Conference Planning: Tasks, Schedules, and Booth Shifts

A conference is a project with a hard deadline that does not move. Conference Hero gives you the project tools shaped for exactly that: a setup wizard, a task board that understands order, a booth planner for the days on site, and schedules you can print and hand to the team.

Start with the wizard

Creating a conference walks you through the basics: dates, team, targets, and tasks. You can pull in a task template, generate a plan from your exhibitor documents with the AI Task Planner, or start blank. Ten minutes in, the conference has a team, a plan, and a board.

Tasks that know their order

Tasks live on a kanban board with assignees, due dates, sub-tasks, and attachments. Two things keep the plan honest:

• Templates. Reusable checklists so your fifth conference does not start from zero.
• Dependencies. Mark a task as blocked by another - "Order booth graphics" cannot really start before "Finalize booth design" is done. Blocked tasks wear a badge on the board, and when the blocker completes, the assignees of every task it was holding up get notified. No status meetings required to find out you are unblocked.

The booth planner

On-site days are their own schedule: booth shifts, session attendance, customer meetings, setup and teardown. The booth planner lays them out per day with multi-person assignments, so everyone knows where they stand from 9:00 to 9:45 and who covers the booth during the keynote. Official conference sessions and your own blocks sit in one chronological view.

Event Staff, without extra seats

Booth crews are rarely just your employees. Contractors, agency staff, and partners can be added as Event Staff: they can be assigned tasks, booth shifts, and meetings like anyone else, but they have no login, get no notifications, and never consume a paid seat. Add them from team settings or right inside the conference wizard, and their names stay on past records after the event.

Print the plan

Conference wifi is not where you want your schedule to live. Export the booth plan as PDF in four formats: a master schedule, a personal agenda per team member, a timeline view, and a chronological activity list. Printer-friendly, readable at 7-point type, and formatted for US Letter - made to be folded into a back pocket.

One plan, from manual to teardown

Planning in Conference Hero is continuous: the exhibitor manual becomes tasks, tasks become a board with dependencies, the board feeds the on-site schedule, and the schedule ends up on paper in your team's hands. Budgets ride along too - see budget and ROI analytics for the money side, and field marketing teams for how event owners run the whole cycle.

More detail lives in the planning help articles.

Ready to plan your next one? Start free or see pricing.