Characteristics of Successful Proposals

The following is a collection of qualities for creating well-developed proposals written by previous Peer Reviewers.

• Well-written descriptions and abstracts that provide strong details and are easy to determine how and what information would be shared with participants
• Material that is relevant and new for today’s leaders
• Proposals containing specific outcomes and “take-a-ways” for participants
• Relevance and adherence to the guidelines set forth by the selected Presentation Track
• Demonstrate familiarity with the literature referenced
• Quality/rigor of research, thinking and content
• Preference is given to full session presentations (i.e., 60, 75, 90 minute sessions)
• If you are developing a 20 or 40 minute presentation, you are encouraged to solicit co-presenters to join your proposal submission
• Paper or Case Study presentations of 20 or 40 minutes in presentation duration can be very good in their own right. There are no sessions of 20 or 40 minutes during the ILA conference. Therefore, submissions of this duration will need to be ‘grouped’ with other submissions of ‘similar’ topic to form a full session. This is a significant challenge for the Track leaders to ‘group’ proposals, especially if there are only a few submissions that each represents a topic. You decrease your chance for acceptance if these proposals are not already ‘grouped’ to other proposals in advance of the review process
• The ILA offers several tools for proposal collaboration:
• ILA-Exchange listserv
• Proposals in Progress
• ILASpace (for ILA Members)
• LinkedIn
• Include representation of multiple viewpoints/perspectives (institutions/organizations, countries, disciplines, sectors, etc)
• Proposal review process is blind peer-reviewed, therefore proposals must not include reference to author(s) names and preferably institutional affiliation in the proposal
• Leadership Education Track – Demonstrate boarder connections to field. Submissions that only focus on one program/organization (show-and-tell proposals) are not likely to be included as concurrent sessions

Example Proposals

These proposals were rated highly in the year they were received. These example proposals are provided for demonstration purposes only and should not necessarily be viewed as models to replicate or ensure acceptance to the 2011 program.

• Example A (Panel Discussion)
• Example B (Non-refereed Paper)
• Example C (Workshop)
• Example D (Poster)
• Example E (Interactive Roundtable)

Conferences : Call for Proposals : Proposal Resources

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