Hi, John, could you hear me? Yeah, hi, Ed. Oh, hi. How you doing? Good, good,
good. Gonna go through some of the basics here of the conference in a moment, and while we are waiting, I think my name sort of shows up as convention support. We should show something else. There's a we have a generalized account that we use for answering a bunch of inquiries. So this is one of them. But I had, I was, I thought maybe I should log into this account, because I don't know whether or not there'll be an issue with regards to me letting people into the meeting and yada yada yada. I don't know how to change my screen name.
I wish I did. Hello.
Okay. I
Does anybody know how to change my screen name temporarily on this thing since I logged into the convention support one because I thought it would be easier to admit people or not, but I don't use this account, obviously, very much,
so you can, unless you change your Google name. Oh, really,
well, that's okay. Then we're not going to do that. Okay, we're 801, right now we've got somebody who's on the phone. Could they just identify themselves? Perhaps we can just remember them. If it's a 281 phone number, could the 281 phone number just let us know what name and chapter they might be with.
Hi there, Albert. John, not with a chapter. I'm a former board member of nap Houston. Oh,
okay, you said, is Albert? Which Albert? Is this? Albert Chow. Oh, yeah, Albert, I you, I think you and I met a while ago. Actually must have been back and must been 12 years ago.
Hey, Hi, Alice. Strong folk. I Yeah.
Okay, great, okay, well and David, you out of Houston as well. Is that right?
Okay? I invited, well al invited one of the original Houston
president now Houston, Henry King, okay, sure if he's, you know, I've been wondering how to get in touch with Henry. I don't know it. Obviously, I mentioned it. I'd asked to I've been talking to Andrew. You know, Andrew Chan out of Houston as well. Yeah, yeah, I know Andrew. Yeah, of course. We all know Andrew. So and so he had mentioned, I would say, like, who the founders of nap Houston? And then he kind of mentioned a few we're actually working with Debbie on some programming. We're working with some of the folks in I've been in touch also with Joseph David, and I've actually been exchanging emails, maybe unbeknownst to David or but, but, yeah, there's hopefully this is something we can describe and get to. So let me go and get this meeting started. And the important, the purpose of this meeting is to, I'm going to give a little bit of a sense of the convention overall, and then also, on top of that, just talk a little about some areas that we could still certainly use help for those people interested in doing so. But that's what it is. And I believe that this is this being recorded at all. I thought somebody, somebody's otter is or something on, but I don't know. I don't see it at all. You
uh, that's a note taker. I think, I'm not sure whose it is,
okay, so let me, I think maybe I can record it for my end. I'll just record it just for purposes of our I don't know how to record so many
maybe you could. You'd have to do the three dots at the bottom right by the end, and then you'll see there's a option for recording, yeah,
but I don't see a recording option. I only see you're not allowed to record the video call.
So whoever is the the administrator of the invite they would be able to record,
but I'm logged in as the administrator.
So like, did the convention support email send out the invite? I believe it
did. Charmaine, did the convention support email send out the invite to this or did you send it out that was
from the convention support email? I think if you click the three dots that Tiffany was talking about, and then the activities button, it should say, record it.
Well, if I click on the three dots, it just says, recording unavailable. You're not allowed to record this video call.
Maybe when you started the meeting, it should say,
you can backtrack when I started the meeting, okay, I just logged into the meeting. I didn't do anything special. Okay. Well, I think if somebody puts on an AR recorder, they can record the meeting. I believe, I think that's kind of, there is an AI note taker right now that's actually logged in. It's an Apps auto AI, okay, so I wonder whether or not that is also, typically, that is like, you know, like Jeremiah will come in there and do a recording, or whatever else it is based on that. But anyway, okay, well, I don't know if we can actually do the recording, then of the meeting itself, it would have been nice, actually, because it would be good people could listen to this later and get a sense of the the event, but I cannot record this meeting, and it looks like nobody else can record it as well. So Okay. Well, it's okay. Let me go ahead and go forward with this and kind of see where things are. But again, I appreciate everybody for attending. Purpose of this meeting is to, like I mentioned before, to just kind of give an overall view of the convention itself, and then to also talk about some areas that we could probably still use some help with regards to the convention. So as many of you might know, the convention this year is in Houston, Texas, and I'm actually going to put on share with on screen some of the kind of the general collections. So allow me to share screen here for one moment, and during the present towards the presentation. It's it's fine. Feel free to kind of interrupt, ask a question, or whatever else it is. I'm happy to do that.
Hey, this is Lucas. Sorry. You said looking around. Yeah, I just joined. But you said something about this is not being recorded. So will there be notes that we will share with our chapter? No,
I wish that there's we could put. I mean, if somebody had an AI note or taker or something like that, usually that does a pretty good job of doing it. Just don't know if anybody's got one AI that's
recording it. Say again, it's my otter. Ai that's on here, and it's recording it. Oh, that's yours. Okay. So it is recording, it's recording the video, but it is taking a transcript.
Okay, yeah, usually the Otters do record the video, but recording the video, then I hope it is, I hope it is actually
okay, and I'll send you the link after the meeting. That would
be great. Actually, that'd be fantastic. Okay, thanks. Okay, so what I'm going to be doing is again mentioning I'm going to step through overall convention, and please stop me with any questions at any point in the way this is meant to be kind of an open discussion of of what's going on here. So at any rate, okay, good. So some of the convention basics. These are the convention basics. The convention is actually at the end of July. This year, we ended up moving the convention to end of July, in part because of the Dodgers Astros baseball game. Actually, that's occurring is one of the reasons why I moved the convention by up by about a month, but that those dates are July, 25 to 28th there's a few things that are different than this convention, than some previous conventions, which I'll go into shortly here, but we do expect somewhere around. I think right now, we've got a projection around 700 attendees. We've had, of those 700 attendees, almost 300 are from sponsoring companies. We've got probably a little bit less than I would like, maybe somewhere in the 55 to 75 range we're anticipating from chapters. I would certainly love that number to be higher. Um, to be higher. We've got about 50 plus speakers. Actually, the exact number is around 65 or something like that. And then we've also got some other individuals that were doing this conference with invitees other kind of partner organizations. So we've got a nice mix of individuals will be attending the convention. The queer fair is also happening there. We're expecting a little bit more people. On top of the six or 700 people there, we'll probably hope to attract another, you know, three to 400 individually. So it'll make the queer fair around 1000 and then on Saturday, we were hoping to put on this Asian community market. They were running into a little bit of difficulty with some aspects of that, which I'll go into a little bit. But again, this is a conference that typically will attract people in the 25 to 45 year old range. It's not much different, I guess, in terms of composition from prior conferences. The one thing I would say is that there tends to be at this conference, over the past couple of years, an increased number of sponsors and ERGs who are sending folks to this conference more and more so. So it's a little bit different than some prior years, but there has not been a convention in Houston since 1997 I'm only aware of a few people who've actually gone to that convention in Houston. John you've been to almost every convention. Did you go to the one in Houston in 97 Yes, yes, I
did. Okay.
How did you feel about that convention in Houston? It was, was around three or so,
not that many, but it was, it was a great convention. It was a new chapter, and they were really well organized, and they had a great event. Great,
fantastic. Okay, good. Well, let's hope that we can, you know, do do the convention? Houston was last and right? Well, by by this particular one. So okay, and the you know, the convention theme is future for leading into the unknown. It's kind of intended to be, it's something that the National programming team came up with in conjunction with the convention team. So some of the program that we have is certainly consistent with that theme. But again, I will go on and continue going with some of the things with the conference itself. Actually, let me make mention one other thing here, which is, every before I get into this, most of the people who are on this call are part of a chapter. And you know, on June, June 15 is kind of like one of our big deadlines, just in a couple of days here on June 15. What happens is that the early bird we had, we had extended out for every chapter to invite one person with a free pass so they have a full free one, two or three day convention pass. If people do not register by the 15th, that pass will disappear. So I encourage you, if you guys are part of a chapter, if you've not used that pass to utilize it, also, the registration discounts that we have for chapters are also due to expire at June 15. I don't know if we're going to extend them beyond that, but, but I would encourage you also to register for convention. That's $300 off of either three day or two day passes, and it's $100 off of either program only passes, which are the sessions only passes, I think, or the one day passes as well. And one of the things I'll I'll go through website a little bit too, to give you some high level knowledge about that, because I do want to talk about that. But the hotels themselves also, we have been sold. We have now in our third room block extension, we have run out of hotel rooms in a lot of cases, but we've actually set aside a few hotel rooms for chapters. So if your chapter and you would like to get a hotel room for that Wednesday night, which is very difficult to get, we have some hotel rooms are at the 239 rate that are available for chapters. So please email convention@nap.org and they will set aside a room for you and and allow you to give that room, but the caveat is that you need to be registered for all four days of the convention, because that room block is being held as continuous block for those people who want a convention room for longer the in addition to that, we've got, but we're also increasing the number of rooms available for everybody on the Thursday, the Friday and the Saturday nights for the convention. More. Those should be released, I believe, by tomorrow, but, and those will be at the 199 rate too. The regular market rate flows, rooms are up $100 a night, so it's probably good to go use the LinkedIn provided. Okay, so I'm gonna keep going. This is some script about the convention itself, but I'm gonna describe this by going into the conference and somebody may want to mute themselves, whoever's on the 281 Albert, you may want to have somebody mute on that one, if possible. So this is kind of the general value proposition we have for the Convention, which is that, you know, why should you come to convention? Why do people want to come to convention? Obviously, there's a professional development component there where we've got several keynotes and other notable speakers who are actually coming to the conference. We a lot of the programming that is built from the conference is actually built in partnership with a lot of the other AAPI organizations, national organizations out there as well. So we've been working hard with all those folks. The other aspects of going to the convention are around, really the relationship building. I think it's probably one of the key areas people go to the convention. It's an opportunity that you know, during the daytime, you've got opportunities to engage in a lot professional development programming, but during the evenings, there's lots of opportunities to connect with individually people in small groups and settings and and build great bonds and whatnot. And then lastly, there's, I think all those things kind of led themselves to, obviously, lots of personal growth. A lot of people have very, very unique experiences as these conferences, and they they tend to take with that with them for a very long time. So any rate, let me go directly also now into the schedule itself. So this is posted on the convention website, as well as the next slide, which I'll go into the sessions a little bit. But I want to just touch upon this to give a little bit of context around the way this convention schedule is built. So the bill, the schedule, is built in such way that Thursday and Friday are really the primary preliminary days. So you've got the convention that's happening where, you know there's essentially on both days, it's breakfast. Keep breakfast keynotes, two one hour morning sessions, of which, for each of those sessions, you can choose from one of four tracks to attend. Then there is a lunch keynote that occurs in the middle of the day, and then there's a one hour keynote, a one hour session in the afternoon, and then after that, it's a series of various kinds of networking opportunities and other kinds of activities that occur. The other thing that's notable about this is on the Friday, you've got the career fair that happens during the afternoon and and then on the Saturday, during the middle part of the day, there is this what they call the Asian community market. It's kind of like a similar to the makers market that was on last year. We're extending that on this year. But it's an, it's a, it's a market where basically Asian Mom and Pop, small business, type of business are there, and they sell their various goods and sours goods and services at the at the convention itself. So most people are probably going to write the Convention on the Wednesday for volunteers themselves. It's helpful to have those volunteers. There's two kinds of volunteers that we're generally looking for. One are volunteers who are going to be doing some work prior to the convention, and then the other ones are the ones who might be interested in doing work at the convention. And, you know, there's some and a lot of people will volunteer, in part because, you know, it is, it is it is helpful to kind of get some interaction working some particular, particular areas driven interest in. You know, the benefits are not really strongly pronounced. I mean, as a volunteer yourself, you will have, obviously, you'll be working on various aspects before the convention. Will be certain, certain activities leading up to the convention that will be helpful. But at the convention, it might be another, other kinds of ministerial, kinds of tasks, but, and, you know, there is, there is not really discounting, per se on the specific convention passes that may necessarily occur, though it's possible that we could expend, extend some early work discounting for those people who for a longer period of time, for those volunteers, it's more for the people who really, if they want to attend the convention, there are kind of sessions only, kinds of things where we can allow you to, as a volunteer, attend sessions and and then also, on top of that, you could actually, instead of going out to go eat, there's going to be some volunteer food that's provided and things like that, and then, plus, you'll have kind of a behind the scenes participation in the overall convention itself. But this is kind of an effort, because this year there's been a lot less fundraising than I would have liked to have had from from various for various reasons, and as a result, we've had been very, very, very judicious on the use of our limited financial resources, and so we aren't able to offer as many of the things that would have loved to have offered for many of those in involved in giving their time to the convention, but we would do the absolute best that we Can to do so without having to cost nap too much money in doing it. So going back to the schedule itself, most people will arrive to the convention probably sometime on the Wednesday, registration will open up a little bit earlier than that. Wednesday, there's going to be kind of a pre convention happy hour that just basically eat and drink on your own, but there'll be a space set aside by the restaurant there at the marquee for people to just kind of gather and hang out on the Thursday itself. The there is planned to be some morning kinds of physical activity exercise for those people who want it, because Houston gets hot fast, and so if you're going to do something and see a little bit of the
city or or get your day going. There are going to be some opportunities to do that in the mornings, uh, as you finish a breakfast on the Thursday, for example, we've got a breakfast keynote, who is Christo, who's got a couple million followers. He's based out of the San Francisco area. And then, followed by that, there's going to be starting at 10 o'clock, there is a lounge that opens up. This Lounge is part of an attempt by V etc, who's one of the major media companies, to basically have kind of intentional networking space people can go there and relax. And I believe they're going to have some, you know, some some things that they're offering there at the lounge itself. There's podcasting going at the lounge. So it's kind of a nice space to kind of relax and and hang out in between or during events that that's that bag is open every day, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, from 10 to around 4pm every day. And then on top of that, what we've got, starting at around 10 o'clock, are headshots. So the way we're doing headshots this year is that there's a there's a company who's offering headshots for all three days of the conference this time, so on the Thursday of the conference, and then on the Friday morning of the conference, till about noon, it's exclusively for people who are convention registrants or volunteers, and then, and then after that, on the Friday afternoon, it's going to be anybody who's part of the job fair can go and line up In and or they could even make an appointment actually, as well. And there's a standby line also that they can get their pictures taken. And then on Saturday, we're actually doing more, but they're not really gonna be headshots. It's just me casual photographs. So the photographers there have agreed to from 10 o'clock to two o'clock on the Saturday allow basically people to come in and take photographs and whatnot, which is, I think, a really nice thing to do. And then, and then, on top of that, on the third going to the Thursday schedule. At 10 o'clock is when you start, start having your first sets of sessions. So 10 to 11 is your sessions 111, 15 to 1215, for sessions two. And then after that, we go into the lunch period, of which there is the chairman's awards for that particular Thursday, and then there's a keynote that's occurring. And then that keynote was supposed to be for somebody from the White House, but they're having a little bit of difficulty right now on the scheduling side, so we may have to change that out with another keynote that we have. We have a couple of backups that will that we have to pursue for that instead, but we should know, really, within the next few days about who that individual is going to be. That's the only, the only keynote that hasn't been fully established on the Thursday yet, and then later on the day, on the Thursday, at four o'clock, there are different receptions that are happening. So there's an invite only reception that's happening for ERG leaders, the sponsorship team and other people within na be identifying people who are within the ERG community. That's a very small reception, probably 50, no more than maybe 60 people at that reception, and they'll be meeting to as ERG leaders the there's also a four o'clock meetup that's happening for people who are either first timers to the convention, people who are part of the LGBTQ and allies community, people are people who just want to find other people to play. You do fitness things with, play pickleball with there's a basketball court within walking distance for the hotel, so there's be things that people can do, and it's a way for them to meet each other and talk and whatnot. And then the main reception also is occurring during that same time. It starts at four o'clock and goes to seven o'clock. The mayor of Houston is what four o'clock drinks start. Five o'clock is when the food starts, and at six o'clock is when the mayor and another speaker actually go on stage. That speaker on the stage is expected to be Brian laussey, who is a pretty decorated second two star Rear Admiral. He's also the he's, he's, he's half Japanese, but he commanded all the Navy Seals and all the special forces of the Navy. So it's really an honor to have him join us in that, in there at the conference as well, and then later on that day, we are working right now with Houston first to try to provide bussing out, or some type of transit out to the Houston Chinatown area. And so we're going to try to get people out there for who want to go out to dirty Houston Chinatown, to go there and go eat, and then we'll bring them on back, and the people who come back that evening, we're going to set up some kind of people just to relax in the same lounge and the have a sip lounge that I talked about earlier, to relax, sing a little bit, you know, without alcohol, just kind of relaxing with friends and catch up with colleagues. On the Friday itself, the schedule is very, very similar. The only disability a couple distinctive differences on this the queer fair runs from 130 to 5:30pm on the Friday. And then on top of that, there is something a little bit different. So Jerry H Lee, who is kind of another social media influencer. He's got a couple million followers as well. He is going to be doing a talk on, you know, he does. He does. He's going to do a talk on, basically your dream career and things like that. He has a lot of that online. And so he's going to do that session 1115, to 1215. That session is actually going to be open to the public. It's actually going to be the only part of the programming that we have that is actually open to the public. And that will hopefully attract some of the individuals who want to come and see him out in person and and learn from what he has to say. And then they will probably hopefully stick around and head shots taken. And then after that, he would then they the career fair is going on for that entire time. And we set the career fair from 130 to 530 in part to allow anybody who's a sponsor to actually attend the Friday keynote, lunch keynote in full before they had to go, you know, essentially their booths and occupy their booths and whatnot. That's happening. And then beyond that, there is there's at five o'clock, there is the kind of nav champs reception. That's another invite only reception, just like the ERG receptions invite only. It's really meant to be kind of some VIPs and whatnot. And then that evening, there's a Dodgers baseball game that's seven, there's only about two. There's a little less than 300 tickets available for that game. That game. So if you are interested in that game, you should email baseball@nap.org and reserve a ticket for that as soon as you can. And we're going to send another reminder out to chapters, probably later on today to do things like do things like that for those people who don't like sports or don't want to go head out to the baseball game, or can't make it into the baseball game, there'll be also the Houston AAPI Film Festival is teaming up with us to do a film screening that night. So there'll be a film screening done at the hotel, and then it's a one hour film. And then after that, people will there'll be a discussion that's led by people who are either involved with the film or community leaders as well. So should be really fun time. Also Lucas. So you got a question,
yeah, yeah, and thank you. Just on your point with Dodgers and Astro baseball game. What's the fee of that per head count?
So the the fee, you mean the cost of the ticket,
yeah, ticket.
Oh yeah, yeah. The cost of the ticket is $68 a ticket. These are in sections, 417, and 418, they are a little bit back and above, but, but they're really pretty good seats actually. I've actually been to those seats and so, so they're, they're, they're really great seats, actually, and we they're being offered at just a little bit more than the cost of the tickets, plus 20% if we don't sell the tickets, plus, like, the transaction fees. So they're really only a little bit more than the cost of ticket themselves. But any rate, yeah, we're trying to make them affordable. The biggest thing with these Dodgers baseball tickets is that you must be a convention registrant in order to buy one, and you're limited to one per registrant, because otherwise we would probably run out of tickets. And so I do it's kind of on a people online. People are sending emails to baseball@nap.org to kind of get in line to buy their tickets. You can buy your tickets for a group of people as well. You can say, like, I need to buy like, 10 tickets, but you have to give us the name of other registrants and their email addresses. And then when, what happens is that, once that the case, we will send out by June 20, an email a link to go and pay for the tickets at that point in time. And then once you pay for tickets, those tickets are yours. They will be sent to you by email about two weeks before the game starts and, and, yeah, you should be able to end. But you know, the benefit of sending us email saying, I want to have these group of 10 tickets that we will try to seat you with those same 10 people. So that's just something to think about. Okay, then last, last thing on Saturday in the morning, again, same summer type of thing, there's a breakfast keynote that occurs. And then later on, there is, there is a 10 o'clock. There's several things that are actually happening. So at 10 o'clock, there is the Sabbath lounge opens up for its last time, for just a little bit of time. On top of that, the community market is going from 10 to around three o'clock. And then on top of that, for those people who are just too tired and they can't do anything else. There is a, there is a Texas pool part Texas, you know, there's a, there's a Texas shaped Lazy River at the roof of the hotel. And, you know, nap has a commit has basically a big gazebo up there. There are some sponsors for buying up gazebos. And it's a opportunity to kind of sit there and relax. They're kind of covered and there is some covered space up there, so won't be like, sweltering hot, but it's Houston, Texas in July. It's going to be hot, but it should be fun. So that's another opportunity, if people just hang out and and do things. And then also, there is at 10 o'clock this special event that we're doing. So the TEDx organization and nap are teaming together to put on what we call TEDx Houston salon. It's an opportunity for, and I do encourage this for anybody who is, especially if they're part of a nap chapter. If you are not a professional public speaker meeting, defined as somebody who does pay public speaking as a living or gets paid a lot of money through public speaking engagements, then we would like you to consider getting on stage for to deliver up six to eight minutes speech about whatever it is that that inspires you, or the information that you want to share, or a life hack, or whatever it happens to be. And there'll be a supportive audience there that will kind of route you on and hopefully be good, a good growth opportunity, because you apply to do it, and then once you apply, and if you're accepted into doing it and selected, you will get about a month's worth of public speaking training and coaching, so that you don't go up there on stage unequipped to do it what you need to do. So that's occurring as well. And then beyond that, what's happening is that we are going and that's, I guess, the major last thing that's happening at 10 o'clock. The other thing that's happening is that the Houston AAPI convention is happening. So last year, the mayor of Houston created a Houston AAPI advisory board. It's kind of like, you know, a selection of around 40, you know, pretty well known or luminary AAPI, individuals in the Houston area, and the mayor put them together, and they charged them with putting together their first conference. And they wanted to put together an annual conference, and they were going to put together one this year in 2024 for the first time. And then they realized that it might be a difficult thing to do, so we they we got in touch with them, and they got in touch with us, and we talked it through. And they are placing their conference was initially supposed to be two days, and condensing it down into a day. And then we were giving them the space through that conference on the Saturday of ours. So their conference starts. We were actually sharing that breakfast with the Houston AAPI convention. At the end of that breakfast keynote, we are doing almost a handoff to the Houston AAPI to launch their start of their convention. Their convention runs with three one hour sessions, starting at around 10am 11:15am, and the same time. And they've got a closing session, but they've got a fantastic series of programming that hopefully they'll reveal to us pretty soon here, and then that evening, on the Saturday, we're doing a joint gala with them. So we about a 500 maybe 600 person Gala, and it's going to be, they've, they've already agreed to buy, I think, like 20 tables. So it's, it's, it's, it'll be a really fun event for us to come together. The mayor of Houston will again be at that event. There'll be some other individuals who are well known in the Houston area, whatever else it is that will also be coming to the van well, so it should be a really good time for that. And then on Sunday, for those people want to stick around the the NASA Space Center towards occurring as well. So those tickets are available. There are $89 or expensive. They are the cost of the ticket, plus a special tram tour. Plus we're going to go buy some Asian pastries or whatever else is, and water and put them on the bus. Will they have them? Plus there's going to be transit down there. We're not exactly sure what form that transit's going to take, but we'll provide round trip transit as well. So for that pricing, that's actually a pretty good deal to get that. And again, that's not something we really are making money. We're doing a service. Because people don't come to Houston often, and so this is good opportunity for them to see that convention. I did see a question that just popped up on the screen for a moment. It was around, can you attend the can nap? Houston nap convention attendees attend the Houston AAPI convention. So the answer is yes, but let me give a caveat for this. So there will be programming available on the day for the Saturday convention. So the programming itself Yes, nap badge holders will be able to attend any of the programming on that Saturday. So if there's a session that's happening at 10 or 1115, or or at two o'clock. And those are dual track sessions, because they've got two choices of something you've seen you if you show your NAP bad, you're welcome to those sessions. The one thing, the one caveat is, as the lunch, the lunch is only available if you buy the separate $99 Houston AAPI convention pass. So you have to buy that one in order to get the lunch because the lunch doesn't come with the nap convention badge, because the nap convention technically ends at around 11 o'clock on that Saturday before the lunch occurs. But if you want to attend the lunch portion, you can, but there are some pretty decent lunch options available. So if you're a volunteer for the convention, you know, we're going to have food up available in one of the suites for people to go run up and get because we can't. You can't eat food in the meeting spaces of the hotel, but you can eat it, you know, in places like the suite. So we're going to have food and drink available. If you're a volunteer to go run up and grab food and eat, or whatever else it is, you will not go hungry if you are a volunteer and you put in your time for the convention. The other thing is that nearby, within about five or 10 minutes walking distance, there are some places for you to actually grab a quick meal. And you can do it for relatively affordably. I think you can even do it for probably 10 or 15 bucks if you go to phoenicias, which is the great grocery store they have around the corner, but they serve all this ready, ready kind of foods and whatnot. So, you know, we've, we've myself and my team of scour the whole area around the I mean, like, we've tried to make it as convenient as possible. Like the baseball game is literally a five minute walk from the hotel. It's like two blocks is where the baseball stadium is. And, you know, the film screening is done there at the hotel. We're trying to provide transit in as many places as possible without breaking the bank, and we're just trying to make it a really good experience that it's we really do want to encourage you to stay at the hotel where you can it's just a lot easier for a lot of folks involved. And we'll have, we have run of the whole second floor, of that of that connection space, which brings me to, I'm going to go ahead and show that for a second floor here. So, as you can see here, we've got, sorry,
if you can see here, you'll see that there's a there's the ballroom itself. This is where the main all the meals are being served. Here this all the keynotes are occurring in this room. And then, if you So, all these green arrows represent points of entrance into the second floor space. So you can come through escalators, elevators. You can walk in on the right hand side from the Sky Deck, where you can, in theory, park a car. But you know when you come in, you know the ballroom, the ballroom foyer over here is where the career fair is going to be. It's where the Asian community market's going to be. The main registration is up here in the right hand side. So if that's where people are going to register for the first time, these rooms are being used for a variety of purposes, but we're setting aside room, for example, if you got work to do, we're going to set up some desks in the work zone for you to do some work. There's gonna be a room that you get away from the crowds and just sit in there quietly. And you know, we'll try to make that a relaxing atmosphere as well. We've got some additional meeting space available in here. The sessions are all happening down this hallway. So sessions one, all the sessions, are really happening down here as well as the speaker ready room. So this is all happening down this kind of Hall, and the lounge space is all located right here. And so we've got, you know, it's a pretty good layout overall for the conference. And this room Fort Bend a is going to be the the room for volunteers. So all the volunteers, when you're not doing something, can congregate there. For those who are day of volunteers, especially, they'll be hanging out over there. And you know, we might have, like, maybe, maybe 24 team would, like, design a t shirt or something like that, maybe foot or something, I don't know. So anyway, that's the space for this. And as you can see here, this is like another map. This is that same ballroom space, but you can see, like, this is the tables that we're laying out for a variety of things, for those people who are in the chapters, the chapters, we are hoping that the chapters can assist in a couple of ways. One is that if you know people who want to help sponsor the convention, we certainly love to talk to them. I think there's a 30% referral, referral from gross revenue for any monies that are passed along by that sponsor directly to the convention, I mean, to the chapter, which I think is great. I think there's also opportunity there to just, we're just looking for people who will just, you know, have more and more people at the career fair, just so we can have a really full and great showing. I mean, Houston is the fourth largest metropolitan area in the US. We are. It doesn't have about half a million Asians there, but it's just got a large community in general. So we're hoping to really highlight the Houston area and bring a lot of traffic and people there. I just saw another question come up. I didn't get to see the question could let me just scan this real quickly here. So are the question. It says, What day or time is the President's Council meeting scheduled? So this is a question I think Rose had posed to me as well, and I was looking at the spaces. So rose that the for those people who are involved the President's Council, we have, we had to reconfigure the space in order to make sure that we could do that, but that space is, I believe, going to be located. I think it's in one of these. It's going to be one of these two rooms. I forgot which word it is, but we're going to, or it might be this Montgomery room, actually, right? Montgomery a but we're going to make a room that's available. And that's that timing of that. The only time that we could find available to do that is on Saturday, probably from about the 11 o'clock to 1230 timeframe. So I don't know if that's a time that could work for you all at the President's Council, but the thing is that the National Board meeting has is occurring on the Friday, like, later in the day, and then on that Saturday morning, you know, Bill would also like to have a meeting with the various sponsors. And so Bill would also like to be able to attend portions of the President's meeting as well. So he's kind of requested that if you guys are able to do it, the only time we could find available that could be done. It could be so much in that 11 to 11am 12 during the Saturday would be good. If there's another alternate day. We could talk about that as well. The difficulty is that just space is a little bit tight, on, on, on finding enough space if you're going to have, especially, gonna have more than 25 people there. But anyway, I'll send you an email back rose with some more details around that, and then you and I can go back and forth and figure out, you know, what makes sense? You know, based on that, it's not really up to me, it's just up to you guys and and the ability to find sufficient space for it. So okay, let me see if there's a couple other things I want to just make mention of. This is just a little idea of some of the programming that's occurring as well. So this is again, on the on the homepage as well. But what I'd probably just make mention of here is that, you know, we've got this, this theme of future forward, and there's about, there's on each of the days, there's four tracks being offered there. So you can kind of see some of the sessions that are being offered there. Most of the speakers are people here that either we sought out for various reasons or that we're part of our partner organizations or sponsors. I know there are some people who interested in being speaking at the convention. They have applied to do so. We have actually accepted nobody who's externally, who's applied to speak at the convention, only because it's just been a little bit difficult in terms of finding placement for them, given the demand that we've had from our partner organizations, from sponsors, and, you know, it's just been really difficult to do it. So if it does become possible, you know, I was hoping to know by this weekend whether or not any other additional slots had opened for that but it's not looking that promising now. But if something does change, I would certainly that you know people who had approached us to speak as well. So anyway, something to think about. But again, I won't spend too much time on this particular slide. I'm going to go now and shift gears a little bit to just some aspects of the website itself, and then talk about our meals included on Saturday for convention registry? So the only meal that's included on the Saturday, depending on what you're doing, is going to be, is if you are a member of the if you get a full day pass, you'll get breakfast on the Saturday. You will not get the Saturday lunch. Like I mentioned before, the conference technically ends for the nap side, as soon as the TEDx ends, which is around 1111, 30 ish around so there won't be any breakfast available for nap convention holders, unless you pay the $99 to go to the AAPI Houston convention that's occurring. And then also, on top of that, you for people who are full convention holders, they're holding the three day pass. They will have access to the gala as well, so there'll be, you know, a reception of dinner at the gala. So on that way, Saturday is mostly covered, but lunch isn't, if that, if that helps. Okay? So you know, again, for those of you who are interested in volunteering, if you know more volunteering, interested in volunteering, you can reply to this, volunteering at nap.volunteer@nap.org. Link, we are doing this orientation this week because we're going to get people probably started by Friday or Monday on some things if you're doing if you're interested in doing some work related to the convention. On the front end, there are some areas that we can certainly use some help with planning. So for example, some of these outings that we have with regards to making those Thursday night Houston, you know, the Thursday night Houston and those are all mostly fun activities, by the way. You know, for the people who are doing the Chinatown runs to Houston, we're going to need some help and the coordination of those, you know, you know, booking reservations for restaurants, doing some logistics around it, and getting all those things kind of set we'll need the same thing on Thursday, also, with regards to, like, maybe a little bit of help on the karaoke, maybe one person to help, you know, make sure that that's done and set up And, you know, coordinating the right way on the Friday that was on the Friday itself. There might be some work also that's being done on some of these things, like around to support the film, the film screening. There might be some things to also support around the baseball the game that's occurring. There'll be some things to support, maybe around the planning of the career fair itself that's happening that Friday, on the Saturday, there is some additional things that can be helped with regards just planning, just various kinds of activities on the Saturday as well. But I would say there's probably some help that we could use in the community market and on Saturday, the really big thing is, really, I think we need some help for the gala. So the gala itself has been, we've got a lot of the major kind of expense components related to the gala largely filled out. What we don't have are things like, you know, decorating the gala, figuring out, like, you know, how it's all gonna run and be put together. And, you know, some of the other kind of nitty, witty aspects of it, like helping to pick out food and helping to pick out entertainment and find the right performer, or whatever those are not all been fully done yet. So, so that's one of the fiance and I just saw another question come up. Let me see if I can find it. Our chapter awards and sponsor recognitions included in the gala. So no, the gala itself is going to be it's going to likely be one nap, 100 award which of which applications are technically at the end of May, but we're still kind of accepting a few of them. They're still coming in until about June 15.
There'll be one nap inspire award for up and coming individuals, and there will be one award for nap pride that's occurring. And then the Houston AAPI folks also have one or two awards themselves that they're giving as well, plus the gala. Also the mayor will do a short speech there, and there may potentially be another speaker at the gala. So there's just not a lot of room for us to have sponsor recognitions of Chapter awards now, on the Thursday of the convention, on the lunch of the Thursday, there is a sponsor recognition happened. There's something called Chairman's Award, but the chairman's awards, I think, are largely going to be recognized for probably our very top tier sponsors, which include organizations like RSM and Bank of America. They'll be certainly ordered on stage in terms of other sponsor recommendations, I'm not sure that's really a question for the sponsorship team, which is composed of in bonata, and Michael tiahu is supporting that as well. So that's probably the right for them. For chapter awards. I think chapter awards are something that's typically done at NLA, then that's moved to NLA and not moved to convention, is it hasn't been a convention for several years, I think now. But again, I don't have any awareness of what's happening with the chapter awards. I don't even know. I don't even think there have been chapter awards in the past couple of years, honestly. So, so yeah, I wish, I wish I could tell you more. John, good questions, though, any rate, so I don't know what, so, yeah, so if you, if you're interested in in in the conference, please, uh, we have your information. We will try to follow up with each of you, let us know what speaks to you on the schedule or something that you know, there is a questionnaire here. If you fill out this questionnaire, it will ask you things. Like, it's a very simple like, I think it's like five questions. It's basically, you know, what are some of your strengths, or not a string. So we can kind of figure out the kind of right place to put you, and then we'll approach you on it and see if this is something that would fit for you. And if it does, then hopefully you can work on one of these teams. If you want to enjoy the convention itself, then come and join one of the teams that are doing work prior to the convention. And then if it's during the convention that you really want to do something because you want to be part of that action behind the scenes. Kind of thing that's happening that's perfectly fine too. We certainly welcome that as well. We're going to be doing a call out for Day of volunteers, also to local universities and other groups, probably starting in about a week or two, that one will constitute a large number of other volunteers that we know so and again, if you have suggestions for us, our convention team, we are not really local to the Houston area very much. We've got a couple people in the team who are but not many. So we can certainly use any guidance or advice that you all have on that I saw another question, okay, do you have a list of the volunteer opportunities? We don't have a specific list, but we can probably put one together. We can probably post one on this volunteers page. I think there's a list that we have of things, but I can try to get that to the page pretty quickly. About these, those opportunities, but it's a good question as well. But I would say that most of the ones is that if you were looking at the convention schedule, anything that is really after 4pm 4pm and afterwards. All those kinds of activities are the things that we probably need the most help with. You know, those are, they're mostly fun things anyway, but when you need, you know, general help with those kinds of things would be the best thing I do, like the I do like the line dance idea. John, so that's great. Yeah, that would be that would be helpful. You can, if you could email convention in app.org with any suggestions, and this is for anybody, if you had any suggestions for the convention, especially with regards to performers, that would be really kind of a fun thing to do. You know, we are trying to be sensitive with regards to the audience that we have for this, AAPI. I mean, Houston has a very large population. I think the largest populations, sub populations, of Asian ethnicities in Houston are not only what you think of regards to Chinese and Vietnamese, but there's also a very large South Asian population there as well. And so South Asians are going to, they figure it very prominently into the Houston AAPI convention team, which we've been working to, I've been working with my counterpart on that team. And so, you know, it's little things that we're doing in coordination to recognize some of their efforts and to ensure that we've got food and activities and experiences that all comport with the wide variety of individuals coming from all areas of the Asian population in Houston to try to reflect so definitely challenging. Even with regards to like speakers, we've tried to find the right mix between South Asian, Southeast Asians, South Asians, East Asians, you know various individuals to come and speak at the convention and participate, okay, and, and I have to drop a overview meeting notes later. Thanks. Okay. Thank you, David. And you know, one of the thing I'd probably say is that folks like Alberta and David, who've been on the call, we do want to make sure that we try to find ways to engage that Houston community a little bit more. So we'll be offering some things to incentivize people who are former Houston leaders to attend the convention. And we'll talk about, we'll talk, we'll talk directly with those folks as well to do that, but we do want to see as many of them come out as possible. And so that's that's something we can do the you know, one of the things that was, that's one of the things we've got. A lot of things are different this year for convention. One is that the Thursday of the convention has got more programming on it. Typically that that day has been like more of a general ERG day, or lighter day. Our Thursday the convention is proving to be almost as busy as the Friday of the convention. Seemingly, in fact, we actually had hotel stays booked in high demand for every night at the convention, the Wednesday night sold out. Almost immediately. We ran out of rooms on Wednesday night, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights have also sold out, which we really see more rooms for that? So uniformly, we are trying to find more rooms for the Wednesday night right now. That is our, one of our big challenges, but we are trying to find that out for people who are able to do that. But if not, I would encourage people to get there, maybe really early on the Thursday from the beginning of the convention programming there, and try to attend for that. The tickets are expensive for this convention. I mean, they are almost $1,000 that is $1,000 the $1,000 cost of the highest priced three day convention pass actually covers both the fixed costs as well as the as well as the many marginal costs. But I'm going to tell you that the discounting provided chapters of $300 off that $1,000 convention pass essentially brings that convention pass down to around $700 which sounds like it is expensive, and it is, but the food and the FMB marginal cost for that pass of $7 is $600 so it is, it is the marquee is top notch hotel. The activities that we have are not inexpensive activities. And you know, it's, it's been, it's been a struggle to do the best thing we can. So our team would come up with this idea for doing what they call sessions only pass. It is a significantly less expensive path. It is 299 with a discount code for chapters. It becomes 199 with that pass, you can access the entire convention,
with the exception of the hotel, meals, you can just, but we've set the schedule up in such a way that even if you dipped out at the end of a session. The session is in 1215. You can run out. Go grab food.
So and if you're a volunteer, especially with this conference, you could literally go upstairs in the volunteer room and go go eat some food, and then come back down. So it's another alternative for people who really are on a budget to have to be cost conscious on it. But I would probably say, though, that most people have probably the best convention going experience when they can participate in all the things fully, like they could actually sit down at lunches and have conversations with people from various areas and whatever else it is. So that's obviously the convention experience that we do recommend. I just wish that there was a more formal way for us to do it, and we've, we've really tried hard to do that, and but I think that, you know, if you're determined, I think that there's a way for you people to participate this convention. If you're a volunteer, you will get the sessions only pass, waived, and you can, literally, you know, volunteer and, and, you know, but, but that would be, you'd have to put in some hours for that, but you could do that and and find a way to participate if you, if you really wanted to, we could work out something with you. But anyway, Okay, are there any other general questions about this at all? So, oh, is your schedule for Wednesday? Yeah, there's really not that much on the schedule for Wednesday, if I go back to that, and this is on the website too, if I go to leadership convention.if. I go to leadership convention, and the whova app, by the way, is going to be, I think, released tomorrow, that's a virtual app that, once you register for the convention, you'll be able to get into the app and actually go into discussion board starts discussing. You'll be able to see all the sessions that are available, create your own session, kind of calendar, like, you know, things on your things that you want to go see and sit into. So that's all happening pretty soon. So if you go to this convention, the main convention page you will see on that, and I'll show this right here, the schedule. And this is the same schedule I was showing you the presentation before. On the Wednesday the only things happening on the Wednesday night is really just the pre convention Happy Hour people. Happy Hour. People are arriving on Wednesday hanging out and and just kind of relaxing with people and colleagues and catching up with them. There might be some informal night activities we might offer them, but nothing in particularly, you'll only be missing the pre convention Happy Hour on that on that Wednesday night. So not much. So really, you can get there on the morning of the Thursday and participate fully in the convention itself, and that's a way for us to help mitigate some things related to, you know, not being able to offer find those Wednesday night hotel rooms for you all,
which has been a real challenge for us. So okay,
good. Is there any other questions that can help to answer it all, okay. Well, we will start reaching out to you, some of you all, either tonight or probably, actually, probably tomorrow. I guess we'll start reaching out to you all and just confirm that you have an interest. And I will try to get in between now and then a list of some other volunteer opportunities posted on there so that you can do and I can see it hand raised. So Jenny, do you have a question?
Yeah, I'm sorry I was late to the thing, but I wanted to ask just whether or not, if we plan on volunteering, and we and you said that the sessions passed would be waived for the volunteers.
Correct, right? Yes, it could be. It could be, but you'd have to put in, like, pretty significant, I haven't calculated over hours, but you didn't put in some relatively significant hours. But yeah, if that's something, you really could
do that. Yes, okay, so would we still have to register online, on the
website? Yes, everybody must register in order to be because if you don't register, you can't appear on the app, and you can't get but, yeah, everybody will register whether you're a volunteer, not a volunteer.
You'll if you're a volunteer, so then if you get something waived. I mean, how do you do you still pay the full front
full you could get refunded later. That's correct. Yeah, that's what we do. We'll refund later based on based on that. Okay, thank you. Yeah, so I would just go ahead and you should take advantage of the fact that there's an early burdens county now, and just go ahead and register, and then if you meet the qualifications later on to fully put in the time to do the best that we can look at doing a refund at that point in time. Okay, thank you. Yes, yes, good question, though. Okay, I know we're approaching our time here, and if anybody's got additional questions, but I do appreciate everybody actually, we've actually lost almost nobody on this call, with the exception of David having to end it. Oh, good question. So Lucas asks, what's the capacity convention? Do we expect? You know, could be more seven could be more than 700 so the capacity of the comfort, the upper limit capacity of the main ballroom of the convention, is 850 people. We have done some initial work to figure out how many people we could put in there. I don't think we could put in more than 800 so at peak, 800 is probably the limit each of the session rooms for the programming can handle, potentially, if we can configure them somewhere around 180 people each. But I don't think it's, I don't think we, we've never reached a situation in my memory where any session has had to be larger than 100 people, but we have, but we are building some of the sessions, such session layouts to accommodate at least 150 people, in some cases, or just because we don't know what the demand is going to be exactly, we have had faster, we have had more people register faster for this convention than probably anytime I could think of in the past several years. So that's why one of the things we thought about is that there's a possibility that this convention, in theory, could sell out. That's one of the reasons why we haven't even offered you know, there's a there's a sessions only pass available for college students, that's even a little bit less. It's at 149 with not need additional discounting. But we had not even offered that out until, like, just recently, because we were worried that we would, you know, not have enough spaces for people who are regular convention badge holders to get in there. So at any rate, but yeah, I mean, there's, there's, there's, there's a good possibility. We could, we could we could have more. It's just hard for us to, hard for us to know at this point in time, a lot of people who register for convention typically don't register until one month, three or four weeks ahead, and we're, you know, six, seven weeks ahead,
and we're already, you know,
we've already had some pretty high numbers, so, I mean, based on, based on previous, historical trend, but we're, yeah, we're projecting, right now, 700 we may even cap registrations at 700 depending on whether or not we can make the room configurations work, because we don't want it To be overly crowded. So good. Okay, we are almost at time here. If you are definitely not interested in doing anything related to this conference, Please also feel free to send us an email again as well and say, like, look, this is just not what I want to do, or not want to be involved with it, and we will not take the time to to reach out to you, but we do hope that you will end up participating in some way, either before or after. Please consider answering the questionnaire on the website, and that should give us a really good sense about the kinds of things you're interested in. We will be touching the next few days to match you up to something, and hopefully we will see you all in Houston. Good. Okay. Thanks, everybody appreciate it. We will talk to you later. You
