Part 1 of 2 video guides to using Abstract & Presenter Management (including Reviewers) features in EventsAir!
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NOTE: EventsAir Version 16 is here and if you've already updated, your screen won't look exactly like this video. In the newer version:

These questions have been collated from the 3 regional webinars. Some questions were asked by more than one person, so you may not see the exact same wording you used in your question.

Absolutely. You don’t need to allocate them to a session. Some clients use the Presentation Portal and Review Portal and Workflow App as a way reviewing scholarship applications or award submissions or similar things. It’s a great part of EventsAir that you can use for anything that has a submission process with a review process – even job applications. So you don’t need to allocate any submissions to a session.

There is a size limit on every file that gets uploaded in the abstract model, whether it's the abstract itself or supporting document, such as a PowerPoint. It’s 5MB per file (because that’s the AIRDrive limit, and it’s so you can access them from AIRDrive).

Yes, you can definitely collect pictures, figures and captions for your abstracts.

If it’s just something small, like a caption, and you've got a plain text abstract there are some symbols you can include, using the Special Characters keyboard (symbols, scientific and mathematical symbols etc).

You can also collect supporting documents and these can include images.

Or you can ask people to upload a document for the abstract, rather than using plain text, and people can add in whatever they want into a document that they're uploading.

We’ll look more at the Abstract Book in the next (advanced) webinar. In the meantime, yes, you can include Supporting Document, but not Additional Documents. PDF files cannot be imported into the Abstract Book.

It’s a word document format that merges in all the abstract information.

You can also use reports or exports to get information on abstracts, and you can look up documents in AIRDrive.

Absolutely not - no plans to phase that out at all!

One way would be to choose an uploaded document rather than plain text as the abstract document. Or you could ask for a short overview to be the plain text abstract, then upload a more detailed document with various sections as a supporting document (and you could also have charts and other data as supporting documents if you wanted to).

It depends if you're allowing them to edit their abstract later. So yes, they can edit it and add the authors if you’ve set up the Presentation Portal to allow editing.

A weighted score is how you apply a level of importance to each of the criterion you’re asking reviewers to rate.

So if you had four questions that you're asking the reviewers (relevance, content, things like that), if you wanted to equally weight them, you would apply a 25% weighting to each of those questions. (The weightings can’t add up to more than 100%.)

If you want to, you can also apply a higher level of importance to a particular question.

There are so many variations and every one of our customers does speaker and abstract management in a unique way because there’s so much flexibility.

There’s no limit to the number of authors per paper, but you can only have one presenter per paper when they submit. You set the number of presenting authors (speakers) attached to one presentation in the Presentation Portal, under Settings. It’s the box called Limit Presenting Authors to [the default setting is 1]. You can only collect one biography (for the submitting presenter) for each paper. One option might be to create a co-presenters’ portal to collect their information as well, because you can create multiple portals. You could go back into the original author’s contact record and under Presentations, add the other authors as co-authors. You may want to set up a specific training session to meet your needs.

See above – you also may have multiple speakers within one overarching session, with each presenter allowed a certain amount of time within that session. Each one of them can have their own bio and they can all be associated within that one session.

If you have too many it can get a little unwieldy, but that’s up to you. You can put them in a specific order and allocate times to them: “So you're speaking in slot number three, at 9.45am”.

Please let us know if that answers your question.

The only way to do this is for both presenters to have a presentation item, so creating another portal for co-presenters is how some people do this. Essentially only people that have a presentation item can have a bio and pic.

Yes, you just need to make sure the correct paper status and document is selected in the setup of the Attendee App under Agenda or Speakers section in the app.

Not sure we’ve interpreted the question correctly, but in the Attendee App, you should see the author’s (speaker’s) biography when you look at a session. This would be the author biography they uploaded when they submitted to the Presentation Portal. As explained in a previous response, only people that have a presentation item can have a bio and pic.

An author can log back into the Presentation Portal after they’re notified that a reviewer has left comments and/or asked them to edit their paper.

You’d set it up so that the Presentation Portal shows the paper status that the reviewer has changed it to (via the Review Portal). So if you set “Edits Required” paper status for when reviewers are sending comments back to the author, you would have to make sure that your Presentation Portal has the “Edits Required” paper status for when they need to edit.

You’d also have to make sure in the Presentation Portal that you’re showing reviewer comments. That way the author can log back into the Presentation Portal to read reviewer comments and you’ve allowed editing so they can edit their submission.

So it's those two portals essentially working together to create that process where a reviewer can send comments back and the author can resubmit – and that might answer a couple of questions.

If you are planning to have an initial stage, where all abstracts are submitted, then you plan to open reviews on a particular date, you may want to consider allowing a submitter to edit their abstract until you open reviews. If this is the case, you could make the following two settings in the presentation portal the same status as when they submit.

This will mean they can submit, edit and resubmit their paper until such time as you change these settings when the review stage is in progress.

If you make changes to an abstract, if the author looks back into the Presentation Portal and reviews it in there, they will see the changes that you've made.

You can also make a personal report containing the abstract text and attach that to a Merge Doc. You can also go to AIRDrive to download abstract documents. Look under your event, Contact Files>>Presentations>>Documents

Yes, you can use a Review Panel and the Abstract Workflow app to do this (you can look at the White Paper and also next month’s Advanced webinar for more information on this).

Unfortunately, no. The issue is data protection and GDPR. If somebody either didn’t finish submitting or hit ‘save as draft’, they haven’t yet accepted your terms and conditions and data policies. So because there is a gray area around permission, the data is not stored directly in the data tables (from a technical point of view) until they actually submit.

But by using that marketing tag method that Alec talked about (assigning a tag when an account is created on the Presentation Portal), you can at least see if somebody has that marketing tag assigned but hasn't submitted a paper yet. That at least allows you to contact them, for example to warn them of an upcoming deadline.

You can read more in the White Paper and we’ll also try to cover this more fully in the next webinar.

When you turn on “Reviewer Comments”, this means that when a Reviewer is in the Reviewer Portal, they can add things into the Comments to Author Field and then they click a button to say send comments to author. What that does is change the paper status. If you then enable reviewer comments in the Presentation Portal, they will be able to see the comments when they View the submission from the Edit Abstracts tab. You can also set it up to send a merge document to the author to advise them to login to the Presentation Portal to view the comments.

It depends if you want to find all incomplete reviews, or check how a particular reviewer is going. There’s an option in the Abstract Workflow App - and this may also be covered more in the next session – called Utilities. You can export from them Excel spreadsheet. You can export a spreadsheet with a row for every paper and columns for all the associated reviewer’s data. There’s another with every individual reviewer on a separate line, and you can filter to say only complete or incomplete reviews. You can also view the status of all their reviews via the Monitor Reviewers tab in the Abstract Workflow app.

Or you can just search in the Abstract Workflow App and filter by incomplete reviews.

We've just added in the last released version 15 release. This new feature allows you to have keywords appear in the agenda with color codes. This is optional but it’s a visual way for attendees to search for themes that interest them. It's really a great way to make searching through a large list of sessions more accessible.

[A follow-up question was how do you set up the sessions then if you don't know what the names are.] What people will normally do in that situation is set up their sessions with a skeleton name, like Session 1, Session 2, Session 3.

Then when “Synchronize session name with paper title” is enabled, when you assign a presentation item to a session, it's going to change the session name to whatever the presentation title is. You can overwrite that later.

You’d normally only turn that feature on when you're only assigning one speaker to a session. If you have multiple speakers on a session, it would just keep changing the name. In that case, turn it off and just rename the session manually yourself.

In most of our apps, there's a localization setting. So when you’re setting up the app, you can go in and re-word a lot of the standard texts that are in there. Have a look at the White Paper that’ll be coming out soon on Abstract and Presenter Management for localization options.

This gives you the option to show who’s chairing the session, as opposed to who’s presenting. You may want the chairperson mentioned in the agenda, or in the OnAIR portal they’re hosting it for a virtual event.

You can go to the session in your agenda setup and add them through the roles tab, but you will have to setup the role types in the presentation module first. They have to exist as a contact record in the system. You can then attach them and assign them to a particular role via session set up.

If you only have two or three sessions at the same time, you can easily just build regular sessions and just put them into tracks.

For larger programs, it can be useful to pre-define different concurrent session blocks and use that as a quick way to automate the assignment of times and dates. (Concurrent sessions have to be on the same day. You can overwrite the times if you need to.) Concurrent sessions are useful if you're going to have four or five presentations happening at the same time – you can make them for example Concurrent Session (A), which first day, first concurrent session block. That makes it very easy to apply that concurrent session to all five presentations.

Concurrent sessions also look different in the OnAIR portal (they are stacked together in the timeline).

When getting people to register for sessions, concurrent sessions are set as radio button so they can only select one, whereas individual sessions would be a checkbox, so they could select multiples.

In the agenda builder, you can see a little person icon to the top right of a session, and a number indicating how many presentations are assigned to the session. Click on that icon to see a list of presenters, and also set the order in which you want them to present.

You can also run reports like the Speakers Program List, or Speaker Session Details, to show this information, or run the Presentation Review Summary Report and filter for the specific session. The information is also visible in the Abstract Workflow App under Allocate Abstracts, once you’ve selected a session.

Not sure if this is what you meant – let us know.

Yes. Whenever a person with a contact record creates an online account, that same online account can be used on the vast majority of our portals. They can also use that password to log into the Attendee App or the Virtual Portal.

This applies to a lot of our portals - if somebody comes along as a new record to create an account, but they don't successfully complete creating their account, it won't have created a record for them just yet. It may be possible, under certain circumstances, for you to create their contact record in the back end for them and then send them a token link to log in. If you need help with this, contact Support.

There a couple of options:

So the combination of those two things would help minimize that that particular problem.

So if you want them to register before they’re allowed to submit, (bearing in mind this means the review process might look a bit different), you send them to an interactive site to register, and then the confirmation email from the interactive site could include a link to the Presentation Portal (so they don’t have that link until they’ve registered).

When you're in the Abstract Workflow App, you can select a session and it will show you all the speakers you have in that session. You can also add in the time that they're speaking within that session.

There's not technically a process where it will stop you adding in too many speakers, but there are reports where you can review each session and what presenters you've allocated, and the presentation times you've put in. You could run the Speaker Presentation Reports to review what you've done and just double-check you’ve got the presentation times correct within each session.

There is also a special filter under the Data Validation filters, called Presenters with Overlapping Session. If you apply this filter in an attendee search it will show you records with overlapping sessions. You would then go and adjust the sessions they are allocated to.

This may require a detailed response – can you please email it through to success@eventsair.com - thanks.

Hard to diagnose from here sorry – can you please get support to look at this to help figure out what’s going on.

Yes, this is on our list and we’re working on it – stay tuned! You’ll also find some information in our knowledge base [where this Q&A is located] if you search for reports.

In Stage 2 of Fast Track, we do have an abstract management topic. You can now jump to any Stage 2 topic as long as you’ve done the brief “Getting Ready for Stage 2” at the beginning of our advanced topics. This will take you through the steps of creating a sample event in the sandbox environment, which can give you a head start in learning some of these aspects of event management.

There's a lot of work going on at the moment with the API and that’s where the focus is just now. However we always listen to our customers and there will be LOTS of new developments coming down the pipeline! If you have any suggestions for features and improvements you can submit these via the chat window.