Courtney Stanton was sick of going to video game and tech conferences that boasted stock-standard panels of men every time. In fact, she felt that these conferences were so dull that she developed a semi-hatred of conferences in general. In her own words:

Conferences are often touted as great places to network with others. In fact, since networking is such a focus of conferences, organizers often push the networking aspect as a reason to attend. But how many conferences actually do help you expand your network with meaningful new connections?

Your name is a huge part of your identity. For someone to forget it can be quite disappointing. We put huge significance on the idea of learning and remembering names and, consequently, the failure of not doing so.

With technology so heavily integrated into our daily lives, there’s no doubt you’ll see it popping up during your conference. Here are ten ways you can integrate technology into your next conference without letting it take over.

Integrating social media into your conference in some way is almost expected these days. With the vast array of social networks and social media tools available, it can be difficult to know where to start. Having a reference list can be useful in these kind of situations, so we’ve put together a blueprint for your next conference.

Your conference delegates, if given some direction and inspiration, can be the most environmentally friendly attendees around.

Twitter can be a useful tool for building relationships with customers and promoting your conference, but you can also use it during your event. If you’re not sure how, here are 3 ways you can incorporate it.

Storify helps you collect media from across the web and paste it together into a story that you can share online. Using media from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and more, you can create a story of highlights by hand-picking the content you want to include.

Chances are you’re attending and speaking at conferences to get to know others with the same interests as you. You also learn from them and share ideas, but did you know you could gain additional customers from conferences? Okay, so you did know that, but maybe you’re not sure how to accomplish this successfully.

It’s impossible to plan for everything, and sometimes things will go wrong no matter how prepared you are. However, planning ahead and having a back-up plan can’t hurt, especially when you have crowds of people relying on you to run a smooth and enjoyable event.