The OpenWater Blog

Simplify Your Annual Meeting Planning Process with OpenWater

It’s high time you asked yourself one question about your annual meeting planning process:

“Does it spark joy?”

At first blush, that’s an unusual question to ask about hard work like annual meeting planning.  But make no mistake—it’s also a crucial one. Marie Kondo (renowned author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up) encourages her clients to discard anything that doesn’t spark joy. 

While she’s primarily talking about knick-knacks and clutter, that doesn’t mean her methodology doesn’t also apply to your meeting planning process.  What the “KonMari method” really teaches us is to simplify.  The frustrations of an over-complex annual meeting planning process threaten to sap the joy from your job.  And without joy, you’ll quickly burn out.  

It wouldn’t be the first time this approach has been linked to the workplace, either.  This insightful 2019 Forbes article discusses the value of tidying up by stripping away the processes keeping us from being at our best—for example, by watching out for the old “that’s how we’ve always done things” platitude and looking past it for a better way.  Advances in technology have given us untold opportunities to simplify the process at every step, so let’s take advantage of that!

OpenWater Is All About Simplicity

When we were building OpenWater, we considered all of the frustrations and grueling manual tasks faced by conference directors and annual meeting administrators. Then we set out to streamline each one.

The result is an end-to-end conference planning system that handles every stage of the abstract management process. We didn’t stop there though, as OpenWater also offers seamless website integration, an online form builder, and a robust suite of APIs to synchronize our system with the rest of your event planning tools and processes. With less manual upkeep on your plate, you can reap the healing benefits of simplicity in the workplace.

Here are just a few of the ways OpenWater can strip away the tedium and “spark joy” for your annual meeting planning process:

• Collect Everything Automatically: OpenWater’s fully customizable form building software makes abstract collection consistent, centralized, and precise.  Gather exactly what you want, in exactly the format you want, with no required fields left unfilled.  The form builder can even handle event registrations, integrated payment gateways, and large file uploads (perhaps for video abstracts).
• Access All Systems In One Place: A wide array of API integrations can give OpenWater access to contact lists in your AMS or CRM, info from your marketing platform, or even data from custom SQL databases.  Single sign-on functionality means you don’t even need a new account—your existing association login credentials will work just fine.  Updates to one system can, in many cases, be synchronized to happen bi-directionally, so every system stays current with no extra effort or record-keeping required.
• Streamline Your Review Process: OpenWater speeds up the review process by automating as much of it as possible with customizable rules and scoring.  What once was a messy, drawn-out process is now organized and swift.
• Keep It All In Place For Next Year: Your entire annual meeting planning process can be saved as a custom template to reload at next year’s annual meeting—with any small changes or edits you like.  No need to start over from scratch. The process renews and grows closer to perfection every year.

OpenWater simplifies annual meeting planning with automation, organization, integration, and aggregation of resources.  When all the loose ends are tucked away, so is the stress and frustration that takes the joy out of the process. What’s left is a rewarding and straightforward annual meeting planning process—one you’ll be happy to undergo each year.

David Lincoln

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