Local Arrangements: Room Assignments

Several factors need to be considered when assigning meeting rooms:

the estimated attendance (from the program sheet)
your guess at likely attendance
the rooms available
technical requirements of the program
the flow of setup

The estimated attendance:

This number is often pulled out of a hat, but it may be all you have to go on. If a program contact is smart s/he'll estimate a larger number -- then you'll assign a larger room. There will be fewer complaints of overcrowding -- except from the other programs that didn't get the bigger rooms.

We had a couple of occurrences of estimations being way off: they said 100-150 and a dozen people showed. This is embarrassing for the speakers. On the other hand, we had more occurrences of underestimates and crowds overflowing into the halls. This is aggravating for everyone.

Your guess at likely attendance:

Here's another number out of the hat. From looking at a couple of years of attendance records, I'd say that:

Internet sessions are getting less popular, unless they're about policy issues.
Employment issues sessions: safety, unions, etc. are very popular.
Sessions about books and readers' advisory are making a comeback.
There're always requests for more sessions for public services.

The rooms available:

With a conference the size of WLA, it's almost impossible to get enough big-enough rooms. You'll *always* end up with some very crowded sessions. Oh well.

The technical requirements of the program:

We had two rooms designated for Internet stuff. They were good-sized (100-125 people) and had built-in screens and TV/VCRs. This meant, however, that they were not available for other programs that might have been more popular than the Internet session. In the future, this will need to be coordinated with the Internet/computer person.

The flow of setup

This is especially important when scheduling meals, since there's more preparation and cleanup time needed.

Setup time caused us problems for two meals: the Support Staff lunch and the YSS lunch. Both needed bigger rooms, but those rooms were not available because they were being used for meetings right up until lunchtime -- and there were no other rooms at the inn.

We had a near-crisis when it became clear (at the last minute) that several meeting rooms had been scheduled for programs until 5pm and business meetings after 5pm. The turn-around time for the hotel staff was impossible. This could be avoided by scheduling at least 15 minutes between meetings.

Other meeting assignment stuff:

I tried in a couple of instances to do "on-the-fly" room changes when it became clear that a room was going to be full and there was another, larger room available. This was a bad plan.

It confused people. Even when I closed the doors, put up a sign and stood in front of the door directing people to the new room, people still tried to get past me into the old room.

Some speakers refused to move to larger rooms, preferring instead to have the room be overcrowded. That's all right -- except that we get the complaints. Again: oh well.

revised: 30-Oct-1995
peter.j.gilbert@lawrence.edu