[Air-L] Fwd: AAUP Conference Insights?

[Alex Halavais]

Hi, all,

I spoke at the American Association of University Presses meeting last week
in SLC (only one other AoIRer there). It was a pretty good conference, and
so I followed up with the program chair on how things were organized. It's a
bit easier on him since they have fewer parallel sessions, and they are
generally organized by panel organizers. However, it's similar in size to
IR. See below.

Best,

Alex


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Gregory Britton <gbritton at getty.edu>
Date: Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 1:45 PM
Subject: Re: AAUP Conference Insights?
To: Alex Halavais <alex at halavais.net>


 Hi Alex:

 The AAUP has their conference planning down pretty tight, but that's partly
because they have an office staff to handle all the logistics. As chair, my
responsibilities were strictly programmatic--assemble a small committee,
pick topics, and draft speakers. We (the committee) also took on the
responsibility of promoting the meeting with the social networking things
(Facebook and Twitter). This was new for the meeting and proved very
effective.

 The office staff (basically one person focused on this--Susan Patton at the
AAUP spatton at aaupnet.org) negotiated the hotel arrangements, rooms, field
trips, meals, assembling the printed program, and multiple receptions. She
also handled all the exhibitors. Susan is an organizational force and has
the details down. This is crucial.

 As I understand it, the AAUP commits to a multi-year contract with some
chain hotel to get the best rates, but this limits the cities the board can
select from. This partly explains Salt Lake. With the Marriott chain, for
every Washington or Philadelphia you are forced to take an Oklahoma City or
Salt Lake or some other desperate little town. It's how they spread the
conference business around their network of hotels. The AAUP is committed to
some geographic diversity so they try for at least one western meeting ever
3-4 years. They also occasionally do a Canadian meeting, but never venture
much father than that.

 Having said the AAUP has their system down, they don't deal with change
very easily. Asking for free wi-fi in all rooms seemed to flummox
them--hotels charge extra for this--and the idea of marketing the meeting
seemed to escape them until we demonstrated how it could be done
effectively. Given the location and publishing economy, they were praying
for 400 attendees. They got about 535 including some walk-ins which still
amazes me. Lost people from the lost tribe?

 Anyway, please ask other questions --

 My best,

 Greg


Gregory M. Britton
Publisher | Getty Publications
1200 Getty Center Drive | Suite 500
Los Angeles, CA 90049
(T) 310 440 6066 | gbritton at getty.edu
www.gettypublications.org

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