Many travel budgets and training budgets have been slashed, and some associations are experiencing severe financial problems. Which means that regardless of the merits of a conference, you’ll probably need to justify the expense. So, here are some things you might want to consider:
- Focus on what you will specifically bring back to the organization as return for the investment.
- Offer to prepare and deliver a short presentation and Q&A to your colleagues to share what you learned. That way, others in your unit will get the benefits of your attendance too.
- Share the syllabus and speaker handouts with your colleagues. As an attendee, you have unlimited access to materials posted by speakers.
- If you are working to obtain or maintain your CAE designation, remind your supervisor that this is a great way to earn up to 18 CAE hours, and is less expensive than registering for separate conferences. It also requires less time away from the office.
- Be ready with a plan that shows who will cover for you while you are attending the conference.
- Offer to share a room to reduce hotel expenses by finding a roommate on the Share a Room group in the Members' Directory.
- Be sure to check out the registration page, where all the various rates are listed to see if you qualify for any of the lower rates or discounts.
How to Justify Conference Attendence
by Mike Doyle
As a manager, how do you propose any allocation of resources in your organization? You need to understand two components to make decisions:
- Expense (the “investment”)
- Return on Investment
This article provides some easy-to-use tools to help you calculate the investment and identify your return.
Understanding Your Conference Expenses
Conference expenses are affected by a number of factors. Before you can even begin to justify conference expenses, you need to calculate what those expenses are. To do so, use the following Expenses Worksheet to develop a cost estimate for attending your selected conference.
Expense Worksheet
Understanding the Benefits
Let’s face it: many benefits from conference attendance are hard to quantify. For example, experts agree that the top benefit of conference attendance is networking value. Where else can you find so many industry contacts facing the same issues as your organization? Are there solutions you’re not aware of?
Although networking is undoubtedly the most important aspect of a conference, it is also the toughest for which to quantify any value.
On the other hand, if an employee came to you and said, “I want you to fund me for $4,000 and I don’t know what it’ll do for you,” then you would likely scoff at the offer…and maybe even mumble a few colorful metaphors about his/her suggestion.
When you propose a conference for approvals, don’t focus on how much you want to go; focus on what you will specifically bring back to the organization as payback for the investment.
Some specific details you’ll need to identify include:
- Session content.What sessions have particular relevance to your organization’s work? Specifically identify:
- Tools (authoring tools, content management systems, etc.)
- Technologies (XML, DITA, etc.)
- Processes (structured writing, single-sourcing, etc.)
- Vendor contacts.Will the conference showcase vendors with tools you use or are evaluating for potential future use? Is this an opportunity during which you’ll be able to compare competing tools?
- Best practices.Will there be training sessions in areas that will immediately benefit your group?
- Training.Will there be workshops designed to teach attendees a special skill and/or help your team overcome current or future challenges?
Qualifying the Benefits
Although you might understand the benefits of the conference that interests you, your manager may not. Therefore, to be most effective in justifying the conference, you need to clearly articulate the connection between your organization’s knowledge requirements and the conference program. DO NOT assume that your manager will be able to automatically make those distinctions.
To support this process, use the following Benefits Worksheet to help you focus on the benefits. Use whatever makes sense for your particular organization and conference, and omit the rest.
Benefits Worksheet
It's all in the selling
After you have identified the specific knowledge benefits, you’ve provided both the expenses and benefits your manager needs to decide the value of your proposition.
Salespeople work the same way. They don’t let customers infer the value of what they are selling, they make that leap for them.
Sell your conference proposition!
