The challenge: Where to put the participation fees?
Anyone who has ever organized a conference for a university will be familiar with the problem and may have already asked themselves this question at least once.
The topic of participation fees is sometimes very complex and the strict requirements of the universities set limits for organizers. People who register for a conference, for example, often can use bank transfer only to pay their attendance fees. This is particularly inconvenient for events with international participation.
There are also other challenges: The more people register, the more time organizational teams spend dealing with reminders, booking changes and cancellations.
Converia provides a bank account for the conference
Converia closes the gap and takes over the entire payment management for the UHHMG. On the one hand, this means that credit cards and PayPal now extend the payment options for participants. Organizers do not need to have their own credit card contracts.
On the other hand, this saves the UHHMG many hours of time. Converia creates tickets and invoices and also stores all payments received in the system. Cancellations, rebookings, refunds and the associated communication with participants are also tasks that fall entirely within Converia’s remit. All participation fees are deposited in an account that Converia manages in trust for UHHMG.
The right software for every event
The UHHMG manages events in the scientific-academic, medical and public sectors and takes on a wide range of event organisation tasks for its customers. Event organizers either book the complete package or use individual services from the Hamburg PCO’s range.
Converia also offers a similar modular service structure and, like UHHMG, the team behind the conference software is very familiar with the requirements of different congress and conference formats thanks to its many years of experience.
Because this fits together so well, UHHMG uses the Converia Academic Platform.
This makes work much easier, especially for teams from the fields of science and research. For example, if an institute is planning a conference, it no longer has to start by searching for the right conference software. There is also no need to renegotiate contracts with the software provider afterwards.
Powerful abstract management
Converia’s abstract management system maps the entire process that a scientific conference paper goes through: Authors use the software to submit their abstract before it is assigned to the reviewers for evaluation. As soon as the committee has made the final decision, emails created in Converia inform the authors whether their paper will be part of the conference.
Along this process, good communication between the individual groups is essential, which is why Converia provides the tools required for this exchange. The Converia dashboard also tells organizers how many reviews are still outstanding. To remind the relevant people of their task, they send a circular email directly from Converia.
Further advantages of the Converia Academic Platform
As an Academic Platform customer, UHHMG is also provided with tips and answers about the conference software by a personal contact from the Converia team.
UHHMG project manager Johanna Karger appreciates the direct line to Converia, which prevents gaps in the organization process:
“The support we receive from Converia is great. With Ms Nebelung, we have a direct contact person who deals with all our enquiries personally. She is very familiar with our events and we never have to wait long to get a competent response.”
Converia is also 100% GDPR-compliant and hosted in high-security data centres in Germany – another important technical requirement for many academic conferences organized by universities, which not all software providers can always meet.
Since 2020, Universität Hamburg Marketing GmbH has already implemented several successful conferences with Converia, including recurring events that can be set up even faster with the help of copy templates. The Converia team copies the previous year’s event, including all basic settings. For the new event, only the data that is different from the previous event – the date or ticket prices, for example – is then adjusted.
In this way, organizers benefit from the range of features, as UHHMG offers them software tailored to their conference with Converia. What’s more, payment handling no longer rests on UHHMG’s shoulders.
This creates more space and the agency can devote itself to other important organizational tasks.