Events
Call for speakers
Collect proposals a committee can compare side by side — title, abstract, takeaway, format, track, language and length.
Why this survey gets sent
“Forty proposals arrived as email attachments, no two of them the same shape. Three of us spent an evening reading Word files just to find out how long each session was meant to be.”
A call for speakers is a comparison exercise, and comparison needs the same fields in the same order for everyone. Put the closed questions — format, track, language, length — beside the two written answers a committee actually debates, and the shortlist meeting becomes an hour instead of an evening.
What is in it
- Name, email and organisation
- A short bio for the programme, about 80 words
- A link to you speaking before — video, slides or an article
- Session title and abstract
- What will the audience be able to do afterwards?
- Format, track, language of delivery and length
- Slides or an outline, if they have them
About 7 min to answer
Call for speakers
About 7 min
How to write this survey
Ask for what the review needs, and nothing else
Write the review criteria first, then build the questions backwards from them. If the committee scores relevance, clarity and the speaker's track record, then the page needs an abstract, a takeaway and one link to a previous appearance — and it does not need a full academic paper, a photograph at a fixed size, or a list of every conference the speaker has ever attended.
Split the page in two — about you, then about the session — because they are two different acts of thinking and a good speaker often writes the second one twice. A proposer who is asked for a bio in the middle of describing their workshop loses the thread, and what you get back is a shorter abstract than the idea deserved.
The takeaway question separates the good proposals
Ask the abstract question — what will you cover? — and then ask a second one that most calls leave out: what will the audience be able to do afterwards? The first is a description of a subject and almost everybody writes it well. The second forces the proposer to imagine a person leaving the room, and a speaker who cannot answer it usually has a topic rather than a session.
Say how long each answer should be, in words rather than characters, and mean it: “about 80 words” is read as an instruction, while a box with no guidance produces one proposal of thirty words and another of nine hundred, and the committee ends up comparing effort instead of ideas.
Format, track and length belong in closed lists
Anything the programme will later sort by should be a choice, not a sentence. Format, track, length and language sort the pile in seconds and let you see, before the meeting starts, that you have eleven talks and no workshops, or that one track is empty. Free text in these four fields means somebody retypes forty answers into a spreadsheet by hand.
Include an honest escape hatch: “not sure — the committee can place it”. Proposers guess at your internal track names and guess wrong, and a mis-filed proposal is worse than an unfiled one. Offer the lengths you can actually schedule, too — if there are no ninety-minute slots this year, do not list one and then disappoint the workshop you liked most.
Ask about language before you build the programme
The language of delivery is a scheduling fact, not a detail: it decides which sessions can share a hall, whether you need interpretation, and how the two halves of a bilingual audience read the printed programme. Ask it as a closed question with a third option for speakers who are comfortable either way, because those are the people who rescue a timetable.
If slides may be in one language while the talk is in another, say so in the call rather than leaving each speaker to invent a rule. Being explicit about it up front also tells a proposer that the event is genuinely bilingual, and that is often the sentence that decides whether a good speaker bothers to write anything at all.
Publish the dates, and reply to everybody
Put three dates on the page before you open it: when submissions close, when decisions are sent, and when the event is. A proposer is being asked to hold a date in their calendar, and the call that will not say when it decides is the call experienced speakers skip. Expect most of the proposals in the last two days, and send one reminder a week before the deadline.
Then reply to every proposal, including the ones you turn down, on the day you said you would. Two sentences are enough, and a speaker who is declined kindly and on time is the speaker who submits again next year. Keep the strong proposals you had no room for: they are the shortlist for the next event, and they are already written.