[Air-L] AAUP Conference Insights?

[Alex Halavais]

With apologies to Mr. Britton and all, I've fallen into the trap of
sending to the list unintentionally. Please ignore... - Alex

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Alex Halavais <alex at halavais.net> wrote:
> 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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> // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur
> // http://alex.halavais.net
> //
>



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