Conference justification letters

The most important persuasion tool you have in your entire arsenal is integrity. 

  - Zig Ziglar

I’m seeing a lot of conference justification letters around the internet these days. I like the concept: provide a ready-made letter for managers to understand the benefits of sending their employee to a conference. But the execution of a lot of these letters is cheesy and pure marketing language.

I have also seen some really awesome ones, though they border on something a little too formal for an employee to hand to their boss.

When preparing a form letter for your attendees to use, consider the audience. This isn’t a brochure. This is a real, active letter of persuasion and value proposition for a manager or finance team to evaluate whether the money should be invested in sending a person to this engagement. It feels incredibly silly to type this, but consider what you would need to convince your management to go to an event. I found one industry conference justification letter that pointed out the evening events, the bands that were playing, and the opening pool party and reception. Really? Not helpful.

Be brief, but impactful. Don’t talk about the parties and don’t over-talk about the networking. Networking is a key reason anyone goes to an industry conference, but education, uncovering opportunities for sales or new vendors, and bringing back knowledge and perspectives to coworkers.

If you’re going to build a conference justification letter, be sure you also send out conference notes and key take-aways to your attendees so they can show the true value of the content they just experienced.