The Continuing Professional Education (CPE) unit at Queensland University of Technology is dedicated to being the leading provider of learning opportunities. Read this to learn why the CPE implemented Certain Software's solutions to help manage their continuing education programs and 15-20 large conferences held each year.

Situation

The Continuing Professional Education Unit (CPE) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is the area within the university that supports its commitment to be a leading provider of learning opportunities. Partnering with faculty, CPE makes the teaching and research expertise of QUT available to the public through non-award professional training and conferences.

CPE organizes 10 - 15 conferences per year, each of which is associated with the university and the Unit. CPE also organizes short courses and professional development opportunities. The Unit is comprised of two Conference Managers, one Short Course Manager and a Registration Officer.

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Solution

Kerry Williams is one of two Conference Managers who organize all aspects of the conference, including financial management, delegate registration, venue, catering and accommodation, sponsorship, and program development including the paper review process. According to Ms. Williams, “Most of our conferences are between 150 - 400 delegates, they are rarely held here at the university, most are held at hotels or conference venues. Our delegates are usually academics or involved in research.”

Within Certain Events the CPE team uses the Demographic and Notes modules to record information about the delegate, Registration module to record the registration type, Accommodation module to record their hotel bookings, Speakers module to record information about the speaker presentation, Exhibition module to record information about exhibitors and Accounting module to record payment details. They also make use of the Masterfile function to keep marketing databases about the conferences that they run each year.

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Results

Following their successes with implementing the Certain eventsPro solution, they also became fans of Certain eventsInteractive.

“We use eventsInteractive for our online registration of delegates for our conferences and our courses. We have also started to use eventsInteractive for paper and abstract submission. Delegates can then pay for their registration online or request a Tax Invoice and pay by EFT,” says Ms. Williams.

“We have only recently acquired eventsInteractive and the change has been dramatic! All invoices and receipts are generated automatically, which is fantastic and we no longer have to spend hours on data entry.”