What To Do After You Register    

So you’ve registered for the conference, have you? Well, we look forward to seeing you in October! Here are a few things you may want to take care of…

• Make your lodging arrangements



• Reserve your flight
• Consider how you might contribute to the conference
• Keep tabs on the conference planning process and provide us with feedback

1. Make your lodging arrangements

The conference will be held at the beautiful Renaissance Austin Hotel, which is surrounded by nature trails, sophisticated boutiques, and a variety of restaurants. If you are coming from out of town, you will want to stay at the Renaissance Austin for convenience’s sake. We’ve negotiated a great $149/night room rate with the Renaissance Austin (the rate is normally close to $300). Self-parking on site is free, which is a great plus.

The hotel address is 9721 Arboretum Boulevard, Austin, Texas 78759. Their phone number is 1-512-343-2626 (be sure to ask for the “NCDD” group discount). If you prefer to use the Renaissance Austin’s website to make your reservations, use this link to get the discounted rate: http://marriott.com/aussh?groupCode=ncdncda&app=resvlink

And be sure to make your reservations before September 18th at 5:00 pm Central (6:00 Eastern, 3:00 Pacific) or you won’t get the NCDD discount!  The original deadline was September 12th, but they extended it a week for us.

If funds are tight, you can do one of three things:

• Find someone to room with at the Renaissance Austin to cut costs. Add a comment to this blog post to tell people you’re looking for a roommate.
• Let us know you’d like to find a homestay (a local conference participant or friend of the planning team who has a guest room or comfy couch you can crash on). Add a comment to this blog post to let us know you’d like to stay at someone’s home if possible, and we’ll do our best. Homestays are limited, so please only use this option if you absolutely need no-cost lodging.
• Find your own alternative lodging. The Visit Austin website has a comprehensive listing of Austin hotels and motels. Click on the NorthWest portion of the map if you want to be close to the conference hotel since you’ll be responsible for getting yourself from your hotel to the Austin Renaissance every day. You may also want to look into the Austin youth hostel. Note that we strongly prefer you stay at the Renaissance for two reasons: (1) It’s much more convenient and relaxing for you to stay at the conference location and (2) NCDD is obligated to fill a set number of rooms at the hotel; if we don’t reach that number, we owe about $30,000 in meeting room costs!

2. Reserve your flight

If you’re flying in to Austin, keep in mind when reserving your flight that the conference starts on Friday, October 3rd at 10 am (registration and mingling starting at 8:00), although you may want to arrive in time to participate in Thursday evening’s free Conversation Cafe event (host training followed by a Cafe, both open to the public). The pre-conference workshops, if you choose to attend one of them, start at 9:00 am on Thursday, October 2nd.

We’ll wrap up on Sunday by 3:30, giving people the chance to catch evening flights. View the conference program page for more details.

You’ll want to fly into the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (AUS).

For additional logistical info, including details about ground transportation from the Austin airport to the conference hotel, visit www.thataway.org/events/?p=164.

3. Consider how you might contribute to the conference

At NCDD Austin, we’re offering more ways than ever for conference participants to contribute content, share their work, and make progress on issues they care about. Although it’s too late to submit proposals for concurrent workshops, you can still  suggest topics or sign up to host a table on a specific topic during the Opening Session on Friday (more).

4. Keep tabs on the conference planning process and provide us with feedback

We’re being more transparent than ever with the planning process, posting much of what’s we’re doing and deciding on the conference blog. We welcome you to check in on the category called “Feedback Wanted” in particular, where we’ll post things you could help us make decisions about.

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We’re archiving this one, since it’s too late to order Moo Cards in time for the conference at this point.  The discount is still good, though, if you just want to order some for yourself!

Order yourself some “Moo MiniCards”! (with a special NCDD discount)

One thing that’s great about NCDD conferences is the feeling you get when you make new connections you know you’ll have for a long time, or when you put faces to the names of people you’ve read about or only known “virtually.” But you meet so many people at the conferences that those faces can start to blur even before the event is over!

That’s why we’re encouraging all NCDD Austin participants to order a set of uber-cool Moo MiniCards with their picture on them. Moo cards are just $20 ($18 with the discount) for 100 high-quality full-color cards that are about half the size of traditional business cards, and many times as fun. Just go to Moo.com and upload one or more pictures of yourself (or any other images that will help people remember who you are). Be sure to use the discount code 78DEYK at checkout to get 10% off up to 3 orders of Moo MiniCards. They’ll ship from the U.K., but shipping to the states is only about $5. And we recommend brightening your photos up a bit before uploading them if you know how to do that.

NCDD’s Director Sandy Heierbacher is a big fan of moo cards. She has photos from past NCDD conferences on her cards, and they are always a hit when she gives people her card. See what they look like here.

Oh – and you can always get Moo cards printed to advertise your workshop (we ordered some to advertise the conference), your new book, or whatever.