I got an email from Ann Ewbank of the Arizona Library Association stating that they had struggled with the question of transparency, and finally come up with this speaker agreement.
It is admirably transparent, absolutely clear to my reading. If your library association doesn’t have one like it, Arizona’s is a fine model. Sorry, TXLA, Arizona gets the transparency prize.
It’s also the same-old same-old. If you’re in-state, member or not, you must pay so that we can use your speaking labor. If you’re out-of-state, you get expenses plus honorarium.
Time for a different tactic. Clearly, “this arrangement is so ridiculously unfair as to be exploitative” is getting us nowhere. Which just figures—but bitterness will get us nowhere, too. Instead, let me try to explain why this arrangement is a bad deal for library-association conferences.
I am making some assumptions here; if I’m wrong about them, somebody with more hands-on experience than I have please let me know. I am assuming that conferences need a certain number of speakers; the exact mix of insiders and outsiders is flexible, but must obey a budget that does not vary one iota based on number of attendees, or number of members attending, or any other success measure. The speaker budget is maintained completely separately from the rest of conference accounting; therefore, a comped insider speaker shows up as a “loss” on the conference-fees sheet, but not as a “win” anywhere else.
Conference planning committees are aware of certain “hot topics” within librarianship that they think will entice attendees. Should an apropos proposal appear in the proceeds of the usual CFP, the committee can check that topic off and move on. Should one not appear, the committees do nationwide searches for individuals to speak on those topics, without first considering whether there might be an insider with expertise. Booking “hot people” is a similar tactic; if a hot insider sends in a CFP, it gets through, but otherwise, the committee guns for outsiders.
And one last common-sense assumption: If you need a speaker, it’s cheaper to comp an insider than pay expenses plus honorarium to an outsider. Under most circumstances, and definitely in the aggregate, it is still cheaper to comp-plus-expenses an insider than to pay expenses plus honorarium to an outsider. (Consider me and TXLA. The top at-the-door entire-conference fee is $375, so that’s the most TXLA can lose by comping an insider. My honorarium is $400. It’s a wash—except that an insider’s expenses are quite likely to be cheaper than mine.) And that is where conference planning is missing its most obvious trick. Even fairly compensated, a sharp insider is cheaper than the equivalently-sharp outsider.
This leads me to a Modest Proposal, a minor alteration of the current conference system that strikes me as reasonably fair to everyone while being cheaper overall than the current system for many conference planners: Invited speakers get comped and expensed, no matter what their origin. Out-of-state speakers get an honorarium on top. Speakers who go through the CFP process and are accepted have to register at normal rates. Conference-planning committees are directed to invite insiders, only going outside as a last resort.
(A slight modification of the above Modest Proposal that would still be an improvement on the current system would be that invited insider speakers get comped but not expensed, whereas invited outsiders get the red carpet. To me, this is the minimum acceptable arrangement; if you can’t provide it, your conference deserves to fail, frankly. Let InfoToday eat your lunch.)
My Modest Proposal respects that associations expect free labor from their members and those non-members they serve. It means that whuffie-ist speakers pay for their whuffie, which is rather mean, but not disastrously so (whereas the current system is indeed a disaster). It also tilts the playing field in favor of insider speakers, which to me only makes sense, since I go to an insider conference largely to meet fellow-insider colleagues. It does not, however, insult members by forcing them out-of-pocket when they have already been asked to offer free labor.
My Modest Proposal also saves conferences money. For every insider they find to speak on a hot topic, they save the difference between insider comp(-plus-expenses) and outsider expenses-plus-honorarium. Conference budgeting needs to account for this.
Extremely small associations may not see savings from this proposal if they don’t have sufficient depth of insider talent to cover the topics they want covered. I still think it’s the right thing to do, but we’ve already seen how far that argument goes. So let me add some other potential benefits that might tip the scales:
- Insiders bring insiders. Speakers like cheering squads, and people like to go to conferences where they’ll see people they know behind the podium. Both of these second-order effects are good for attendance. How many extra people are going to TXLA because of me? Zero. I guaran-damn-tee it.
- Non-member insiders become members. I would feel guilty if an association whose demographic I fit but of which I am not a member invited me to their conference and paid my way. Would I sign up and pay dues? Sure I would, without the least prodding or poking or marketing, because I don’t like guilt. How many members has TXLA lost over Michelle and me? At least one: Michelle herself. She’ll be in the profession thirty or forty more years, I’m guessing. Multiply thirty by a year’s membership fees, if you want to talk lost revenue. Then add, say, ten years of lost committee labor on top (on the assumption that nobody’s on committees forever).
- A good conference experience means return attendance by an insider speaker. This is the loss-leader theory of comping insider speakers: if they like the conference, or if they’re flattered by the invitation, they’ll come back next time, even if they have to pay to do it. When’s the next time Michelle will go to TXLA, you think? (If it were me and WLA or WAAL: “when hell freezes over.” But Michelle’s much nicer and more organization-minded than I am, so go ask her.)
- As the current system gains a bad odor, highly desirable insider and outsider speakers will avoid conferences and associations that employ it. I’ve already made that promise, and I won’t be surprised to see others do so as well. Goodness knows I don’t count for much, but do you really want to miss out on 50-invites-a-year Sarah Houghton-Jan? (How do I know all these famous people, anyway? I’d consider getting five invitations a banner year.) To save your conference’s marketability among speakers, never mind the people who want to listen to hot speakers and hot topics, the current system had better go. Smart associations will change fast, and make a point of pointing out that they behave fairly, so that they can gank hot speakers from slower and stupider associations.
There are other ways out of or around this dilemma, most of which involve “thinking out of the box” about conferences. But that’s for another post, I think. My central point: associations that treat insider speakers badly are being penny-wise and pound-foolish. We’re librarians; we’re in a field constantly besieged by budget cuts. We’re supposed to be smarter than that.
