How four global conferences stopped building their programs by hand

These engagements are covered by non-disclosure agreements. The organizers, conferences and people are not named, and no real program data appears anywhere on this page. The workflow screenshots are lookalikes rebuilt for this page, and every other image uses demo data.

The situation before we showed up

Picture one of the conferences on this page. Two or three days, more than 9,000 attendees, several stages running in parallel. What attendees see is a few days. Behind it are months of daily work by a program team.

The teams already kept their program in Airtable: sessions, stages, times, speakers and each speaker’s status. That part was well run. The trouble was what happened next. Every day the team needed documents out of that data: program drafts to circulate, speaker status views to chase confirmations, and program-at-a-glance timetables that fit the whole schedule onto a few screens so it could be planned.

Airtable held the data. People built the documents, by hand, every day.

What was breaking

• Every draft was rebuilt from scratch.
  Session titles, descriptions and the speakers mapped to each session were copied into the document one by one, for hundreds of sessions.
• The tracker and the document drifted apart.
  When a speaker’s name or title changed in the tracker, someone had to remember where that speaker appeared in the program and fix it there too.
• Version control lived in people’s heads.
  Which draft went to which stakeholder, and what changed since, was a question of memory.
• Fifty pages never quite lined up.
  Hand-built layouts drift. A card a few pixels off on page 34 is exactly the kind of thing a client notices.
• The busiest week carried the most risk.
  Programs change most in the days before the event, which is precisely when nobody has time to rebuild a document.

What we built

A way for anyone on the program team to pick a document and get it back, finished, in a few minutes. The output is either an editable Google Slides deck, so the team can still adjust wording before it goes out, or a print-ready PDF. Both land in a shared Google Drive folder.

A form anyone on the team can use

The whole system sits behind one form with a single dropdown: which document do you want. The options cover every combination the team actually used:

• The edition: Final, Internal, or Sessions only
• The orientation: horizontal or vertical
• The track: plenary stages or workshop labs
• Or the program at a glance, as its own option

That is eleven documents from one question. Behind the form, the choice is parsed and routed to the right generator with the right settings. Adding a new option means adding it to the dropdown; the routing does not change.

The program at a glance

The at-a-glance timetable puts every stage side by side on a single time grid, so the team can see the whole day at once and spot collisions before they happen.

• A real time grid. Sessions snap to five-minute rows with a time label every half hour, so a 20-minute talk and a 90-minute panel take up honest amounts of space.
• Pages that stay readable. The layout balances how many stages and how many hours share a page, so a busy afternoon splits across pages instead of cramming twelve narrow columns together.
• No session is ever cut in half. When a session would overflow a page, the page ends just before it starts.
• Built for print. Stage headers repeat at the top of every printed page and each stage keeps its colour from start to finish.

The full program, in three editions

The full program carries everything: session titles, times, full descriptions, and the speakers and moderators for each session with their titles and organizations.

• Final is the public layout, ready to share.
• Internal marks every speaker as confirmed or not yet confirmed, in green and orange. That turned the daily speaker status check into something the team generated rather than compiled.
• Sessions only strips the program back to titles and descriptions for content review.

Within each day and stage, sessions sort by start time, and day title pages slot in automatically before each day begins.

One config behind every document

Stage order and stage colours live in one shared configuration that every document reads. Change the running order once and the at-a-glance timetable, the Final program and the Internal program all agree the next time they are generated.

Where SourceToDocs fits

Part of this work ran directly in n8n: the workflows read Airtable, built the pages through the Google Slides API, and rendered the at-a-glance timetable to PDF. Part of it ran through SourceToDocs, a document generation platform that takes datasets from Airtable, fills a Google Slides template and delivers the finished file to Drive. n8n still handles the trigger and the routing either way; SourceToDocs takes over the document step, which means the template can change without anyone touching workflow code.

Event week

Programs change most in the days before doors open, so that is when the system earned its keep.

In the run-up to one event, production added a new stage that existed only on the opening day. A few days later, three more stages replaced existing ones for that day alone, and had to keep the same colours they used on every other day. An Airtable field changed type. Each change went into the shared configuration or the data, and every document picked it up, within hours.

The numbers

Reported by the program teams we worked with.

A 78-page program, before and after

Documents like these were produced every day over months of preparation. Across that period the time returned to program teams ran into hundreds of hours.

Why this matters beyond one event

The next edition started from a working system

Two of the four conferences were consecutive editions of the same annual event. The second edition did not start from zero: new templates and a new set of stages, on a pipeline that already worked.

What it changes for an agency or a consultancy

Program work is often run by a consultancy on behalf of the organizer, which means the cost of assembling documents by hand is ultimately carried by the client. Automating it can go either way: lower that cost, or raise what the service is worth. The program manager we spoke with estimated it freed up roughly half of a junior team member’s time on a months-long project.

They were also clear about how to win that argument: