One of the major responsibilities of the organizing committee is to provide adequate publicity for the meeting. To achieve this, the Chair MUST ensure that the publicity of the meeting appears at regular and relatively frequent intervals so that the conference is kept continuously in the attention of intended participants.

The publicity efforts for each conference should be viewed in terms of Pre-conference Publicity and Post-conference Publicity. The post-conference report should be the first publicity for the next conference. If the highlights and the excitement of the conference can be portrayed accurately, readers will most likely make a mental note to attend the next conference of the series.

Pre-Conference publicity
Pre-conference publicity should consist of the following:

• Any news about the conference. For example, if a time and a place are chosen, a short announcement will bring the conference to the attention of potential attendees. If abstracts are submitted, this might be announced. Short news items appearing more frequently will do more good than one larger news item. Recall the philosophy behind the commercials on radio and TV.
• Call for Papers.
• Conference registration information.
• Conference program. This is a listing of the titles of the papers to be presented and the names of the author(s).

Post-Conference publicity

The Post-Conference publicity should consist of the following:

• Technical highlights from the meeting.
• Conference profile. Attendance, number of papers, country of origin of participants, etc.
• Pictures from technical sessions, social gatherings, tours, companion program, etc. Be sure your conference has a designated photographer.
• With proper pre-conference planning, this material should become available for publication right after the conference. Old news is not interesting!

Although conference organizers may devise their own means of providing efficient publicity for the conference the use of IEEE Electrical Insulation Magazine and the Internet should not be overlooked.

Publicity in Electrical Insulation Magazine

EI Magazine has been supporting and promoting each of the DEIS-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences with publicity for years and is still committed to do so. Please send your submissions to the Editor-in-chief of the Magazine.

Please note that the deadlines for submitting manuscripts to the Magazine are approximately two months before the mailing date for the Magazine. The table below indicates the projected mailing date for each issue of the Magazine and the corresponding date for receiving manuscripts to be included in that issue.

Table 1: Mailing and manuscript due dates for EI Magazine

NOTE: Based on the conference organization schedule prepare a separate timetable for submitting publicity material to EI Magazine and send it to the magazine editors. It will help to properly plan the inclusion of your submissions in the Magazine.

The material for publication in the Magazine should be submitted on a floppy disk, preferably in ASCII format. You can also e-mail it as an attachment. Editors of the magazine work in Microsoft Word or in Word Perfect. Either is acceptable. Guidelines for electronic submissions to the Magazine can be found at: http://www.ieee.org/organizations/pubs/magazines/submit.htm

If submitting the material electronically is impossible, a hard copy will do. However, since it will be scanned, the quality may not be that great.

Please note that if a copy of the submission is not received in time to make the issue before the conference, it will not be printed.

Publicity on the Internet

The Internet is becoming an increasingly popular way of advertising various events and its effectiveness can only improve with time. Our present experience is that although many organizers have access to appropriate web servers, some may not have such an access. If you among those less fortunate, please contact the chair of the DEIS Meetings Committee, for possible help.

Try to setup web pages for a conference as soon as the location and the time are selected. Place all new information about the meeting, Call for Papers, details of technical tours, spousal program, registration forms, hotel and travel information, etc. Take a look at some of the WEB pages maintained by our conferences and borrow some ideas.