Thanking speakers and sponsors
Why thank people?
It’s always a good idea to thank the individuals who helped make your event a success. Thanking the individuals who participated in your event (speakers) as well as those who helped fund or promote the event (sponsors) is particularly important. The reasons for doing so are many, but three of the most salient are:
Thanking speakers and sponsors helps you maintain positive relationships with them, potentially making it easier to work with them in the future
It gives you the opportunity to share useful stats with speakers/sponsors and may encourage them to promote materials from the event
It feels good for both you and the people you’re thanking!
*Quick Note* After the event, you should thank speakers, sponsors, and anyone who helped organize the event on social media, tagging them if possible.
Thanking speakers
You should likely make more effort in thanking your speakers than your sponsors. Remember that your speakers took the time to prepare their talks, coordinate travel to your event, and actively participate in the event. For this level of commitment, you should ideally thank your speakers with something tangible. Possible tangible thank yous include:
Physical thank you cards
T-shirts from your organization, university, or the event itself
Gift cards
Sending a tangible thank you gift requires knowing the speaker’s preferred shipping address, but you can easily get this with an initial thank you email (see example below).
The initial thank you email should:
Be short (no longer than 1-2 paragraphs)
Point out what specific things you appreciated about the speaker’s participation (i.e. be customized)
Contain useful stats about the event that will help the speaker feel good about the event (a link to survey results could be useful)
Example initial thank you email for speakers
Dear SPEAKER NAME,
Thank you for taking the time to speak at our minisymposium on reproducibility. Your expertise on the current publishing landscape was invaluable and was a huge part of making the event a success.
I have some quick stats on the event below and we'll be publishing an in-depth write up on the XXX blog very shortly (likely later today!). In the meantime, we'd like to send you a small token of our thanks for speaking at the event. Please send along your preferred shipping address and we'll send a little gift your way.
Cheers!
NAME
Quick Stats
Attendees (in room) ~30
Livestream Viewers at Peak ~25
Livestream total views to date: 165
Minisymposium Registration Page Views to date: 805
Thanking sponsors
You should definitely take the time to thank your sponsors but don’t necessarily need to thank them to the same extent as your speakers. Part of the thanks for sponsors should have already come in the form of the incentives you used to encourage them to sponsor the event (e.g. links to their websites on your event page, inclusion in a handout, etc).
A simple thank you email to the individual or individuals you worked with at the sponsoring organization should work well. In this email you should:
Thank the specific organization or individual for their support (i.e. the email shouldn’t start off with “Dear sponsor”)
Include stats on how well the event did
Offer to work with the organization again in the future (if you’d actually like to)
Example thank you email for sponsors
Dear SPONSORING ORGANIZATION NAME,
Thank you for your support and help in making our recent Minisymposium on Reproducibility a success.
The event had nearly 50 attendees in the room while the event webpage [link] has over 800 visits and counting. A full recording of the event can be found here [link] and we’ll be continuing to promote the event on social media.]
We look forward doing more events like this in the future and hope we can work with you on any similar events you have planned.
Thanks again!
NAME
Last updated