2005-2015: Good conferences for #highered web and #hesm professionals

This post is #6 in a series of 10 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this blog while looking back at the past decade in higher ed digital marketing and communications.

Conferences in the higher ed digital profession: the first social network

Conferences have always been a big part of professional development for digital professionals in higher education for the past decade.

Conferences were the first social network for a profession with so few representatives at their respective institutions.
They were the only way to meet with like-minded professionals as the majority of web teams were relatively small. My student worker was my only team member and would only stick around for 2 years if I was lucky.

I attended and live blogged my first conference, the Web Communications and Strategies Conference at the University of Salisbury in Maryland in the summer of 2005. According to my archives, it was the 6th edition. I don’t know for previous editions, but the edition I attended was organized by Shelley Wetzel who has been behind the eduWeb conference (now called eduWeb Summit) for almost 10 years.

While I was working for a college, I still had to cover the conference costs on my own dime — as some digital professionals working in higher education have had to do even recently – or still do.

In the summer of 2005, I was a 6-month higher ed blogger, but still managed to meet readers at this first conference, relationships I had developed by replying to blog comments or interviewing some of my peers working at other institutions.

Live blogging, tweeting and the history of great conference backchannels

I’ve always done what I could to promote conferences targeted to digital professionals working in higher ed.

If it was tough to make the case to get the budget to go 10 years ago, it should at least be easy to find good conferences, right?

My first post about conferences was published in March 2005, but it was the first of a very long list between the interviews I did with organizers, speakers and the conference live blogging I published with the help of several teams of volunteers, all this before the advent of twitter and live streaming.

In 2005, the great HighEdWeb conference was called by another name: HighEdWebDev (well, there were actually 2 different conferences in Indiana and Rochester, NY that had merged to become the Annual HighEdWeb Conference every digital professional working for a university or a college has heard about).

Over the past 10 years, I also got a chance to present at many conferences – including a couple of keynotes – and really enjoyed the experience and the connections I made during my presentations, in the hallways or at the social events.

Today, when I go to conferences, it really feels like homecoming: I get to see old friends and meet new ones.

Yet, knowing that many professionals couldn’t get the budget to go to conferences, I also decided to launch Higher Ed Experts in April 2007 to offer online conferences to teams that couldn’t travel for their professional development.

Looking for great conferences to attend in 2015, check out my conference guide – often!

For many years, I’ve kept a calendar of higher ed conferences with dates, calls for proposals, websites and registration fees and wrote a blog post at the beginning of the year to share the info with the community.

Last year, I decided to do something smarter: a higher ed conference online guide that could be updated and maintained easily. That’s how the Higher Ed Experts Conference Guide was born.

As soon as I hear about a new interesting conference or get the dates and locations of recurring conferences, I update it in a pinch. It takes no time to do, which guarantees that the guide is always up to date.

You can also find the list of open calls for proposals in the guide by looking for the “Presenter” category.

I often ask attendees to post comments about their experience at a given conference and had some success with it. But, unfortunately not as many comments as I wish.

Anyway, if you attended in the past any of the conferences listed in the guide and feel like sharing some of your experience in a comment, please do. This will help future attendees to find out if this event might work for them as well.

Want to present, but don’t have any conference budget?

Unfortunately, you will need a budget – even if you present – for most conferences. Speakers usually only get a discount on their conference registration and don’t have their expenses covered.

Some conferences will offer free registration if you present a workshop or have different levels of discounts.

If you don’t have a budget though and don’t want to limit your options to vendors-sponsored webinars or programs for your professional development, you should consider presenting at one of the online conferences I organize every year about analytics (tomorrow), social media (in December) and digital content in April.

The call for proposals of the 2015 Higher Ed Content Conference closes tomorrow at midnight, so this is still an option for you to present and attend with your team – for free a 12-session online conference – without spending a dime – if your proposal is accepted.

If your are not into digital content, you can also check out the CFPs of the HighEdWeb Regional Conferences, they might not be 100% free, but they are usually pretty affordable to attend. So, make sure you consider any that is within driving distance for you.

Oh, and if you need some advice to craft your conference proposal, I wrote a post where I shared all my secrets earlier this year. You’re welcome :-)