Applicable packages
checkApplicable to all Symposium packages
This article is for event organizers. If you are an event participant, please see our Resources for Participants section.

Once an attendee has absorbed the information on your Welcome Page, they can click over to one of two other header tabs on your event: Presentations or Live Sessions. The Presentations page of your event will contain all of the presentations that have been submitted by presenters via the Presentation Submission Form. Depending on your event package, you can customize this form and distribute the submission form link to prospective presenters before your event is launched. 

With the release of our new Abstract Management workflow, for all events created after April 28th, 2022, all presenters are now required to sign up for a free Symposium account (or log in if they already have an account) in order to submit the Presentation Submission Form. This allows us to link the presentation to the user's account so that, if permitted by your chosen settings, they can make modifications and/or provide additional information (in the case where there is a multi-step abstract submission process) as part of their submission under "My Submissions". Submitting the Presentation Submission Form for a specific event will not automatically register presenters for the event. Presenters who are not logged into their Symposium accounts will see the following message when they open the Presentation Submission Form. 

Presentations can be submitted via the presentation submission form link at any point before or after the event has launched, up until the event expires (per the uptime associated with your package), except if you are using Symposium's Abstract Management workflow and have closed the first round (i.e. activated Stage 2) as that would close the form to new submissions. 

Unless you set up the Abstract Management workflow, these submissions will automatically appear under the Presentation page immediately, where they will be searchable and filterable along with presentation materials submitted earlier. If you set up your Abstract Management workflow, only accepted presentations in your last stage will appear on the Presentations page. If your event does not have any presentations, participants will only see the Live Sessions tab when viewing your event. 

In this article, we'll go over some of the basic information surrounding collecting presentations and your attendees' presentation browsing experience.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Order of presentations

The order of presentations is automatically randomized specifically for each viewer, so that each presentation receives about equal visibility. The order won’t change for the viewer each time they leave and return to your event site; the order of presentations will only be randomized on their first visit. 

There is no way to specify the order of presentations for all viewers at this time, but you can create presentation filters when you customize your presentation submission form. (This feature is not available to events organized on Single Lite, Single Plus, and Lite Subscription packages.)

Presentation comments

Symposium allows event registrants to leave comments and reply to comments under presentations to facilitate asynchronous discussion directly surrounding event content. Once an attendee has completed the registration process for your event, they will be able to scroll to the bottom of the page under any posted presentation to read formerly posted comments, reply to comments, and post a new comment of their own. 


Please note that presenters will still need to sign up for an account on Symposium and register for your event in order to respond to comments under their own presentations. The presentation submission process is independent from the event registration process, and submitting a presentation does not automatically create a Symposium account for the presenter and register that account for your event.

Default Presentation Submission Form

By default, the Presentation Submission Form has a handful of key fields necessary to populate the presentation interface. These fields are divided into 3 sections: Presenter Information, Presentation Information, and Presentation Media.

Feel free to take a look at what our default presentation submission form looks like to a presenter here: symposium.foragerone.com/blank-demo/submission

First, we ask for some basic background information on the presenter in the Presenter Information section. By default, a presenter can add up to 8 co-presenters; as an organizer, you can limit this to a lower number when you edit the presentation submission form. Each co-presenter will be asked to provide the same information.  


Under Presentation Information, we ask for the title and abstract of the presentation, as well as the mentor for the project and the subject area. 


NOTE: While you have the ability to remove the subject and mentor fields from your submission form as you are customizing, please note that these two default fields are integrated into the judging and analytics portion of your event management. The default mentor field feeds into the presentation cards within the Judging workflow, serving to help avoid conflicts of interest as organizers assign judges to presentations. The default subject field allows organizers to filter presentation cards by Subject Area within the Judging workflow, and also populates a key Analytic metric which will simply remain blank should you choose to remove the field from your submission form.


Lastly, under the Presentation Media section, we ask the presenter to indicate the kind of presentation format that they would like to use, and to upload any relevant materials based on their selection. 

By default, presenters are given 3 options:

  • PDF + Video
  • Video
  • Video + Video

For each of these options, only the first media upload is required for submission. Then, for PDF + Video and Video + Video, presenters are given the option to upload their own companion video as a further introduction to or explanation for their work. This secondary media upload is not required for submission, and can be removed from the form as an option entirely by the organizer during the presentation submission form customization process.

NOTE: If you choose to set up Abstract Management within your event and organize multiple stages, you can choose whether or not you would like your presenters to upload a form of media within the first stage. The presentations will not appear in the Presentations main page until the presenter submit the form with their media upload and you, as an event organizer, accept their presentation. 

Exporting Presentation Submission

Once presenters have filled out the presentation submission form, you can download the submitted presentation information (excluding video files) via the Export button on the bottom of the Presentations > Submissions page. The presentations will be downloaded as a CSV spreadsheet (.csv file) and will reflect all data inputted through the Presentation Submission Form. All presentation PDF files will also be downloaded as a separate zip file, and when opened, you will see a folder with all of the PDF files located within. 


Exporting presentation data can happen at any point during and after the event, as long as your event is active on the Symposium website.