Build a conference

Click Conferences in your sidebar, then click New Conference. Your organization needs live hosting enabled, since every conference session is a live event.

Add a title, a URL slug, a description, and a time zone. The title and slug become your conference’s public landing page and the container attendees register into.

Click Add session for each talk or block. Each session gets its own title, date, time, duration, credit value, and speakers. Adding a session prefills the next one’s start time based on the previous session’s end time plus a break, which you can set and adjust.

Click Add speaker under a session to add a name and email, plus optional credentials (e.g. “BCBA-D”) and a short bio — these show on your public conference page. This works the same way as adding speakers to a single event. See Add speakers to your event.

If paid events are enabled for your account and your Stripe payouts are active, you can mark the conference as paid and set a price. Otherwise the conference is free to register for.

Click Create Conference. Each session you added becomes its own live event, linked together under the conference.

On your conference page, click Publish. You need at least one session before you can publish. Publishing makes the conference landing page public so attendees can register, and moves every session’s status badge off “Draft” as well — a published conference is fully live, agenda included.

From your conference’s Edit page, upload a hero image for the landing page banner. From each session’s edit panel on the manage page, upload a session thumbnail and, per speaker, a headshot photo — click Photo under a speaker once you’ve entered their email. These images, along with any credentials and bio you added in step 4, show automatically on your public landing page.

Click Sponsors on your conference’s manage page to sell space on the landing page, the break screen attendees see between sessions, and the certificate email. Add a sponsor name, logo, and link, and choose which of those three spots each one appears on. Nothing sponsor-related shows anywhere until you add a sponsor here. If you sell the same spot to more than one sponsor, you can either rotate them on a split you set or show all of them at once — and once your event is over, this same page shows clicks and views for each sponsor so you can share the results.

Speakers get their invite when the conference is published. Every speaker you add to a session gets a calendar invite for their green-room time (15 minutes before the session), plus reminders 1 week, 24 hours, and 1 hour before, with the green-room link and the exact email to sign in with. Move a session and its speakers get an updated invite; remove a speaker and their invite is cancelled. Turn these off for the whole conference with Send speaker reminders on the manage page, where you can also Send test to me to preview them. Placeholder addresses like name@example.com are never emailed. Attendees can add every session to their calendar from the landing page, and their confirmation email includes the same calendar file.

When you publish, everyone on your team also gets a calendar invite for each session, one email per day, with the green-room link and the conference page. A teammate who speaks in a session gets the speaker invite for that session instead of a team one.

If your organization sells a Summit Pass, your conference’s Edit page shows a Summit Pass card. Check Include this conference in the pass and save. Every pass holder is registered automatically with a VIP ticket, right away if the conference is already published or as soon as you publish it, and new pass holders are added as they buy. A pass holder who fills in your registration form is registered without paying again. Pass registrations show a Pass badge on your Registrations page and in the CSV export. If the first session falls outside the pass’s dates, the card shows a warning, but you can still include it. Unchecking the box stops adding new pass holders; it doesn’t remove anyone already registered. Certificates work exactly as they do for every other attendee. If you don’t see the card, your organization doesn’t sell a pass.

If OpenCEU has turned on Test conferences for your organization, the conference form shows a Test conference switch. A test conference is a private dry run: use it to rehearse the live room, your sponsor reel, and registration before the real event. It is never listed or searchable, issues no certificates or credit, takes no payment (it is always free), and does not count in any report or analytics. Every screen shows a TEST CONFERENCE banner, and the only email it sends is the registration confirmation, marked [TEST]. When an attendee reaches the claim step they see “Test session: no credit issued.” To run the real event, create a new conference without the switch.