March Webinar 2023 - Advanced Abstract & Presenter Management

Handling multiple reviewers is a lot easier using EA than trying to manage all of that manually. Each reviewer just logs into the same reviewer portal, and they only see the papers they’ve been allocated to review.

They get separate emails. The first reviewer logs into the Reviewer Portal, (and can only see all their papers and their comments and scores); they do their review and tick the box to say to return it back to the author. That would send an email to the author (that you’ve set up). After that first email, the author can see the first reviewer’s scores and comments. Then when another reviewer does the same thing, the author will get another email, and when they log in, they’ll see both reviewers’ scores and comments, and so on.

You can remove the link between reviewers and papers in the Abstract Workflow App. We strongly recommend that you export all the reviews and scores before you do this. (There is no option to bulk remove all reviewers off all papers. You will need to delete each reviewer off each paper.)

We might need to get more information, as you can do this – the author submits, the reviewer scores the paper and also can return it to the author for editing, and then when it gets re-submitted, they just update their existing score. But you may be talking about a two-stage scoring process, or the author submitting a different document?

You can create another paper status is you like, but you’ll need to manually update this on each paper – it’s probably easier to use the existing editing process instead.

So as we talked about in the previous webinar, if you get the same reviewers to go back and review an edited document again, their previous comments are visible, even though their new scores overwrite their old ones. That can be confusing, so to avoid that, some of our clients export all the data from the first round of reviews, then clear that data out before asking authors to submit for review and start the process again. depends on what you need, but here are some options:

• You can get authors to submit another item for the next round. You do this by adding a Supporting Document, or Additional Document, and giving the reviewers the ability to review that document as well. Some of our clients do that, and it means you don’t need to clear out any data from the first round of reviews. Just keep in mind which document you’ve designated as the Abstract and where it’s going to show up. You can decide to have that first presentation item just sit there and not be allocated to a session.
• Or you can just use different reviewers at each stage of the review process.

You can turn on this feature in Set Up > Presentation Preferences, via Presentation Time (and/or Presentation Order). Then when you add a paper to the session, click the Settings button to allocate a time (and/or set the order).

At the moment, it’ll display the submitting presenter, rather than a presenter of your choice, but we’re working on a way to do that.

Not a lot – they both do the same thing essentially, but we might use them a bit differently. You can add Custom Fields as additional questions to modules like the Presentations module and the Exhibitions module if we need to ask extra questions at a particular point – let’s say when they’re submitting an abstract and you want to ask “have you submitted this abstract for a previous conference?” – you can use one presentation Custom Field per paper. You’d use a Marketing Tag on an interactive site (such as the contact interactive site where your presenters register).

Not to our knowledge – as we saw in the video, it’s adding each file into a Word document, similar to a mail merge, then putting specific other features and formatting on that. If you are trying to upload the Abstract Book document to our AirDrive then the size limit would be 5MB but you can always store it somewhere else that doesn’t have that size limit. [See other question about file sizes below.]

You may be able to upload up to 20MB but we recommend 15MB maximum. I recently was able to upload a 12MB file but it really does slow down your portal when uploading a large file like that. If you think you’re going to have some submitters uploading large files like that, you can set a limit on your document and if they really want to, let them know it will be very slow uploading (and if it’s too large, it won’t work).

For large files, or video files, you can ask them to upload it in a different place, Dropbox/Google Drive and then pop a link in instead.

In many cases, large file sizes are the result of large, high-resolution images being used in documents and PDFs and simply asking people to use slightly lower resolution images dramatically reduces the file size. More information can be found here.

The Abstract Book won’t import a PDF file. Because the Abstract Book is a Word file, it can only pick up plain text or Word documents, so that’s what we recommend. If it’s a PDF, all that’ll be displayed is the file name of the PDF. So you wouldn’t actually see the text. But you can download all the papers from the AirDrive.

TIP: Adobe now offer free online conversion tools, so you could consider asking your presenters to convert their PDFs to Word document, https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/online/pdf-to-word.html , or to a webpage: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/hub/how-to/how-to-convert-pdf-to-webpage

So you could consider including instructions to your presenters on how to convert a PDF to a Word doc or URL instead. (Just weigh that up against whether or not you want a PDF if you’re planning to add it to the Attendee App etc.)

Yes – an image file (you set that as the file type).

Yes, to both – but just with the proviso that a PDF can’t be inserted in the Abstract book. You can add Supporting Documents in the Attendee App by selecting both the paper status and the document type for the presentation to appear in the agenda. You can also have the supporting and abstract documents show in the resource gallery and you will just need to set it up for that.

You can create Custom Fields that are required fields, just as you can make certain supporting documents mandatory. You can also add Marketing Tag questions on the contact interactive site and mark them as required.

So you can either set things like this up as a custom field in a portal or as a marketing tag on the contact site. If the latter, it wouldn’t show in the presentation portal or reviewer portal.

You can create a record in a database and add a presentation item in that record. Then create a presentation portal and send them a link to that portal (for editing and adding AV requirements etc). You still need to give them a link and some instructions on using the presentation portal.

Alternatively, some people do it through an interactive site but then you’ll have to copy the information over to a presentation item. All of this is being considered for future releases.

You can also watch the recording back again, but a quick summary:

• You set up the marketing tag e.g. “submitting presenter” when they create an account via the presentation interactive site.
• You apply one filter based on the marketing tag
• Then apply data validation (“contacts with no presentation”)

• …to find people who created an account but didn’t submit anything.

No - although you can see the Presentation Portal in your membership database, you can't really use it in there. You'll need to set up an actual event, set up a Presentation Portal in that actual event, then you can link the contacts that are in the membership to your event. It will say in the Membership Store that members are registered, and are attending that event, and that’s because any item that you have on the right-hand side in a record indicates to a Membership Store that they are actually coming to that event, they’re ‘attending’. Then you can proceed from there with setting up an Abstract and Presenter management process. Hope that answers your questions?

You can create a second presentation item for the second speaker. But we’re looking in our roadmap to create a better process for that particular scenario. (See also last month’s webinar Q&A for more on this.)

Again, this is part of our roadmap but at this stage, if you want a biography to show in the Attendee App and event website, it must be captured in the submission item rather than an interactive site. Not sure when at this point.

At this stage virtual backgrounds are not supported within OnAIR because of the bandwidth needed to run this in your browser. However, there are several apps you can use to create virtual backgrounds that may work with OnAIR, such as NVIDIA Broadcast, XSplit VCam, or getting a portable green screen (or blue screen) and using with a webcam’s Chroma Key feature. These work by just editing the camera feed that your webcam is outputting. Many options are available so we encourage people to search online for information and talk to our OnAIR support team for more information if needed.