AASL Chapters Forum

I hope it's okay to ask this here. Our Conference Exhibitor Chair for our annual conference wants to give registered attendees' email addresses to the registered exhibitors so they can begin notifying attendees of their booth, goods and services, displays, and more. Our conference is in a little over two weeks. As president, I have reservations, and our pres-elect/conference planner too has reservations. Our Exhibitor Chair shares that it is common practice for Exhibitors be given access to the registered attendees contact info. I do recall getting mailings AND emails from ALA Annual and ALA Midwinter Exhibitors, as well as other state and national level conferences I attend. Is this a common practice in your conferences? I'm trying to decide if I should agree to share this info or perhaps decline, an then for next year's registration, offer attendees to "opt out" as registration information will be shared with exhibitors. Please share how your organization handles this.

At the Texas annual conference (TLA) exhibitors are given the contact information ONLY if the attendee does not opt out.  All attendees are given the option of opting out at the time of registration. 

We use Sched.com for our annual conference.  I marked the exhibitors as "exhibitors" which gave them access to send an email to attendees.  It had to be approved by an admin, so that things didn't get out of control.  But they could not download a spreadsheet of names and emails.  They had to do it through the program.  Ultimately, there were only about 3 exhibitor emails sent. They could collect emails as people came to their booth.

This was our site:

https://mameconference2017.sched.com/

Best-

Klaudia