9 Steps To Organizing a Global Conference Packed With Awesomeness

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I want to put a disclaimer that the first ever global Teen Business Summit featuring Guy Kawasaki as the keynote has not happened yet. This free conference, conducted entirely via Skype video will be held on August 22nd – 24th. The aim of the conference is to bring together successful entrepreneurs of various age groups to discuss how teen entrepreneurs can “Create A Better Future.”

With that said, here are 8 steps to organizing a conference that is packed with awesomeness.

1. Start With Big In Mind

Do something truly unique that will catch the world’s attention. For us, we wanted to throw a conference directed at teen entrepreneurship where the speakers are awesome themselves. And then do it all online. We thought doing a local conference with 200-300 people was simply not big enough.

2. Plan Out The Next 6 Months

This was one of the first things that we did. We have in our possession a breakdown of the 6 months leading up to the date of the conference. We worked backwards to identify what we would need to do each month. We figured out we don’t have to do certain things until the 4th or 5th month while things like getting speakers confirmed are very important in the 2nd and 3rd month.

We keep going back to this document to see what have been done and have not been done. It’s not perfect but we helped eliminate the risk of missing something.

3. Start With Your Friends

When we first had the idea of a conference, I ran it by someone who we interviewed – Rob Salkowitz who wrote Young World Rising. I knew his vision was very much aligned with ours so I pitched him the idea and get his take. He was very interested and so that gave us validation that this is going to be awesome. He was the very first speaker that we confirmed.

4. Get A Logo And Website Created

Quickly after that, we got our branding created. Why do this before all the speakers are confirmed? For one, if you go about getting these things created, you committed yourself to doing something. You made yourself accountable to your actions. And when you have accountability, you’re more likely to follow up. This is not a plug, but we love 99Designs and got a great design. We did not really know what we wanted the brand to look like, so a crowdsourced solution was ideal to us. After creating the site, he is now up to his ears with work because we kept recommending him to others. [Email me if you would like the name of the person who did our website.]

5. Say What Will Happen, Then Make It Happen

Very much another accountability tactic. You don’t have to know everything because you put things into action. You don’t need to know how the video will be streamed or which software you will use. But those things you will figure out once you committed to doing things. From the start, we have said we want this speaker or that speaker but have no way of how to reach them. Once we committed, we figured out how to get to them.

6. Have A Keynote

We are extremely lucky to have Guy Kawasaki, the author of Art Of The Start and Enchantment to be our keynote. We would not have felt comfortable making an announcement without a big name backing the conference. This absolutely gives us leverage in getting more speakers- which has happened in the two days following our press release. So don’t make an official announcement without someone to keynote.

7. Drop It (Press Release) Like It’s Hot

While we plan to get the word out about the conference in every way possible via social media, we did create a press release on PRWeb to tell the world. We felt that by creating a press release, it legitimizes what we were trying to do. Many news outlets still look at it to see if there was a press release for any big news. There’s other options such as using Fiverr gigs or something called PitchEngine. So we recommend making an official announcement using a press release. That’s a hard launch instead of a soft launch.

8. Find Partners To Help You Promote

Next we identified potential partners who would help us get the word out there. Many non-profit entrepreneurship organizations, like NFTE are extremely interested in what we are trying to do. Because this is a global conference, we looked for organizations that have a global presence. Also, we made a list of 20 different entrepreneurship sites that we would like to get covered for the event.

9. Hope For The Best

As I said earlier, this conference has not happened yet. But we have made such a big announcement that we again are holding ourselves accountable to making it happen.

Do you have any tips for organizing a global conference?