Regional Roundtables

Regional Roundtables

Want to meet Church IT staff/volunteers that live closer to you? Each year CITN hosts regional roundtables in the Spring. The goal is to have enough sites across the country that attendees don’t have to drive more than 3-4 hrs to attend a regional event. The cost is just $15 and includes lunch.

2024 Regional Sites
(it’s not too late to add your location!)

Sites will be listed here as they are confirmed and registration links are ready

Interested in hosting a regional roundtable? Keep reading this page …

For 2024, we're suggesting host sites pick a date from April through June. But honestly, the date doesn't matter that much. Find a date this year that works best for you/your org.

Who can host a regional event?
What does it take?

The Host has previously attended at a minimum...
1) Church IT Network National event and preferably also a regional roundtable.
2) Facilities to host 20-30 people (and permission / support from your church / organization)
3) A Willing Heart :-)
4) See 1.
If you can answer YES to all of these questions and would like to be considered as a host site please fill out this interest form

Here’s what a typical regional event looks like …

Schedule
The event itself looks something like this:
The evening before - optional meet-n-greet dinner and hang time.
Day of - 8:30 registration. 9:00 kickoff. Lunch. 5:00 roundtable ends. 6:00 optional dinner.

Promotion
CITN leadership will promote your event from our venues (email, social media, CITN website, etc), but YOU will need to find ways to reach IT staff/volunteers in your area not familiar with CITN. Mailers, personal phone calls, whatever you can do to reach out … do it!

Registration
You’ll use your own ChMS and handle all aspects of registration for your site.
To cover your costs we recommend $15 as the price for this 1-day event. Bonus if you can get vendors to kick in some $ to cover food and some fun prizes. 

The Day
Opening
Welcome
Prayer at some point before the discussion starts, and perhaps a very brief challenge or devotion time led by one of your pastors.

Capture discussion topics/questions on the fly … spend 10mins max writing down topics/questions from the audience on a whiteboard or whatever so everyone can view them. Have people quickly vote for each topic, then work your list from most votes to least.

Identify at least one person to take notes, most people get caught up in the conversation and then later ask for links or names of tools or products, it has proven very helpful for one person (or people rotating) to take notes and publish those notes for the entire group to go back to later (also helpful to share those notes with the entire CITN community).

The Moderator’s Job
Start working through each question/topic. Feel free to merge questions together, and address questions out of order when there’s a natural transition … again nothing’s written in stone. Let the discussion be organic vs. mechanical.
It’s the moderator's job to discern which questions are most beneficial for the whole group and which would be best answered by “experts” during a break. For very narrow specific questions ask the audience who has been there, done that and have them pair up with the requester during a break … unless many people are interested in the answer too.
Try not to let any one topic take up too much time. Some topics could take all day: The moderator will have to, from time to time, ask that the group move on to another topic.
Stress that people be on time after breaks … you’ll have to be persistent on this as geeks tend to like to yak a lot with each other.

Closing
Take a group photo and tag #citn on social media.
Push people to connect with other CITN peeps on our CITN discord and our forum.
Invite everyone to the National Event in the Fall.

Door Prizes
Everyone loves a freebie even if it's just some silly swag.

Interested in hosting a regional? Let us know by filling out this interest form