Developing a Conference Proposal: Examples of Developing a Conference Proposal
Presented on April 18, 2019
Last updated 6/8/2019
Audio: Instrumental music
Visual: Title slide “Developing a Conference Proposal: Conference Examples”
Visual: Slide changes to “Agenda” and includes,
- Provide a general introduction
- Share examples, best practices, and tips
- Discuss our own experiences
- Provide additional resources
- Answer your questions
Audio: DR. Christy Fraenza: During this presentation we are going to provide some general information about conference proposals and share some examples, as well as some best practices and tips. Throughout the conversation today, we are also going to discuss our own experiences with submitting our conference proposals. Lastly, we are going to provide some additional resources and live to answer your questions, as well.
Visual: Slide changes to “What is a conference like?” and includes a photo of four women in front of a conference poster board.
Audio: Christy: So to give you a bit of context about conferences, most fields and disciplines do have professional organizations. You might have heard of American Nursing Association or the American Psychological Association or National Association of Social Workers. Those are just to name a few. Many of those professional organizations hold conferences every year or two. And those conferences are meetings that are either on person or online, and the members come together to share their research, to network as we were just talking about, but also to develop policy that helps to shape their fields.
There are a lot of different types of conferences. There are those large, in-person conferences associated with those big organizations that we just mentioned. But also, small, in-person, regional conferences, as well as a variety of online conferences held by different institutions and organizations to as well.
So within these conferences, there are typically several options for types of presentations, as well. So you might have an opportunity to do a one hour talk on a topic. You could be part of a roundtable conversation on a topic of concern within your field. Or you could create a poster presentation to share with others as they're walking around a large conference room.
So you see a few photos here on this slide. And these include a few of us from the Academic Skills Center, including myself. And we were visiting one of our colleagues who was sharing her own poster presentation. So you can see her poster in the background of a couple of those photos.
For online presentations, you typically would need to create a PowerPoint presentation and use an online presentation tool, such as Adobe, very much like what we're doing here today with the webinar. Then you will see on the example here, an example of an Adobe presentation on this slide, as well.
So when you submit a conference proposal, it's really important to understand these different options and formats of proposed sessions. So for example, if you're not comfortable leading a conversation by yourself for an entire hour -- which quite honestly, many of us are not, so you're not alone if that is something you don't want to do. But maybe we would want to start with something like a poster session, instead. Look through those options, choose a fit that is a good option for you. Lastly, some conferences may require you to create additional resources such as handouts or papers, as well. So you're going to want to plan for any of those requirements that might be involved.
Before we get into some of our best practices for creating a proposal, we want to share a few different calls for proposals just to give you an idea of how unique each individual conference can really be.
Visual: Slide changes to “Example Call for Proposals” and includes text that has been highlighted.
Audio: Christy: So, this is our first example, and this is actually a call for proposals for a small conference held at a college every year. And you can see, we highlighted some key pieces of information on the slide. First you might notice there are some word limits for the abstract and summary. Be sure you pay special attention to any of those types of limits at words. Personally, I once wrote a proposal and then saw I was way over the expected word limit – which, as you can imagine, required quite a bit of editing and time. So from that experience, I really do recommend that you really pay attention to the requirements early on, before you start writing a proposal.
You will also notice that the topic here is pretty broad. So for this particular conference, it can be anything related to the teaching of psychology. In this case, as long as it's related to teaching in this specific field, you could create a proposal. Not all conferences are going to be this broad and as we will see in a minute, others can be a lot more specific.
Lastly, you do see a few different options here for type of presentation. So, you have the traditional, oral presentation, a workshop which would be a little more interactive, hands-on, and also a discussion forum, which would most likely be a conversation led by a couple of experts on a specific topic. Lastly, there is a poster session at this conference. But you will notice for this conference that poster presentation option is limited to only undergraduate students.
So that's something you want to watch out for, is any limitations with so many proposals. You want to make sure you meet the criteria for the session you’re choosing. To sum up, this conference is pretty broad with a few different options for talking about your topic.
Visual: Slide changes to “Example Call for Proposals” and includes some highlighted text.
Audio: Christy: Let's move on to our next example. This example is for a virtual conference, so this is online, it's right here at Walden. It's actually being hosted by the Academic Skills Center and the Center for Social Change. You will notice there are some specific headlines here in the topic is less broad that our last example. So for this conference, the presentations must address ways that students have used and applied the skills they have acquired their Walden program to enact social change.
And you will notice we have highlighted some key pieces of information on this example, too. First, you're limited to three presenters. And this is something you want to keep in mind for conferences, too. There might be limits on the number of presenters depending on the type of presentation that you might be submitted for. So you really want to be careful of that. Review does limitations before you start reaching out to colleagues to collaborate. You don't want to be in that situation where you have asked too many individuals to, present with you and then not be able to include them all.
You will also notice were the most of these too, and there are clear instructions that you should not use your dissertation abstract as your submission. It gives some specific guidelines to write a [indiscernible] of your proposed discussion.
You are also required to provide two clear learning outcomes for this conference that you would really want attendees to walk away with from your session.
Lastly, you will note you are instructed to include an interactive activity to make your session engaging, so that is also something you would plan and figure out think about how you could incorporate that in your proposal as well.
To sum up, this cover page, it has some clear pieces of information that must be required as part of the proposal that we didn't see in the previous example.
Visual: Slide changes to “Example Call for Proposals” and includes some highlighted text.
Audio: Christy: Let's look at one more example. Okay.
So this is our final example, and this is from a yearly conference at a university, and you will notice this has some additional requirements we didn't see in our other examples, which is why we chose to include this one.
For this particular conference, you would actually be required to also submit a one-page paper or white paper after your acceptance for the conference, depending on the type of presentation that you've been accepted for.
So there is this expectation, also, that presenters would submit electronic versions of materials to share with conference attendees as part of a conference app. So that is something you would also need to think ahead and plan for, to have these electronic resources available and submitted on time, as well.
As we think about these last three examples, we saw some very specific guidelines and expectations for each individual conference. It's because each of these conferences can be so different, it's really important to review all this requirements and expectations before you start putting together any proposals.
Now that we've discussed some important background information, we talked the some examples, I'm going to go ahead and pass things over to Joe to take over for the second half of the presentation.
Audio: Instrumental Music
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View second half of this presentation, Developing a Conference Proposal: Best Practices
Transcript for the second half of this presentation.