Today's news blog feature is News from the Field, and the third installment from the Professional Development Seminar, "Purple Cow Documentation via Video and Photography."

Continuing to address some of the comments and questions we hear most frequently in our post-conference surveys:  Beginning with the Toronto conference, we no longer host a banquet on Saturday night before the dance party.  As mentioned last week, all hotels require meeting a Food & Beverage minimum.  The food for an evening banquet is extremely expensive, even buffet style, and there were constant complaints about the quality of the food served.  So we looked to see how to better invest those dollars.  And the answer became immediately obvious.

Year after year we hear that attendees wish lunch was provided.  Providing lunches is far more relaxing than trying to go out to find and eat lunch before hurrying back to the conference.  We often have lunch-time programming and providing lunches makes it easy for people to attend those.  Keeping people together over lunch also promotes open networking time for conferees.  Creating opportunities for like-minded strangers to come together is perhaps one of the most important aspects of the conferences. And of course it saves the cost of buying lunch every day.  So we took the money we were spending on the Saturday night banquet and moved it over to provide lunches.

 

The response was overwhelmingly positive; only a few people were upset that we had made this shift. They thought SNAG was being "cheap" and "pathetic" by discontinuing the banquet, and didn't like the sandwiches for various reasons.  Making this change did not save SNAG money (lunches are expensive too), but rather made far better use of the money that we already have to spend with the hotel.  We also know that one thing missing this year was the lack of central space to set up lunch tables where people could plop down and meet new people or continue conversations. That will change in 2014. 

There is a tradeoff, to be sure, when providing sandwiches for 800 people---a culinary experience it's not.  Overall though the convenience of it more than offsets the smattering of complaints.