – it opens up so many cool options. Just a small step of growing in the Power Platform.
Note: The Patch function does NOT bypass Microsoft (and SharePoint) Lists updating the Modified date and Modified By fields. These fields do get updated when the Patch function updates anything in the item/record.
Our first post-COVID M365 “Saturday” Twin Cities event was on January 21, 2023. Not our normal time of year, but we (the organizing committee, attendees, sponsors, and speakers) have been chomping at the bit to get back in-person so here we are. 🙂 Normally, we host our events twice a year – in the Spring and Fall. Our schedule is primarily dictated by living in the upper Midwest, where Winter can be harsh, and Summer is dedicated to being outside. No one wants to give up summer weekends. So that leaves us with the “shoulder seasons” where we have plenty of other variables to deal with, but we’ve historically had success with. However, we wanted to get back as soon as possible – so here we are. All things considered; I think the event went off well for all involved.
Coming back post-COVID for this event had its own new variables to work with. Specific to the pandemic, were people willing to come back to an in-person event? We knew there were some vocal and passionate folks that would but weren’t sure we’d get back to our normal volume on the first event back. We definitely weren’t as large as we’ve been, but still had successful numbers, I think.
I’m pretty sure there was also a bit of Zoom/Online meeting fatigue. People just want to be back in-person. Me included. That part probably helped us a bit.
Scheduling in the middle of a Minnesota Winter would throw some challenges at us. Weather could have a huge impact. Folks may not want to travel to the event from outside the metro. It can get *really* cold this time of year. Thankfully the day of, we lucked out with both moderate temperatures and no snow. But we likely lost a few sponsors, speakers, and attendees that didn’t plan to attend even with the chance of having to travel in adverse conditions.
For attendees, registering for the event and deciding at the last minute to attend or not isn’t a big deal (for them – it stinks for organizers). They can sign up but not come if the weather turned. For speakers, we figured we’d lean on local folks where we could, but not limit our selection, to local and regional speakers that would be less likely to need to cancel. Signing sponsors for the event seemed to take the biggest hit as we usually have a mix of local, regional, and national companies – even international from time to time. For this event most sponsors ended up being local companies with only 2 coming from out of state. We love *all* our sponsors, but it was unique to have such a local focus.
As we returned to hosting in-person events again, we find ourselves figuring out *how* to do it again. Here are the tools that we’ve used. Maybe it’ll help you if you’re starting an event or building a community.
Note: We’re definitely not a benchmark, but if any information here helps someone else run an event, then fantastic. 🙂 What do you use?
Sessionize has become the standard for managing the Call for Speakers (CFS), speaker submissions, the session approval process, and communication between event organizers and speakers. We also use it to schedule sessions, which we do as a part of the review and approval process.
Note: For our Winter 2023 event, we had the most submissions we’ve ever had. It took our team over 4 hours to sort through 130 sessions submitted by 59 speakers and walk away with a schedule for a one day event with 10 rooms and 4 speaking slots per room.
We’ve used Eventbrite for years. It may be time to revisit this tool as it’s changed quite a bit over the years, but it does still do the primary job of letting us set up an event with all the required details and allow folks to register for it. This gives us an attendee list, allows us to do a bit of information gathering during the registration process, and gives us a platform to provide (opt-in) email addresses for sponsors. We also use the registration list export to populate our master mailing list that we keep from event to event.
Attendee info
We do ask for a few additional bits of info during registration – Custom Questions:
Primary attendee “role” – Useful to us and for sponsors
Dietary restrictions – to get an idea of how many alternate meals to provide
Attendees opt-out for sponsor emails
Multiple ticket “types”
Something new we did this time around. Rather than keeping registration open through the event, we used to close the main registration a few days ahead of time to get printables and other things done. What we found was that closing registration can be confusing for folks finding the site prior to the event and after we’ve closed tickets… So, this year we added a second “ticket” (Eventbrite term) that opened at the same time we closed the main “ticket”. This approach allows us to go forward with sending the main attendee list to the printer to create badges while still having a normal registration process from the perspective of folks signing up. Then we print a smaller group of badges on our own the night before the event.
Attendee list for vendors
After the event, we use the filtered (by opt-out) attendee list to distribute to sponsors – providing name, company, and email.
Attendee list for printing badges
Eventbrite used to provide additional functionality for creating badges but has backed that out and now offers integration to partner products to do it. We opted to export our list to Excel and do a mail merge with Microsoft Word using Avery name tag templates (#5390). We send the file to Kinko’s where they print and cut the badges from card stock. This method is less expensive than printing to Avery labels but is a pain as we need to sort the badges ourselves. (Sorry volunteers, but thank you for sorting these)
We were initially interested in the Community Days site as it manages the main calendar for our community – which is great for scheduling and making folks aware of local/regional events. But the site itself has pretty good utility with one of the biggest benefits being integration with Sessionize. As sessions and speakers are approved and scheduled, the list of speakers, speaker info, session info, and schedule are all available on the event site almost instantaneously.
The Sessionize integration here is also key for speakers as it pulls directly from current Sessionize data – as the speakers update their biographic info and contact information, it’s available through our event page.
During event ramp-up, this will likely be our primary point of contact for folks looking for information on our event. Between events, we’ll likely still maintain a presence with a traditional website or page.
We maintain a domain and website for our team, event, and community. This is our primary “surface” when we’re in-between actively planning an event and have active Eventbrite and Community Days pages. Our current site is a manually created HTML/Bootstrap site – so there are definitely other ways of doing that. I don’t remember how we got here, but I think the decision had to do with having the control we wanted to integrate with other platforms. At the moment we’re using the approach of using Community Days page and integrations during event ramp-up and maintaining the manual site throughout the rest of the year.
Lots of options for building and hosting sites. We briefly considered WordPress as it would be super easy to maintain content on it. At the end of the day, it’s a “what’s your hammer” sort of decision. Use the tool that you’re comfortable with.
We also use our homepage as a connection to Constant Contact sign-up pages for the various groups we want to connect with: Speakers, sponsors, attendees, and Coffee Crew (networking events between the big events):
Finally, we also use the site to host historical content like sessions from previous events as well as any other items we need to make available that might not fit on the Community Days page. Most recently, we host our printable schedule file here.
The domain also provides us with a little more legitimacy when dealing with sponsors as well as creating distribution groups for ourselves. 🙂
While all of our attendees aren’t on social media, we still maintain accounts on these as we do have plenty of folks in the community that do connect with us here. We’ll hit these sites hard as we plan for and ramp up to our primary events to drive speaker submissions, sponsor sign-ups, and attendee registrations.
We also manage Coffee Crew (small networking events) events on our Facebook page, make them public, and share the link on all of our channels. We could probably use something like Meetup here but haven’t made the change yet.
Note: We’ve often considered a page on LinkedIn but haven’t made that move yet. We’re not sure if it will bring additional visibility or just be another site to maintain.
There are two main things we use Constant Contact for – maintaining a master list of attendees and providing a place for folks to add themselves to contact lists between events.
We have mailing lists for: Attendees, Speakers, Sponsors, and our Coffee Crew. These include signup forms for each, branded with our logo.
We try not to spam our attendee list as it’s the folks we’re trying to serve. We currently use these lists to ping the community as we’re planning events, have a “Save the Date” announcement, have opened registration, want to get feedback with a poll or something. When we’re actively working on an event, we’ll usually switch over to the Eventbrite email tool so we’re only hitting the folks that have registered.
We’ll also use the speaker and sponsor lists when we have dates announced and start our call for speakers and call for sponsors.
For years we used Guidebook. But when we decided to return and run another event post-COVID, we also decided to trim down a bit and be a bit more frugal with our sponsor dollars. So, we cut Guidebook and went to a more manual option that we’ll likely change or build on for future events.
Our current tool post-Guidebook is Microsoft Forms. We’ve created forms for attendee feedback for the event, session feedback, feedback from sponsors, and other smaller questions.
Budget – Excel
Yes, we have a budget. As we balance the dollars from sponsors, we figure out what we can afford while running our event. We use Excel to track this. The spreadsheet I have right now has reference columns from a previous event or two, has an estimate column, and an actual spend column. I have a second tab/page where I track paid sponsors revenue.
M365 – OneDrive / SharePoint / Microsoft Lists / Microsoft Teams (paid/free)
Yes, of course we’re using M365. Though, admittedly we need to clean up our tenant (who doesn’t). We’ve been using it for years and both the product capabilities and how we use it has evolved significantly.
Document libraries and OneDrive for managing content, our logo files, sponsor logo files, any other support docs like sponsor level info sheets, etc.
I’m currently managing our sponsor lists and process in a List and will be adding some automation and forms to streamline it when I’m able. Maybe something to blog about after we have it working smoothly.
We use Teams for our virtual meetings and ongoing persistent conversations threads.
(Update) Microsoft Community Tenant
Don’t forget to check out the Microsoft Community Tenant. It’s a free M365 offering for folks doing exactly what we’re doing, and you want to do – run community events. (Thank you Karuana for the reminder)
Now, go sign up for it, use it, then pull together some case study content for a session at your own conference. People love case studies.
Recap
That’s everything I can think of at the moment. If we come up with other tools, we’ll update or post follow-ups.
Let me know if this helps and/or if you have any questions!
