Writing Effective Alliance Session Proposals: One Person’s Approach

Do you have a great session proposal idea, but find it challenging to express it in a way that captivates and engages your audience? You are not alone!  The following are some tips and tricks I’ve discovered for writing an effective session proposal. 

What is a Session Proposal?   

First things first, the intent of a session proposal is to “sell” your idea.  The primary audience for your session proposal is the conference committee who will be reviewing all submissions. 

Second, what you write in your session proposal, if accepted for Alliance, will be used as your session description for attendees.  Think of it this way, if you can impress the conference committee with your topic, your experience, and the learning objectives for your session, you are sure to garner interest from potential audience members and are well on your way to having a great session at Alliance!    

Writing Your Session Proposal 

There are many ways to write a successful session proposal.  Please know that I am presenting you with just one option, one that has worked well for me. There are lots of resources out there if you do a quick search for “Conference Proposals” on the internet.

The way I approach session proposals is to think of it as a really short paper that I need to write.  I use the standard introduction, body, and conclusion.  Let me break that down and explain further. 

Introduction:  I open by briefly describing my topic in 2-4 sentences.  I like to think about “what” the session will provide and “why” participants should attend.  For example, if I were to submit a session proposal with a title of “Writing an Impactful Session Proposal,” I might write something like:

• Are your session proposals falling short or not getting accepted?  Come join this session to learn some quick and easy ways to write a session proposal that will impress the selection committee and set you up for success! 

Body:  For me, the next section describes “how” I plan to cover the topic (break down the “what”).I often use bullet points, but just a few sentences would also work well.  It doesn’t have to be fancy or long.  Taking the above example, I might write something like:

• In this session, we will cover the following:
  • Session Proposals:  What are they?
  • Components of a Well Written Session Proposal
    • Introduction
    • Body
    • Conclusion
  • How to Write Learning Objectives 

For the closing section, I like to mention any activities or resources used during the session and provide some fun encouragement for people to attend. Continuing with the above example, I might write something like:

• We will use impromptu surveys, have an open discussion, and perform a fun group exercise together to illustrate this approach.  Come join the fun, I promise you don’t want to miss this one! 

Learning Objectives: As part of writing a session proposal for Alliance, you must also provide 3 Learning Objectives.  Learning Objectives help the conference committee understand what the audience will learn from your session.  Again, there are multiple approaches to writing these and I encourage you to do some investigation online about how to write objectives.   

For me, I like to start with the concept of SMART Objectives. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.  I find these particularly easy to write after having written a solid body for the proposal description itself. 

Let me provide a brief definition of each, as it relates to a session proposal: 

Specific – The Learning Objective clearly states what an audience member will get from the session. 

Measurable – The Learning Objective includes how the action will be measured. Measuring your objectives helps you determine if you are making progress. For most of our sessions at Alliance, the idea is to be able to take information learned at sessions back to our jobs.  The measurement here is simply that they learned the objective by the end of the session, so we are able to do just that.   

Achievable – The Learning Objective is achievable during the session. In other words, if it would take 3 hours to learn the stated learning objective, then it is too much for a session’s time block, and you may think about breaking it down further.  If you find you have too many objectives, you may pull back on the scale of the topic. 

Relevant – The Learning Objective is relevant to the topic of the session.  For instance, learning that 12*12 = 144 would not be relevant to the topic of “How to Develop a Customization in PeopleSoft.” 

Time-Bound – There is an appropriate amount of time planned to cover each Learning Objective during the session length given. 

To Conclude: The following is my session proposal example, complete with 3 Learning Objectives, for a session titled, “Writing an Impactful Session Proposal.”

Are your session proposals falling short or not getting accepted?  Come join this session to learn some quick and easy ways to write a session proposal that will impress the selection committee and set you up for success!

In this session, we will cover the following:

• Session Proposals:  What are they?
• Components of a Well Written Session Proposal
  • Introduction
  • Body
  • Conclusion
• How to Write Learning Objectives

We will use impromptu surveys, have open discussion, and perform a fun group exercise together to illustrate this approach.  Come join the fun, I promise you don’t want to miss this one! 

Learning Objective 1:  Audience members will learn what a session proposal is and its intent. 
Learning Objective 2:  Audience members will learn about the components of a well written session proposal including how to write effective Introduction, Body, and Conclusion sections. 
Learning Objective 3:  Audience members will learn how to write Learning Objectives using the “SMART Objective” framework. 

 What do you think?  How do you write successful session proposals?  I would love to hear from you!