Cross posted from the SQLSaturday blog

Though few see it, we also maintain a full set of admin tools for the event lead. It’s grown here and there as we had time, but we’ve definitely had times where the limitations hurt the ability of the event to make real time changes – and in turn added to the overhead of hosting the events as we had to make the changes for them.

We tried to go back and answer requests for changes, plus we added a few features from the wish list – with a goal of reducing the amount of effort for everyone involved. Here’s a short list of the changes:

• Added a true menu so we could organize functionality, before it was just a big set of links on the page!
• Added the ability to post event news to the front page in blogish format. The nice part is that users can see the last 5 or so posts in chronological order.
• We have a fairly nice system for sending messages to various subsets of interested parties, but it’s always been tedious to include a copy of the full schedule or sessions submitted to date, so we fixed that and added items to the menu to paste in all of the commonly used URL’s plus things like the call for speakers end date and the current registration count
• Many event leaders are either reluctant to message or not good at it, so we’ve drafted 20 messages that can be used as is, or modified as needed. Event announcements, event reminders, reminders to speakers to upload files, and more. We load the messages into each event, they can delete them if not wanted or use them as templates.
• We set up a list of recurring sponsors and we automatically copy that into ‘Sponsor Leads’ for each event, giving the event leader a resource they can use get sponsors for the event. They can add their own leads as well.
• We also added a simple way to add marketing contacts. A good example would be other area users groups, prominent people in the area, even recruiters that will forward on messages about the event.
• Event leads can now edit session details and information about registrations
• We reworked our first try at PayPal integration and extended it to the sponsor sign up. When sponsors register we automatically send them an invoice with the payment link, when they pay we  post it back showing the event lead the net payment (minus the PayPal fee) and flip the bit that shows the sponsor on the web site.

There’s always more you want to do, but especially on this project time and and resources are limited – time I spend on this comes at the expense of billable hours and/or family time, so we try to focus on areas that matter the most. The other part is that we’re trying to build tools that allow event leads as much flexibility as possible while still empowering them – the message templates above are a good example. More work to give them options, but important to do so.