Frank Mulligan, 35th Annual Meeting of Upper Atmosphere by Optical Methods

I was returning to academia having been out of it for essentially ten years – I was Vice-President here in Maynooth since 1998. I was on a year’s sabbatical and it was suggested to me that by at least making a pitch for the meeting it would be a good way of announcing that I was back in the community.

Name Faculty/ Association

Frank Mulligan, Senior Lecturer in the department of Experimental Physics in NUI Maynooth

Conference Detail

35th Annual meeting of upper Atmosphere by optical methods
Date: August 2008
Delegates: 64, from 14 different countries as far afield as Australia and Canada

The meeting has been running for 35 years and where it is held is based on people making a pitch for it at various meetings. Sometimes it’s decided two or three years in advance, for example in 2007, the destinations for the next three meetings up until 2010 were decided.

Official bidding process to win the event?

There is an official process and when we bid in 2007 two other groups made proposals and all three proposals were accepted, it just was a question of ordering them.

Who were the decision makers for the bid?

The general Assembly make the decision. All the groups made a PowerPoint presentation for about ten minutes.

Why did you decide to host this international event?

In my particular case I was returning to academia having been out of it for essentially ten years – I was Vice-President here in Maynooth since 1998. I was on a year’s sabbatical and it was suggested to me that is would be a good way of announcing that I was back in the community by at least making a pitch for the meeting.

When did you bid for the conference?

I thought about it first in about October 2006. First of all it was just a concept and then by the time May or April came around in 2007 I started preparing the presentation and speaking with people here on the ground, as part of the bidding process you have to give some indicative costs.

Support – Practical/ Financial

Our Conference Office was a great help. They drew my attention to the fact that the Meet in Ireland team could support bids and that they have slides available and it gives you an idea of what you might put in your presentation.

The Conference Office also put me in contact with other people, who had also been supported by the Meet in Ireland team, who had run academic conferences here in the last 2-3 years and I was able to speak to them and learn from their experiences. Another person who gave me support was the vice president for research who agreed to provide the funding for the welcome reception.

What advice would you give to others?

We did arrange to pick up all the people who arrived at the airport and bring them here. The general reception by the participants for that level of service was extremely high and people really appreciated that because when you arrive at an airport at a new country you’ve never been to before you don’t know how the transport system works, if someone is there standing with a sign saying the name of the conference it really makes their job an awful lot easier. So we were able to pick them up and we were able to incorporate the cost of that into the registration fee into the conference.

Organisational steps

The initial steps were my discussions with the Conference office and they gave me costs for accommodation, providing meals etc. The next thing then was to set up a website with a certain amount of information in it, for example where the university is, the local organising committee, the transport arrangements, costs, and what the sessions would be about. The conference office looked after the secure features of the website, so that delegates were able to use their credit cards.
Going on from that then the next steps would be to make preliminary reservations of a certain number of rooms. Also once we had an idea of the numbers we booked the social programmes.

Promotion

The promotion of the conference was through email and the website. We decided against printing flyers.

What was the highlight of the conference?

The highlight for me was seeing the response of the people at the end of the conference at how well they were treated and how easy everything was made for them. The delegates came up to me and said this is one of the best conferences in the series and that was very satisfying for me.

Tips & Advice

I would recommend that you talk to your conference office on a continual basis. With their knowledge of the whole business they have good ideas and they are able to advise you on the pitfalls to be avoided.

Also make sure your website is relevant and you may want to think about different options for registering. Also having one point of contact for delegates is an important aspect of the organisation.