Leadership summit planning: run the day, then keep the working groups meeting

A leadership summit is one day with a six-month afterlife. Most of the hard part is the afterlife: who showed up, what they committed to, and whether the working groups are still meeting in March. The summit is the kickoff. The sphere is where the leadership keeps meeting.

This playbook walks a summit through Revel Sphere in three parts, before, on the day, and after, and names which pieces are free for community groups and which belong to the Organization Plan. Everything here runs on a phone, in English and Spanish.

Before the summit: one shared space for the committee, one door for the public

Set up in an afternoon, with us on a call if you want company. The shape is one summit sphere for the organizing committee, with a sub-sphere for each track or working group that will outlive the day.

• The summit sphere. One planning space for the committee: a feed, a planning board with claimable tasks, contacts for venues and vendors, and a momentum indicator so co-leads can see the work moving.
• A sub-sphere per track. Each working group gets its own space under the summit, so the groups that continue after the day already have somewhere to meet.
• Registration as an event with a sign-up. Capacity, a waitlist, and a fill-rate display. Free, with your own external payment link, or with seats sold in-platform at a fixed price or pay what you can. You are the merchant of record, and Revel Sphere takes no share of ticket revenue.
• Guest RSVP. People can RSVP without an account and free their spot later from a link in their confirmation email. Organizers can add people to the roster by hand.
• The pre-event checklist. Logistics, comms, supplies, day-of, and your own items, with synced state across co-leads and a progress bar.
• The space map. Lay out the venue: rooms, stations, and tables, with vendors pulled from the sphere’s contacts.
• A public page (Organization Plan). A hosted site in your brand, or a widget that drops the summit and its open roles into a website you already have. See volunteer intake on your website.

The day of: built for standing in a hallway with one thumb free

The day-of desk is open to anyone who can manage the event: the creator, org admins, and sphere co-leads. Everything runs from a phone.

• Roster with tap check-in. The crew list fills in live as people arrive, and the committee sees it from anywhere in the building.
• The headcount clicker. A full-screen counter for the door. One big tap target, a running total, nothing else. It keeps counting when the venue wifi does not.
• Printed door signs. Signs and sheets with scannable check-in codes, so a volunteer at a side door can check people in with a phone camera.
• Breakout sign-ups. Each track is its own sub-event. People pick a room on their phone instead of at a table in the hall.
• Questions and pledges. The closing “what will you commit to” moment becomes a pledge with names on it, posted in the sphere where the working groups will see it next week.

After the summit: the part that usually gets lost

The summit ends. The spheres do not.

• The debrief. Logs attendance and volunteer hours in one pass, and feeds an Organizer Desk that briefs each working group before its first meeting. Tools, not chatbots: it gathers what happened, it does not speak for you.
• Working groups keep meeting. Each sub-sphere has its feed, its planning board, and its own recurring events. The people who said yes on the day have a place to show up on Tuesday.
• Take-action tools. Call, add your name to a pledge, speak at public comment. Each one sized to the time a person actually has, from fifteen minutes up.
• Hours and reporting (Organization Plan). Volunteer hours tracked per person and per group, rolled up into grant-ready reports.
• A verified report (Organization Plan). At ninety days, a share link a funder or a board opens. Every aggregate expands into timestamped records. No sign-in, no names.
• Certificates. A printable charter for the cohort.

What it costs

• Community groups. Spheres, events, sign-ups, the day-of desk, debriefs, take-action tools, and an Organizer Desk for every sphere. Free, always.
• Organization Plan. Adds the public site or widget, hours tracking, grant-ready reporting, and verified reports. One umbrella for a coalition, with a sub-sphere per member group on one plan.
• People, when you want more than software. Setup with you on a call, a managed program for the summit itself, or fractional leadership afterward. See consulting.

Three questions before you set it up

The answers tell you whether this is a free summit sphere or an Organization Plan conversation. Both are fine.

1. When is it, and roughly how many people? This sets the registration shape and whether the door needs more than one check-in point.
2. Are there tracks or working groups that outlive the day? If yes, the sub-spheres get set up before the summit so people land in them on the way out.
3. Does anyone need a report afterward? A funder, a board, a county. That is the verified-report path, and it changes what gets logged on the day.

Start from the summit template

The whole arc above is a starter template, and it fits any one big day with an afterlife: a leadership summit, a convening, a retreat, a volunteer day, a coalition assembly. Create a summit sphere and the planning board opens with the before, day-of, and after tasks already on it, claimable by your committee, first task “set the date, the venue, and a rough headcount.” Prefer to talk it through? The guided start seeds the same board once the sphere is named.

Bring a question

Two doors. A thirty-minute setup call, where we build the summit sphere together and you see it on your phone before you decide anything: write to hello@revelsphere.org. Or the weekly Organizer Session, Wednesdays at 5:30 PM, online and free to join: create a group, walk the planning features, create an event, then the floor opens.

Related: how an event grows from draft to published, and volunteer recruitment sources: know where your volunteers come from.