If you’ve organized even one academic conference, you know the feeling. That moment around month four when you realize your inbox has 300 unread emails, your spreadsheet has three versions with conflicting information, and you have no idea who actually said yes to chairing Session 4B.
Most conference organizers know the chaos intimately - the spreadsheets, the email threads, the last-minute scrambles. This post is different. This is the timeline. This is what actually needs to happen, broken down month by month, so you can stop feeling like you’re improvising and start knowing exactly what’s supposed to happen and when.
And no, 90 days isn’t enough. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never organized a conference with peer review, international speakers, and institutional invoicing. Real academic conferences start planning a year out. Some start even earlier. If your conference is in September, you should already be deep into this by March.
Here’s what the full cycle actually looks like.
This is the part everyone skips and then regrets.
Pick your dates first. Not “roughly September” - actual dates. Check them against the major conferences in your field, against the academic calendar, against religious holidays. You’d be surprised how often a perfectly planned conference collides with another society’s annual meeting and half your target audience can’t come.
Book your venue. If you’re at a university, this means reserving rooms through whatever internal system your institution uses, and that system probably has a six-month lead time. If you’re renting external space, good venues get booked a year ahead. This isn’t paranoia. This is just how it works, especially in cities with active conference scenes.
Set your budget. Where’s the money coming from? Membership fees? Registration? Sponsorships? Institutional funding? Get the numbers on paper. Decide what you can actually afford - catering, printing, AV equipment, speaker travel support. Add a 15% contingency buffer because something will cost more than you expect.
Form your organizing committee. You need at least one other person who can make decisions, ideally two or three. Assign roles: who handles submissions, who handles logistics, who handles money. If you try to do everything yourself, you’ll survive the conference but you won’t enjoy it.
One more thing: decide on your conference management approach now. Are you going to use Google Forms and spreadsheets? A dedicated platform? EasyChair? Whatever you choose, commit to it before you start collecting data, because migrating mid-cycle is painful. This is the cheapest decision you’ll make all year, and it has the biggest impact on your sanity over the next twelve months.
Draft your call for papers. Be specific about topics, submission format, word limits, and the review process. Vague calls get vague submissions.
Set up your submission system. Whether that’s a Google Form, EasyChair, or something purpose-built, configure it now. Test it. Have someone outside your committee submit a test abstract. Make sure confirmations go out automatically - the single biggest source of anxious author emails is “did my submission go through?”
Start building your reviewer list. You need 10–20 reviewers for a typical 80–120 person conference, depending on how many submissions you expect. Reach out to them now, before the academic year gets busy. Tell them the timeline: when abstracts will arrive, how many they’ll review, when reviews are due. Get a yes before you need them.
Publish the call. Email your mailing list. Post on relevant listservs and academic networks. Email department chairs in relevant fields. Ask your committee members to share through their networks. Post it on your conference website. Then post it again two weeks later, because half the people who saw it the first time forgot.
Set a clear submission deadline - with timezone. “March 15 at 23:59 CET” leaves no room for interpretation. “Mid-March” leaves room for everything going wrong.
Your submission deadline has passed. You got fewer abstracts than you hoped. Extend the deadline by two weeks. This happens at nearly every conference. Don’t feel bad about it - just communicate the extension clearly.
Now close submissions for real. Export everything into one place. Count your submissions. Are you in the range you expected?
Assign abstracts to reviewers. Match expertise. Avoid conflicts of interest. Spread the workload evenly - 4–6 abstracts per reviewer is reasonable. If you’re doing this by email and spreadsheet, set aside a full day for it. With a proper system, this takes an hour.
Send assignments to reviewers with clear instructions: here’s your abstract, here’s the review form or criteria, here’s the deadline. Not “please review when you can.” A specific date, three to four weeks out. Academics respect deadlines when you actually set them.
Start a tracking system for reviews. You need to know at a glance: who’s been assigned what, who’s submitted their review, who hasn’t started yet. A spreadsheet column works. A dashboard works better. What doesn’t work is checking your inbox and hoping.
Follow up after two weeks with anyone who hasn’t submitted. Be friendly but direct. “Just checking in - your reviews for [titles] are due on [date]. Let me know if anything’s come up.” One reviewer will ghost you. Have a backup reviewer ready.
Reviews are in. Time for decisions.
Read through the reviews. Make your accept/reject/revise decisions. If your committee is involved, meet once to discuss borderline cases. Don’t drag this out - authors are waiting.
Send decision notifications. Acceptances, rejections, and revision requests each need different emails. Be professional with rejections - a one-line “your abstract was not accepted” creates ill will in a small academic community. Include reviewer feedback where appropriate, even for rejections. People remember how they were treated.
For revision requests, be extremely specific about what needs to change and set a firm deadline - usually two to three weeks. “Please address the reviewers’ comments” is useless. “Please clarify your methodology section and add the sample size as noted in Review #2” is actionable.
Handle appeals. You’ll get a few. Set a policy: one appeal per submission, decided within one week. Stick to it.
Now start building your program. You know who’s presenting. Organize talks into sessions by theme. Assign time slots. Decide on parallel tracks if you have enough presentations. Start thinking about session chairs - usually senior members of your community who can introduce speakers and manage Q&A.
This is also when you should open registration if you haven’t already. Set your ticket types: early bird, regular, student, member. Include a clear payment method. If you’re relying on bank transfers and manual invoices, brace yourself for the tracking headache that’s coming.
Confirm your venue details. Room assignments for sessions. AV equipment in every room. Wifi capacity (this matters more than you think when 100 people try to connect simultaneously). Catering setup - when, where, how many.
Contact your keynote speakers or invited guests if you have any. Confirm their travel, accommodation, AV needs. Get their talk titles and bios for the program.
Start designing printed materials if you’re doing them: program booklet, name badges, signage. Don’t underestimate how long this takes, especially if your institution requires specific branding or logos.
Send a registration reminder to your mailing list. You’ve probably got 40% of your expected attendees registered at this point. The rest will trickle in over the next two months, with a big spike in the final two weeks.
Chase outstanding payments. Someone registered in month eight and never paid. Someone’s institution needs a formal invoice with a specific format. Someone paid the wrong amount because they selected the regular rate instead of the student rate. This is the unglamorous reality of conference finance, and it eats more time than anyone expects.
Finalize the program and publish it. Send it to all registered attendees. Post it on your website.
Confirm every single speaker one more time. Send an email: “We have you presenting in Session 3B on Saturday at 11:00. Your talk title is [title]. Please confirm.” You will discover that two people have scheduling conflicts they didn’t mention before. Rearrange sessions accordingly.
Finalize catering numbers. This usually means committing to a headcount with the venue. Add a 10–15% buffer for late registrations.
Send logistics emails to all attendees: directions, parking, wifi info, building access, the conference schedule. Then send it again one week later, because people will ask questions that were answered in that email.
Prepare contingency plans. What happens if a speaker cancels the day before? What if the projector fails? What if attendance is 20% higher than expected? You don’t need elaborate backup plans - just think through the most likely failures and have a response ready.
Print name badges. Bring blanks for walk-ins.
This is where it either comes together or falls apart. If you’ve followed the timeline above, this week is about final touches, not firefighting.
Confirm room setups with the venue. Check AV equipment personally - don’t trust “it’ll be ready.” Do a tech run-through in at least the main room.
Send a final reminder to all speakers with their exact time, room, and any last instructions. Include an emergency contact number (yours, or your co-organizer’s).
Brief your session chairs. Make sure they have speaker bios, know the session format, and understand the timing.
Handle last-minute registrations. There will be five to ten people who register in the final 48 hours. Process them quickly.
Get some sleep. Not much. But some. You’ve done the work. The conference will run.
If you want a detailed day-by-day breakdown of this final stretch, we wrote an entire survival guide for the week before your conference.
Archive everything. All submissions, all reviews, all attendee data, all financial records. Put them somewhere your successor can find them - not buried in your personal Gmail.
Send a thank-you email to all attendees within a week. Include a feedback survey if you want one, but keep it short - five questions maximum.
Document what worked and what didn’t while it’s fresh. Which sessions had the most attendance? Where did logistics break down? What questions did attendees keep asking? Write this down. Not in your head. In a document that exists next year.
Pay any outstanding invoices. Close out the budget. Report finances to your society or institution.
Then - and this is the part nobody does - actually reference these notes when you start planning next year.
That’s the real timeline. Twelve months, not ninety days. Each phase builds on the last, and skipping any of them means the next phase gets harder.
If reading through this made you tired, you’re not alone. A lot of conference organizers are stretched thin, juggling spreadsheets and email threads instead of actually thinking about the quality of the conference itself.
Tools like Symposia handle a huge chunk of these steps automatically - managing submissions, assigning reviewers, sending notifications, tracking payments, and building the program. Even if you stick with manual processes for now, having a timeline like this means you’ll know what’s coming before it arrives. That’s half the battle.
The other half is knowing you’re not the only person doing this. A lot of us have stared at spreadsheets at 10pm wondering why conference organization has to be this complicated. It doesn’t have to be. But until it isn’t, this timeline is the map.
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