Association of American State Geologists

Association of American State Geologists

99th Annual Meeting

Key Largo, Florida

June 9-13, 2007

Hosted by the Florida Geological Survey

Florida Department of Environmental Protection

Walt Schmidt, Chief and State Geologist

The Florida Geological Survey was pleased to celebrate its Centennial Year as host to the 99th Annual Meeting of the Association of American State Geologists held in Key Largo, Florida in June 2007. This document is provided as guidance to those preparing to host future annual meetings of the Association.

Staffing

The most important lesson we learned concerning planning the meeting is that it will take more staff and more time than you might anticipate. Eleven of our staff assisted with planning with the degree of effort ranging from a few weeks time for planning various trips to a five to six months time planning details with the hotel. Given overlap in staff assignments, about five of our staff members were involved in the hotel meeting room and meal planning details, five with guest activity/trip planning, four with geological field trip planning, two with planning and purchasing “giveaways,” one with managing the web site, one providing technical support, and nine actually attending and staffing the meeting. We reiterate the statement made by New Mexico as the 2006 meeting planners: “there is a tremendous amount of work involved in planning one of these meetings.”

Location

The location, Key Largo, was selected due to its proximity to geological and cultural gems—including John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, Everglades National Park, South Miami, and Key West. The cost of doing business in the Florida Keys is fairly high and the distance from our headquarters in Tallahassee significant, but we expected that this would be a more popular destination for the AASG membership and guests. It turned out to be well worth the extra cost and effort.

Timeline

Allow plenty of time to work with the meeting hotel and plan the field trips and guest activities. The first obvious thing you will want to do is send out invitations to the meeting—the thing that is not so obvious is that you will need registration costs in order to send out the invitations and to set registration costs, you will need most of the details with the hotel (food and alcohol), the field trips and the guest activities worked out. Many of these details hinge on having the meeting schedule determined; this requires communication with the AASG president and the hotel (for example, the maximum number of breakout sessions held at any one time may be restricted by the number of meeting rooms the facility has available). It’s amazing how intertwined and intricate this planning turns out to be, so the earlier you begin, the better.

The hotel contract for the 2007 meeting was actually negotiated and signed several years in advance; however, it required about five months and four staff members to iron out the details concerning meeting room needs, menu plans and social events. The State Geologist, Walt Schmidt, traveled to Key Largo in 2005 to meet with the hotel conference coordinator and conduct early reconnaissance of the field trip and guest activity trip destinations. In retrospect, it would have been ideal to return to the meeting hotel and further ground-truth the field trips and guest activity trips as early as August or September 2006 and prior to estimating costs and announcing the trips. This work was begun in November and continued through March 2006; one planning trip by our staff uncovered the fact that one of our guest activity destinations had to be scrapped due to storm damage. Fortunately, the substitute destination turned out to be even better than the original plan and was enjoyed by all who attended. The bottom line on the timeline is to start as early as possible with the planning.

Registration

Estimating Registration Cost

Estimating cost and setting registration fees is arguably the most difficult and time-consuming part of the planning process and requires answering the following questions:

1.  Attendance: How many attendees will there be?

Estimating the number of attendees for the meeting, various sessions, business lunches, banquet, field trips and guest activities is necessary before you can begin to estimate costs because many cost items are directly dependent on the number of attendees. As the following table demonstrates, using the attendance numbers and category breakdowns from the previous year was an excellent way to do this.

Registration Category / 2006 Attendee Totals / 2007 Attendee Totals
Members / 41 / 37
Associates & Staff / 33 / 26
Honorary Members / 17 / 16
Other Professionals / 36 / 27
Spouses/Guests / 45 / 52
Youth / 7 / 10
TOTAL / 179 / 168

A list of attendees by category follows this summary. Regonline reports also are included in the binder as examples. Two late/walk-in registrants were not entered into the Regonline system, which accounts for the minor differences in head counts.

2.  Food and alcohol: How much food and alcohol do we need to provide?

These are the most expensive items that need to be covered by registration fees. Close coordination with the hotel in planning the food and alcohol for the social and business events are required to estimate costs. We ran into communication problems with our initial contact at the meeting hotel; hindsight tells us that we would have been well served to deal with these problems sooner than we did. We were eventually assigned a new contact and things ran much more smoothly.

Another issue that affected planning the cost for food and alcohol was that the contract with the Key Largo Grande Resort prohibited bringing in any outside food or beverages; this significantly affected the cost associated with the drinks for the Icebreaker and the Hospitality Suites. A minimum number of drink tickets were initially planned (two per person). We were able to increase the number once we received sponsorship funds; however, registration fees had to be set prior to the receipt of the sponsorship funds in order to get the meeting announcements and invitations out in a timely manner. Ultimately, although the hotel costs were fairly high, they proved to be worthwhile in terms of quality and keeping things running smoothly. Similar to previous years, registration for the meeting included the Icebreaker Reception, two business lunches, the hospitality suite, and breakfast snacks. The cluster lunch, annual banquet, field trips and guest activities were charged at estimated cost.

3.  Field trip and guest activity costs: In addition to the above two questions, field trips and guest activities need to factor in: How much will transportation and possible entrance fees cost?

Estimates of field trip and guest activity trip costs were based on minimum attendance levels and per person costs. Transportation, snacks, drinks, boxed lunch for the Everglades trip, boat tours at John Pennekamp, and entrance fees for Fairchild Botanical Gardens were included. Field trip and guest trip attendance substantially exceeded the minimum. In addition, we spent less than initially expected because we were able to purchase food, drinks and supplies for these trips at fairly low costs since these were not purchased or arranged through the hotel. We shopped local sales in Tallahassee on sodas and snacks and purchased the boxed lunches at a Publix grocery store. Extra revenue from the trips was used to supplement snacks for the ice-breaker, the hospitality suite and provide breakfast baked goods each morning.

4.  Sponsorships: The state of Florida issued a new code of ethics in 2006 which greatly restricted solicitation and source of potential sponsorships. Due to the new code, we had to wait for a ruling from our department attorneys which was not made until late November, delaying our requests for sponsor donations. The late start meant that we were required to set the registration fees before we had any response from our sponsorship solicitation. Additional strict interpretations concerning conflict of interest meant that we expected sponsorship revenue to be low. The timing, expectations, and uncertainty forced us to ensure that none of the “essentials” were planned to be covered by sponsorship revenue. It is advisable to start as early as possible soliciting sponsorship donations and setting realistic expectations based on the host state’s particular circumstances and somewhat on past history.

We were surprised to take in a total of $9,000 with AASG providing $5,000. As with the extra field trip revenue, these funds subsidized ice-breaker, hospitality suite, and breakfast snacks. We were able to increase the number of drink tickets to six for each attendee and provide bottles of wine at each table at the annual banquet. Many drink tickets were not turned in and many wine bottles were not opened, resulting in our receiving credits for them. This resulted in an account balance of $4,814.15 which was returned to the AASG treasurer. The Executive Committee can determine how to utilize these funds, (i.e. general funds, Foundation, next year’s meeting seed money, etc.).

In addition to the sponsors who donated funds, the National Park Service (Geologic Resource Division) paid for the buses for the Everglades Field Trip. Everglades National Park, Windley Key Fossil Reef Geological State Park and John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park waived entrance fees. Sponsorship information is included with the financial data following this summary.

Final Registration Costs

We established five categories of registrants and two levels of registration as follows:

Registration Category / Early Registration (Received On or Before May 1) / Late/On-Site Registration (Received after May 1)
AASG Members, Associates & Staff / $350 / $365
Other Professionals / $320 / $335
Honorary Members of AASG / $210 / $225
Spouses/Guests / $135 / $150
Youth (under 18) / $65 / $65

In retrospect, even though the registration fees and events were the same for members, associates, and staff, it would have been useful to separate them into separate categories for reporting and tracking purposes. Sorting these categories for attendance reports was done by hand since they could not be separated within Regonline.

Following the advice of the New Mexico Geological Survey from their experience in planning the 2006 meeting, we expected the discount for early registration would encourage attendees to register early and therefore based our revenue estimates on early registration rates. This proved to be successful as all but eleven attendees registered early. This high rate of early registration also facilitated finalizing the detailed meeting plans.

On-line Registration through Regonline

As a Florida state agency, we cannot use state funds to purchase food or beverages; it also would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to process credit card payments. As a result we followed the 2004 experience of Washington State and used Regonline to allow on-line registration and credit card processing. We encouraged attendees to use Regonline but also accepted mail-in registration with check payments.

Regonline waived the usual setup fee since an account had been set up in 2004. Costs were $2.50 per registrant to Regonline and 5% credit card transaction fees to Visa; the total cost was $1,233.58 and total Regonline revenue was $55,925.05. Regonline generated invoices on the 10th of each month and mailed us a check for the revenue minus costs at that time.

We highly recommend using this service because it provided powerful reporting and registration management tools, in addition to allowing on-line registration with credit card. Among other things, we were able to:

1.  Set up the on-line registration form for all of the registration categories and embed the cutoff date for early registration.

2.  Include custom fields on the registration forms. Regonline “standard” fields provided for most of the information we needed but allowed for custom fields as needed. For example, we created a shirt size field and multiple choice responses for the cluster lunch sign up (Eastern, Central and Western) and the Pennekamp boat tour (glass-bottom or snorkeling).

3.  Set up each registration category so that once the registrant selected the category, only the registration events for that category followed. For example, spouses/guests did not see business lunch and cluster lunch choices. This streamlined registration for attendees.

4.  Test and edit the registration form before going live and edit anytime after going live if necessary (for example, single-day registration was added after we went live).

5.  Use administrative registration to add attendees who mailed their registration to us including check payment data. This was useful for attendance reporting purposes.

6.  Generate “snapshot” reports anytime to capture registration by category and for each event.

7.  Run a variety of other standard reports and create and run custom reports as needed.

8.  Send e-mail to all attendees or a subset. E-mail address was set as a required field for registration and was also requested on the mail-in registration form to ensure that we would have addresses for every registrant. We used this feature to send out information and reminders to attendees.

The learning curve was not too steep and the technical support at Regonline was very helpful. The URL for Regonline is https://www.regonline.com/marketing/clientLogin.aspx, the username is “flaasg” and password is “EverGlades1.” If you choose to use Regonline, you will need to set up a new user account with a new username and password, change all contact information, and contact Regonline to open a “mini-merchant” account. It is advisable to check with technical support and the accounting department at Regonline to make sure the account information is changed. Although we thought we had done a thorough update, our first check arrived at the FGS made out to Washington Department of Natural Resources! Jackie Lloyd was the primary Regonline user and would be happy to answer any questions (850/487-9455 ext. 133).

Managing Meeting Funds

As mentioned above, we could not use state funds to purchase food or beverages so we set up an account at a local credit union to manage meeting funds. AASG is a non-profit organization so the account must be designated as such and must be a non-interest bearing account. You will need to contact the AASG treasurer to obtain documentation of the organization’s tax-exempt status. In addition, we found out that banks will require officers of the organization as the authorized signers on the account. This is impractical since the officers are State Geologists who are not likely to be located in the host’s state. We found that the credit union allowed broader interpretation of the requirements, accepting Walt Schmidt as “Past-President” and three other FGS staff as “Meeting Coordinators” as officers and signers on the account. In addition to the tax-exempt documentation, a copy of the By-laws was required to set up the account.