Electronic and print posters are not mutually exclusive solutions. There are a few ways organizers can use both within a single scientific conference. In this blog post we will go over the many ways you can reap the benefits of multiple poster formats.
While we always promote using electronic posters for being environmentally friendly and a great way to save on space at the venue, there are circumstances where using printed posters in a pinch can work well for you or your attendees.
1. Tiered Poster Sessions
One approach to using printed and electronic posters is to create “tiers” of posters that get a certain format at your conference. For example, you could have everyone submit and present an ePoster, and give the top 3 posters in each topic a designated poster board for the authors to print and display their posters for a longer period of time at the conference.
This way, you save money on rental space because you’re using monitors instead of rows of poster boards, your top poster authors get rewarded with greater exposure at the conference, and all poster authors get the benefit of the digital archive of their posters, which remains available long after the conference has ended.
2. Category-based format designations
Another way to plan your poster session with two poster formats is to assign some topics to printed posters, and others to eposters. Some topics, particularly in medicine, for example, are well-suited to eposters because they enable multimedia sharing of audiovisual evidence.
For other topics that might not need as many bells and whistles, per se, you can opt for printed posters that your authors have to print out and bring to the conference. This puts more of the onus and cost burden on your attendees, but can be simpler if you are short on time or resources.
3. Electronic content management
This last option is a great method for hybrid conferences and events. It allows you to have 100% of your authors present physical posters on-site, while also creating a digital archive of the posters that can be accessed before, during, and after the meeting.
To do this, just have printed posters on poster boards on-site, as usual. The only added step would be prompting your authors to upload the PDF of their poster to the ePosterSubmission site before the conference takes place. It’s a simple, straightforward process that takes only a couple of minutes. From there, our content management system handles the rest and hosts all of the posters from your event, without another thought.
As you can see, there are a few different ratios that you can choose between if you want to combine both physical and electronic posters at your event. What you choose should be based on your conference’s needs, available space, and budget.