5 tips to make your conference proposal shine

The Pandemic came with countless changes, one of which is the way events are being held. Last year we saw several civic tech conferences going online (like TicTec and RightsCon), and we believe 2021 will be no different.

We learned some important lessons last year on how to design, build and facilitate sessions in more dynamic and engaging ways. But how can we improve our chances at being included in these conferences in the first place? How can we write better conference proposals?

Whether we’re meeting in an online or face-to-face format, there are some important aspects we need to consider when creating a session proposal. Here are some tips and tricks we’ve gathered that may help you write a better proposal to make sure you’re able to share your work and knowledge with the rest of the civic tech community.

This piece is part of the Code for All effort to strengthen our Network’s capacities and to provide our Members with support and advice on how to frame better conference proposals and design more creative sessions once selected.

Join our first conference coaching sessions on February 4th at 16:00 UTC. We’ll get to review Calls for Proposals that are currently open, requirements they have and some of these tips in more detail!

Set your goals

• Have a clear and tangible outcome. Consider the event’s topics and guidelines when designing the goal of your session.
• First define your session’s goals and from there on you can design your session’s format and activities.
• Chad Sansing, facilitator and newcomer support for MozFest, shares some key questions you can ask yourself to help you design your session’s goals:

What do you hope to achieve and how can audience participation help you achieve it?

What can you learn alongside participants?

Whose insights do you need to really improve your work, and how can your session help you gather those people and ideas together?

Be clear and concise

• Tell a story with your proposal. What is it going to look like? How will it develop? Focus on the details that will help event curators and organizers visualize how your session will be developed and which will be the key take-aways from it.
• Proposals that best leverage the event will likely be the ones that end up being selected, so it’s important that curators understand what you’ll be sharing with participants, how and why that is relevant in the context of the event’s topics.
• Don’t go around in circles trying to make your proposal sound more fancy and complex. As Karolina Szczur writes in her blogpost How to write a successful conference proposal, “a good rule of thumb is two to three paragraphs clearly expressing your idea”. Use the word limit to include enough detail for it to be crystal clear to curators. The importance is to easily convey your session, making it too ethereal could play against you!
• Dave Cheney shares 3 key points that your session proposal should communicate:

Why are you facilitating the session? Let curators know that you are well positioned to talk about the topic or that you have relevant experience with it. Show your passion for the topic and for your session.

How will you share it? How will you present the awesome idea or project you have? Creativity will play a key role here when detailing how you’ll engage and connect with your participants.

Have you covered all proposal requirements?

Imagine a session you want to attend

• Being creative is fun! 2020 forced us to transform conferences and events to an online format. We are getting tired of the lectures and webinars where the speaker is the only one talking and there’s little buy in from the audience.
• Yes, there were cool things you could do with a face-to-face audience, especially when talking about workshops and skill shares. But, don’t limit yourself! Online tools for meetings and conferences offer some variety of features that allow you to create a fun and interactive mix for participants to feel engaged and interested. Avoid activities that rely on a single mode of engagement, it can get boring if the session is too long. You can play with the online and offline interaction too, asking participants to look for something in their physical spaces that have certain relevance to the topic and your session.
• Play with session formats! If the event doesn’t specify session formats, you can get crazy and create your own using the different features online tools have. You can also review session formats from other conferences to get some ideas.
• Proposal titles are everything! Make sure to come up with a clear, catchy (and fun) title. Titles that are too broad or vague can be confusing and share no clue to what you want to focus on. If your title is concise enough, it will give a sense of the specific area within a topic you’ll be addressing. How will you make your session stand out, not only among curators but with participants in the event? With a catchy title!

Show how you’ll get people involved

• How will participants help you to reach your session’s goals? Change the role of participants from passive to active players.
• What do you expect from participants? Let curators know what will be your participation strategies in your proposal.
• Be open to different levels of expertise, different backgrounds and participation. Be aware that some people may not feel comfortable speaking out loud or whose English is not their native language. They may need other methods to participate, like writing on a document.
• Flexibility in numbers is important. How will your session adapt from 5 to 50 participants? How will you make sure they all have the same possibilities to take part in the conversations.

Make sure inclusion & accessibility are a top priority

• Try to use inclusive language as much as possible.
• Consider all the different participants a session can have. Think, for example, that in your session you have a 10 year old kid, a 70 year old grandma and a 40 year old web developer. How will you make all of them feel welcome, engaged and encouraged to actively participate in your session?
• Also, think about how you can encourage diversity in your session. For example, if your idea is to host a panel of experts in a certain topic, avoid having an all-male panel.
• How can you invite folks from marginalized groups to join and feel safe enough in your session to share ideas with the rest of the participants?
• Sessions that challenge power dynamics will always have kudos for bravery!
• Check out the Accessibility Guidelines for Presentations to nurture your proposal.

One last piece of advice: triple check it before submitting it!

These are some of the basic tips we have found to be important, in our experience and going through some research. If you have other tips you consider valuable, please let us know and we can include them in this piece!

This blogpost was built out from a mix of our experiences and more resources:

• How to write a successful conference proposal — Karolina Szczur
• How to write a successful conference proposal — Dave Cheney
• MozFest 2021 session proposal guide guide — Mozilla Festival
• Your guide to a successful proposal — RightsCon
• Wrangler Wisdom: Creating a MozFest Session that Stands Out — Alia EKattan
• 5 Tips For Designing Engaging, Inclusive Sessions — Chad Sansing