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Home // TO SPEAK // Tips for Submitting
Tips for Submitting
TIPS AND GUIDELINES ON SUBMITTING A CONFERENCE SESSION PROPOSAL
We receive more than 500 proposals to speak at each show and we only have room for 50 sessions or fewer.
At each event audiences rate the speakers on a scale of 1 ("Poor") to 5 ("Excellent"). Speakers rated 4.0 or higher are often invited back in future shows, but lower-rated speakers are not asked to return. Speakers from companies that consistently present sales pitches are similarly not invited. And great speakers are given the opportunity to present topics that they find most compelling. As a result, the average conference presentation rating is higher than 4.0, "Very Good" to "Excellent."
To help us properly evaluate your conference session proposal, please:
* Propose Specific Topics: Tightly focussed sessions like "Seven Ways to Profitability" and "Free Space Optics: A Viable Last Mile Option" are more likely to find a slot than amorphous titles like "Creating a Successful Web Site."
* Push the Envelope: Attendees come to our events to learn about the latest products, practices and perspectives. They don't need too-basic "101" tutorials, unsourced evangelical statistics or dog-eared case studies and site examples that everyone has heard before.
* Write Tight: While we mail millions of attendance brochures, serve hundreds of thousands of Web page views and place millions of dollars-worth of print and broadcast advertising, each individual session gets just a title plus two or three sentences in the program to attract an audience. Feel free to provide whatever background information we'll need to evaluate the session, but remember that the session description needs to be compelling -- and short.
* Highlight Credentials: Golden Group conference speakers are the best in the business, and audiences appreciate the chance to spend quality time hearing about their high-profile experiences with pioneering technologies, innovative business models or important companies.
The best way to submit a proposal is through our online conference session proposal form, our starting point for programming each conference. Remember that we get and send thousands of emails during each show cycle, so if you send mail please:
* Use the subject line: It's much more helpful to get email titled "John Smith's ISPCON Spring proposal on Outsourcing Infrastructure" than one that says "ISPCON Spring."
* Add a signature: It's surprising how many emails don't have contact information. Using an email signature is like using a letterhead.
* Limit attachments: It's easier to say yes to a proposal that we can read instantly rather than one that we have to unpack and browse through MS Word, Powerpoint or Acrobat.
* One proposal at a time: If you can, place each session discussion in a separate email. Sometimes the fourth or fifth proposal in a file doesn't get the attention it deserves.
* No paper, please: We manage the proposal database electronically, so paper mail and faxed proposals have to be input to our system by hand.
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