5 Ideas To Organize Information Gathered At Conferences And Other Events
The conference is over and you’re now back at home with a bag full of brochures, business cards and presentations. Your good intentions were to keep in touch with the people you met and to use the information you gathered to develop new articles.
However, your good intentions have previously come to nothing. The information became stale and and you were no longer enthusiastic about contacting the people. Worse yet, you couldn’t even remember who some of the people whose cards you had were or why you wanted to connect with them in the first place.
Here are some tips to help you organize your new contacts and brochures and other documentation from conferences, seminars and other events:
A. At the event
1. Put business cards in context when you collect them– After a busy event, sometimes it’s difficult to work out why you took the business card in the first place, and why it’s important for you to contact the person/owner of the card. So write a short summary of how you met the person and the reason you need to get in touch at the back of the cards during the exchange. This reminder will help you organize your cards when you get home and have lots of people to contact.
2. Write some notes on the brochures and other paper- based documents –Write down a few notes on the brochure explaining your story idea/ the issue you want to pursue with the company.
Also write down the name of the media relations person on the brochure. If you’re meeting the marketing/promotion people at the exhibition stall, you’ll still have to hunt up the owner/manager/media relations person later.
If you were not sent by a specific publication, write down the publications you’d like to pitch the articles to while you’re still inspired and the idea is fresh in your head. Yes, it is harder work, especially hen you consider how big some of the exhibition halls can be. But the sheer size of the event and the number of interesting people you meet are the very reason why you need the notes.
B. When you get home
3. Immediately sort and/or capture your data -If you use an electronic database to manage your contact base, capture the data as soon as you get home, while it remains fresh in your mind. If you let it keep for long, you may forget to capture that information, which will affect how well you follow up on the self-imposed tasks.
4. Plan your execution well - Draw up a plan of the articles you plan to write and allocate deadlines ( either set by the publications that assigned you the work or self-imposed). Integrate the activities into your regular planner.
Also input reminders into your calendar to contact the people you met at the conference and intended to maintain contact with.
5. Set aside time for making contact with the people- Spread your planned correspondence out so you contact new people on a regular basis. Where possible, set aside a regular day and/time to contact the new people.
Friday afternoon works best for me, because I generally don’t have writing deadlines then, and the exercise is not demanding intellectually, giving the impression of a relaxed beginning to a weekend. Make sure the reminder has a prompter as to who the person is and why you need to get in touch with him, so you don’t waste valuable time wondering ” what do I say to this person?”
6. Keep it short - I prefer email because it’s quicker, and gives the other party to respond to my overtures n their own time, or not respond at all. My email briefly explains who I am, where and how we met and the reason for the contact. If the reason for the contact involves the interview, I generally wait for the other party to say “sure, send the questions.”
6. File your conference documentation – File your business cards and selected conference documentations that you think you’ll need if you have the space in your home/office to do paper-based filing.
I personally prefer electronic storage of conference presentations, as it allows for easier research when I work on articles on the same subject weeks or months later. Electronic storage also saves me filing space in my filing cabinets.
Damaria Senne attends a lot of conferences and seminars gathering news for ITWeb, a South African technology media house. Read some of the news, views and trends she uncovered about Africa and South Africa’s telecommunications environment at http://www.itweb.co.za and her adventures as a writer and parent at http://damariasenne.blogspot.com
Tags: followu-up, manage your database, post-conference articles
