OREGON STATE FISCAL ASSOCIATION

2011 OSFA Annual Conference Sampling of Survey Results

Share your overall conference experience:

• My lunch was delicious but the morning and afternoon refreshments were both gone before I arrived. I would suggest bringing food out in 3 separate stages so the people in the front of the lines aren’t as apt to ‘load up’ because they see a huge tray in front of them.
• The keynote speaker was great!
• I really liked having the courses I selected on the back of my name tag.
• It was too cold in the building and you need to have more light on the keynote speakers.

 Share training ideas or topics you would like to see covered for next year’s OSFA conference

• I loved the humor presented this year. I think another leadership session would be good and anything to reduce our stress will be needed.
• With the budget issues the State of Oregon is facing I believe it would be advantageous to focus on coping mechanisms, efficiency training, and topic ideas acquired from the different state agency CFO’s as they see might be beneficial.
• GFOA – link up with them and get their speakers and sessions.
• Continued leadership and career path.
• Hyperion / Brio (formula rules & techniques); any topics on SFMA workings.
• With GASB and systems changes, perhaps project management would be a topic people could benefit from; stress management might be a good one – providing coping tools in the face of cutbacks, changes, etc. Hopefully Hyperion can be brought back next year as that training is hard to come by.

 Share additional comments regarding this year’s conference or break out session.

• I had the best session and the worst session I have ever had at an OSFA conference. The best out-weighed the worst though. J.
• Have all handouts available to every participant whether or not they attended a session. This could be accomplished by having them on a web page for download or on an inexpensive flash drive with OSFA logo.
• I haven’t been to the conference in a few years and it seems to be the same. Spice it up a little; change the format somehow; maybe all the ‘how-to’s’ in session one, the ‘warm and fuzzies’ in session two, and the career items in session three.

 Share suggestions you have to help make next year’s conference a success.

• Just an observation…I see less management presence. If you get the leaders in our agencies to participate more, maybe the membership / attendance would increase.
• The quantities of break snacks were really skimpy, I got there early and the rolls and fruit were gone.
• Set the registration table at the beginning of the flow rather than the end of the flow. Folks walked right passed all the sponsor booths to get to the registration, then filed in to the main conference room without mingling.