How to Improve the Chances of Your Proposal Being Accepted

There is no "formula" to being accepted, and there is no way to guarantee that your proposal will be selected by the conference committee.  However, there are a few ways that you can improve your chances and avoid being eliminated in the early part of the evaluation process.

DO...

- Write clearly, succinctly, and use a spell-check.  You'd be amazed how many proposals we receive where it's really difficult to understand  the subject matter of the presentation.

- Offer more "Advanced" subject matter, especially if you're an expert in your field.  Develop a presentation that stretches the audience to reach further (i.e. help bring them up to your level).  Too often we receive very basic speaking proposals from people who have much more to offer.  We want more advanced, sophisticated subject matter!

- Give us something exciting with which to evaluate you. eg. "voted 'most amusing' speaker at the DB2 conference", or "I have just completed a major project dealing with these issues and I'm excited to share the difficult lessons with my peers."

- Be specific about what you'll be presenting, and why it will be useful to the audience.  i.e. "I'll show you exactly how we reduced the time to create the models by 25%, and reduced the cost of re-work by another 50% because of the improved quality the deliverables."  That's much better than "Discussion of efficiencies, quality improvement and cost reductions."

- If you're from a vendor company, you have a better chance of being selected if you propose talking about the "leading edge" of the technology area in which you operate, rather than the basics.  

- If you're from a PR firm, speaker placement agency or internal marketing department, make sure your speaker is willing and available to participate before you make the submission.  

- Be willing to speak on a panel.  It's not as much podium time, but the panels are very well attended.  And given the competition for speaking slots then you will definitely increase your chances of being accepted.

- Accept all the speaker terms.  If there's anything you're not sure about, contact us to discuss it.

- You may email the committee chairpersons at speaker@wilshireconferences.com to ask questions.  We're happy to help.

- Finally, PLEASE use the web-based form to make your final submission.  That way your proposal will go directly "into the database", where we can track it, distribute it to the committee and ensure proper follow-up.  Proposals which are sent by direct email or fax have to be tracked separately and eventually get re-keyed into the database by someone on the committee, so there's always a chance of your proposal being misplaced in the meantime. 

DON'T...

- Don't propose "obvious" topics.  The attendees of DAMA+Meta-Data are a reasonably sophisticated audience, and they already understand "Why Data Management is Important" and "Why Quality Matters" (for which we receive over a dozen proposals over every year). Though we need some presentations that cover fundamentals, they have to be about new subject areas, and must be pitched at a level that's useful to an audience of data management professionals.

- Don't ever propose a talk that discusses how your products "meet the needs of data management" -- you'll never be accepted.

- Don't make the same proposal you've submitted for the past 3 years.  Please offer something new.  There's probably a good reason we didn't accept it the first 3 times. 

- If you were accepted and presented at a previous year’s event, don’t submit the same proposal this year. We do not repeat the same conference sessions in subsequent years. If the proposal is similar, indicate the differences from the previous year.

- If you're from a vendor company, don't talk about your products, unless we specifically ask you to do so.  Just don't do it.  If you're deemed to have made an "unacceptably commercial presentation" then you won't be invited back to speak.

- Don't take the shotgun approach (ie. making a dozen different proposals and hoping that one gets accepted).  Much better to contact us beforehand, get some advice as to what we're looking for, and refine the list down to the 2-3 good topics that are most likely to get you selected. 

- Don't assume that extensive audiovisual or technical requests can be easily provided at no cost to you.  For example, a high-speed Internet connection can cost as much as $2500 a day in some venues, so don't assume we will be able (or willing) to provide the connection for you.  If you need a more elaborate or expensive AV set-up then contact us to discuss it first.

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