 This is Shannon Smith and today I'm going to show you how to prepare and submit a proposal for an EDUCAUS conference. Let's start at the EDUCAUS home page and the first thing you're going to need to do is to find an event for which there's an open call for proposals. So let's float over conferences and events and then go to the EDUCAUS event finder page. On our event finder page, you can search for an event or you can scroll through a list of upcoming events for which you can register or you can have a save the date or reminder email sent for you as well as you can see what events that are still in the open stage of the call for proposals. You'll also be able to see recent events that include the archive proceedings which are a great resource of information on topics important to higher education IT. You can see there are two conferences with open calls for proposals. Let's take a look at the 2013 Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference. EDUCAUS conference web pages will change based upon where we are in the conference cycle. For instance, as we scroll back up to the top, when you look at this call for proposals tab, it will eventually become the conference program schedule tab. For convenience, the submit proposal button is included here on this page so you can click and go straight to the proposal submission form, but in order to adequately prepare your proposal, you need to go to the call for proposals page itself first. Think of the call for proposals page as a blueprint created by the conference program committee to design the conference program. It starts off with a proposal preparation checklist. These five steps will ensure you have the necessary information together in order to submit your proposal and we'll talk about them in more detail in a minute. In addition to encouraging student presentations, the program committee developed a set of program tracks and key topics to help shape the content of the conference. Click on each of the show more links to read how the committee envisions this track and look at some suggested key topics in this area. In addition to defining the desired content through tracks, EDUCAUS helps program committees design creative programs through varying types of session formats. This conference offers six unique session formats from a traditional interactive presentation to a 90-minute workshop. We also constantly look for innovations in conference sessions, so we encourage you to think about suggesting something new. This page also provides a great deal of information on how proposals are reviewed and selected and reminds potential proposers that, if selected, travel and registration costs are the responsibility of the presenter. Let's take a closer look at the proposal preparation checklist and guidelines for proposal submissions. The checklist is a guide to step through in order for you to have collected everything you need to submit the best proposal possible. The first step is to make sure you create or update your EDUCAUS profile, and in particular that you have information in your bio so that reviewers will know a little bit about your background when they review your proposal and score it for possible inclusion in the program. There are a lot of reasons to have an EDUCAUS profile, and we hope you will look at the many tutorial, the power of your EDUCAUS profile, to find out more. But one of the most important reasons is the ability to quickly submit a proposal for one of the many awesome EDUCAUS conferences. The next action item we encourage you to take is to explore steps to writing a successful conference proposal from the EDUCAUS Speaker Concierge. The Speaker Concierge service is designed to help EDUCAUS members navigate the entire conference presentation life cycle. From designing a proposal to writing, delivering and promoting your presentation to leveraging the work you put into your session into other professional development activities such as articles or blog posts. As you can see, the Write a Proposal tab has a more in-depth description of the steps that are outlined in the proposal preparation checklist. This is an easy way to make sure that you've put together the best proposal possible. Going back to the checklist on the CFP page, you will next be advised to review the tracks and key topic descriptions, as well as the session type descriptions, because you'll be asked to select these when you submit your proposal. You are also encouraged to review the submission form by looking at a PDF version of the form. This is so you'll know what to expect when you begin the process of entering your submission. Let's take a quick look at the PDF form. As you review the form, you can see what you will need to write up, and we suggest that you open a Word document and write up your descriptive responses, so you'll have them already typed so that you can easily cut and paste into the text boxes when you're entering your submission. Back at the CFP page is one of the places where you can submit your proposal to go to the live form. If you've done your homework and followed the steps in the checklist, you will be able to go through this very quickly. You can see I'm now logged in, so when I click the Submit Proposal button, I go into the form with my information already filled in for the speaker information. You will be asked to confirm the information that's currently in your EDUCAUSE profile, and then you'll click Next. If you have additional speakers, you will keep adding them, and then you will enter the information that you've carefully thought through and prepared. Once you hit Submit, your work is done for now, as your proposal will be stored for review by the program committee. You will hear whether your proposal has been selected via an email from the EDUCAUSE speaker liaison a few weeks after the call for proposals closes. This mini-tutorial on how to prepare and submit a conference proposal has been brought to you by EDUCAUSE Professional Development. This is Shannon Smith, and be sure to look for other P.D. Byte mini-tutorials to help you get the most out of your relationship with EDUCAUSE.