If you’ve planned a conference or other large-scale event for your association, you’ve managed many moving parts to make it happen, from nailing down logistics to tracking registrations and creating marketing content. However, one of the most notorious aspects of organizing an association event is abstract management—the process of collecting, reviewing, and making decisions about the descriptions of proposed presentations that speakers send in.
It’s easy to hear about the complexities other organizations have faced with abstract management (or encounter them yourself as you get started) and resign yourself to pouring lots of time and effort into it. But you can change that narrative for your association! As OpenWater explains, “By streamlining key processes, your team can focus more on outcomes [e.g., increased event impact and better attendee experiences] and less on administration.”
In this guide, we’ll explore how to streamline abstract submission and review for your association’s events. Let’s dive in!
Create a Unified Submission Experience
Imagine you’re a prospective speaker at your conference, and you visit your association’s website ready to throw your hat into the ring. You quickly navigate to the right page on the site and click the “Submit Your Abstract Now” button—and suddenly, you’re on a different website that has no visual indication of belonging to your association besides the name. The new site also isn’t user-friendly, doesn’t provide many instructions, and requires you to fill out a long form with lots of unnecessary information. Would you still submit your abstract?
If your answer is no, you aren’t alone. Inconsistent and overly complex submission processes lead to high rates of form abandonment.
To prevent these situations and encourage submissions, make sure to:
- Design a branded landing page. Make your submission form consistent with other branded marketing materials by incorporating your association’s logo, fonts, color scheme, and messaging standards. This will reassure potential speakers that they’re in the right place when they arrive on the landing page.
- Provide clear guidelines. In addition to writing out the steps for submitting an abstract, reiterate your call for proposals on the landing page so presenters can verify that they’ve checked all of the boxes. Don’t forget to explain the theme and audience for the event among these guidelines, too. According to NXUnite, when conference presenters understand who they’re speaking to and why, they can more effectively tailor their presentations and have a greater impact on attendees.
- Promote abstract submissions across multiple channels. Your call for proposals is only a “call” if it actually reaches your audience! Leverage email, mobile messaging, social media, and print communications (e.g., mailers and flyers) to reach as many potential speakers as possible. Include a link or QR code to your landing page in all of these marketing materials to make submission as convenient as possible.
- Make submission simple. Prospective presenters are more likely to complete shorter forms, so you should only require them to fill out the fields you really need them to, like contact information, proposed title, and presentation type. Ensure your system can also accept several file formats for the abstracts to make it easy to upload them.
Streamlining and unifying abstract submissions in this way benefits your team as well as potential speakers, since it puts everything in one place for review.
Develop Fair Review Procedures
Consistency is also critical at the review stage of abstract management—not only for simplifying the process, but also for promoting fairness. While there is some inherent subjectivity to abstract review, you should do your best to ensure every potential speaker has an equal shot at acceptance by:
- Selecting judges carefully. Whether they’re association staff members or volunteers, each judge should have some prior experience with the abstract process (i.e., reviewing them, writing them, or both) and be knowledgeable about the conference theme. In an ideal world, none of the judges would know any of the potential speakers, but that usually isn’t possible. To reduce personal bias, anonymize submissions and avoid having judges review abstracts that describe research they’re very familiar with.
- Creating a standard review form. Denote categories for rating each abstract (clarity, relevance to the conference theme, adherence to guidelines, etc.) that every judge will focus on. Additionally, clearly explain the numerical scale and scoring rules for each category. For instance, if they’re rating relevance from one to five, five may mean it’s very closely aligned with the event theme, and one might mean it doesn’t relate to your member base’s professional interests or the event’s focus at all.
- Do multiple rounds of review. Since you can’t completely eliminate bias even by vetting your judges and standardizing review criteria, have several judges score each abstract and average their ratings. Let’s say the total scores on your review form are out of 25 possible points, and three judges rated an abstract 22, 24, and 17, respectively. Its average score would be 21 out of 25, so it would likely be a good contender (which might not be the case if only the judge who gave the 17 had reviewed it).
Even with all of these considerations built into abstract review, it’s important to complete the process in a timely manner to ensure prospective presenters will hear back by the date you promised. Make this happen by choosing your judges and creating your review form before your abstract submission deadline, so all that’s left to do after abstracts are in is your multi-round review and ranking of average scores.
Integrate Your Event Software
Abstract submission and review don’t happen in a vacuum. Instead, they’re part of the larger abstract management process that also involves communication, session scheduling, reporting, and other tasks. Plus, you can’t separate abstract management from the rest of your event planning process.
If you already use any software in your abstract activities, it’s probably an abstract submission platform, so it just allows you to create a landing page and accept completed forms. However, you’re better off investing in a full abstract management solution that also includes tools for:
- Conducting multi-round review with standardized forms built into the platform
- Configuring conference sessions and publishing event calendars
- Communicating with speakers and attendees via email and your conference app
- Collecting and analyzing data on your improved proceedings
Additionally, this solution should integrate with your other event technology and administrative tools like your association management system (AMS) to ensure seamless information sharing and help all of the moving parts of your event (and member engagement strategy) work together.
The strategies above should provide a solid foundation for more effective abstract management ahead of your association’s next conference. After your event, assess how the process went, review your collected data, and ask for feedback from presenters and team members so you can make informed decisions about further improving abstract management going forward.