Prospective new members frequently find conferences, chapter meetings, webinars, and other events compelling reasons to join your association—not to mention these benefits’ role in keeping existing members engaged. Events offer networking opportunities, access to relevant vendors, and a front-row seat to new developments in the industry.

While all of these components factor into a memorable event, choosing speakers for your sessions carries extra weight. To honor your members’ time and attention, you’ll need to select relevant, interesting, and innovative presentations from among a pool of proposals or abstracts.

In this article, we’ll explore how to optimize your abstract management process and secure engaging speakers for your audience.

Hone Submission Criteria

The first step in getting the right presenters on your conference schedule is to ensure your reviewing panel selects from the best possible pool of applicants. At the beginning of your event planning process, define your overall goals. Rather than trying to reverse-engineer a proposed presentation to fit an event schedule, outline the purpose and theme from the beginning to give your team, reviewers, and applicants clarity.

Then, use these goals to structure your submission criteria. If potential applicants know the details up front, they’ll be able to better identify whether they’re a good fit, which automatically filters out less-aligned candidates. Your call for abstracts should include the topic areas and types of presentations you’re looking for, if you’ll need additional materials from them for breakout sessions, and overall event details (date, location, format, etc.).

Maximize Your Call for Abstracts’ Reach

While it’ll save your reviewers time if you limit irrelevant abstract submissions, you don’t want to narrow the overall pool so much that no one applies or great applicants miss their opportunity to submit. Strategic promotion of your call for abstracts widens the field to include as many candidates as possible, who can then opt in if their presentation concepts match the submission criteria.

Here are a few ideas to help your call for abstracts reach great presenters:

  • Ensure materials are accessible. Follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for all digital content (e.g., your submission page should be keyboard compatible and have adequate contrast between text and background colors). Additionally, double-check that all links work correctly so users can find what they need.
  • Share with relevant industry groups. Your association’s partner organizations’ audiences could include strong applicants, so you might ask them to co-market the opportunity with you.
  • Involve members in promotion. Providing members with resources or asking them to share social media posts widens the call for abstracts’ exposure to their networks as well.

When promoting your call for abstracts, always align the branding with your association’s. Recognizable visual cues like consistent color schemes and your organization’s logo signal that this submission opportunity is legitimate and can help attract great applicants who respect your organization.

Eliminate Communication Silos

The abstract management process can take time. However, by communicating consistently with applicants, you mitigate the risk of losing them to other commitments and improve their experience with your association.

On your abstract landing page, provide applicants with the following information:

  • A timeline of the review process and when they can expect to hear back
  • Answers to frequently asked questions for quick reference
  • Contact information for if candidates have additional questions or issues
  • Financial information, like if there is a fee to apply and if they’ll also have to buy a conference ticket

In your abstract management platform, schedule out automatic messages throughout the process to keep candidates informed. These touchpoints should be brief, but as Clowder’s guide to member communication explains, strategic communications like these boost your association’s reputation and encourage additional engagement.

Another way to improve the candidate experience is to ask for their preferred communication method. Not only will applicants appreciate the personalization, but it also increases the likelihood that your messages will reach them.

Optimize the Review Process

The review phase of abstract management is essential for narrowing down your applicants to the right speakers. Your judging panel needs to be aligned with your goals for the event and have clear, consistent criteria for scoring abstracts to achieve this goal.

Especially because this phase involves multiple judges who may be staff members or volunteers, the administrative burden can quickly become overwhelming. However, OpenWater recommends utilizing these features in your abstract management platform to achieve a fair but streamlined judging process:

  • Standardized and consolidated review formats using templates for judges’ scores and feedback that are stored within the platform
  • Multi-round review to help you objectively find the best candidates in a large field of applicants
  • Blind judging that further reduces bias after you’ve thoroughly vetted all judges

Once you’ve finalized your approach, share that you’ve taken these steps with applicants publicly. A transparent review process builds applicant and community trust in your organization, leading to better quality candidates.

Personalize Attendees’ Schedules

After you’ve selected the winning abstracts, you’re ready to move on to the scheduling phase of managing your conference. Conference schedules can quickly become unwieldy and overwhelming for attendees, but you can mitigate that confusion by connecting speakers with the right audience. When you post your agenda to your conference website and send out materials, group sessions by topic so attendees can follow their interests.

To take personalization a step further, you can leverage AI to suggest tailored schedules for each attendee using engagement data. Attendees then get recommendations for which sessions they’ll resonate with, increasing the likelihood that attendees will have a positive experience with your awesome speakers!

Future-Proof Your Association’s Events

As you take these recommendations on board, don’t miss one of the best ways to improve your association’s abstract management: data-driven decision-making. Here are some ways to get started:

  • In your application management platform, customize your dashboard to report on pertinent metrics (for example, form abandonment rate) that are leading indicators of the success of your abstract management process.
  • Listen to member preferences, both in qualitative feedback and session numbers, so you can design events that boost future registrations.
  • Survey speakers about the submission and presentation experience to identify opportunities for improvement that will encourage them to apply again.

If you effectively use the data your stakeholders provide, you’ll be able to design events that align not only with your organizational goals, but also with your members’ reasons for joining your association.

By curating excellent presentations for your events through effective abstract management, you enrich members’ experiences and invest in your organization’s future. When your members are well-informed and inspired, they’re more likely to push your entire association towards excellence, attracting and engaging members who will change their field for the better.