PennTESOL-East had the honor of being the local affiliate for TESOL 2012 in Philadelphia back in March. As an affiliate, we work very well together, and we have an amazing group of dedicated professionals who came together to form our 2012 team. We thoroughly enjoyed the experience and learned a few tricks in the process that we would like to share with future conference hosts.

(1) Perhaps where being local is most helpful during the convention is at the hospitality booth. Make sure that your hospitality team leaders coordinate with your volunteer team leader to recruit as many local volunteers for this booth as possible. (It helps if you locate the booth next to the local affiliate booth, so that you can help each other out.) Be prepared to answer questions about where to go to eat, shop, and be entertained. You should know prices and hours for all places that you recommend. It really helps to have a laptop with Internet access at the booth to help with questions that you might not know the answer to. Also, make sure you publicize local events and dine-arounds in advance and keep prices low.

(2) Volunteers can be tricky to keep track of if you’re not communicating before and during the convention. The volunteer team leader should create a master list of volunteers and use a cell phone to keep in touch with each team area location to assess volunteer needs during the conference. It also helps if you overlap the volunteers’ shifts by 15 minutes, so that way each shift can train the new shift, and you can move people around if someone hasn’t shown up. Finally, all volunteers should sign in at their location as well.

(3) During the convention the most work certainly occurs at Bags. I must congratulate our two team leaders here for running this like a well-oiled machine, but they will tell you it was physically demanding. Your team leaders should be physically fit enough to stand for hours and strong enough to lift heavy boxes of stuff. If your leaders are not very strong, then you will need at least one such volunteer for every bag shift. In order to keep the line running smoothly it helps to have someone working the line aiding people with tearing off their bag receipt, and to work really hard on the first 2 days to create a stockpile of stuffed bags.

These are just a few quick tips from three of our busiest teams during the convention. All of the areas worked extremely hard and did an amazing job. It really is a great experience for any local affiliate to be the host city for the big conference!

Jennifer Freeman teaches for the School District of Philadelphia’s Title I programs. She has been an active board member in Penn TESOL-East since 2009.