The OpenWater Blog

Annual Meeting

Virtual Conference Platforms with Breakout Rooms

Breakout rooms are a necessary component for any virtual event. Virtual conference platforms with breakout rooms enhance attendees’ conference experience by keeping them engaged. It can be a virtual conference […]

annual meeting
Collect and Organize Abstract Submissions for Your Next Annual Meeting

There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors in the abstract management pipeline of an annual meeting.  I like this metaphor because, to the casual onlooker, everything appears to happen automatically—as […]

Tips for Managing Your Annual Meeting Session Chairs

Session chairs tend to come into the game late.   If your annual meeting were a tabletop game, you’d have already laid out the board, sorted and shuffled the cards, and […]

annual meeting planning
How OpenWater Makes Planning Your Annual Meeting Easier

The annual meeting is coming around again.  Whether you’ve recently been handed the reigns or you’ve been running it for years, there’s a good chance you’ve got a wishlist of […]

annual general meeting agenda
Use This Tool to Create a Stress-Free Annual General Meeting Agenda

There might be nothing more hair-raising in annual meeting planning than the moment you spot an agenda conflict—on a stack of already-printed agendas.  If only you’d seen the error earlier, […]

event engagement
How to Measure (and Improve) Event Engagement at Your Annual Meeting

Whenever I think about measuring event engagement, John Lennon’s voice runs through my head: He say one and one and one is three Got to be good looking ‘Cause he’s […]

Openwater - AMS software
Here’s How to Tell When Your AMS Software Needs an Upgrade

Let’s visualize the perfect association management system (we’d close our eyes, but that would make reading this challenging).   Paint a picture of a day in the life of a member, […]

Openwater - annual meeting planning
Simplify Your Annual Meeting Planning Process with OpenWater

It’s high time you asked yourself one question about your annual meeting planning process: “Does it spark joy?” At first blush, that’s an unusual question to ask about hard work […]

OpenWater - AMS integration
Planning an Annual Meeting? Here are 5 Benefits of an AMS Integration

An Association Management System (AMS) is the cornerstone of many successful organizations, associations, and nonprofits that need to keep track of a member list or user database. You could say […]

event technology solutions
Plan Your Next Annual Meeting with These 4 Event Technology Solutions

The recipe for planning an annual meeting calls for 1 part tradition, 1 part ingenuity, and many, many parts organization.  You build your yearly event on the foundation of what’s […]