Your RFP Process Is Approving the Wrong Sessions Right Now
If your speaker RFP process is open today, it is probably approving proposals about "leadership and unity" that sound fine and land flat. Talkadot's Association Event Design Playbook, built with the Association Leadership Coalition, has a one-line fix: stop accepting topics. Start requiring proof.
I am Arel Moodie, cofounder of Talkadot. Talkadot is a platform that helps event planners find and book professional speakers using real audience feedback data, and helps speakers capture audience feedback, testimonials, and leads through a simple QR code. This came out of the room at ALC Summer Conference, from Executive Directors comparing notes on exactly this problem.
The Attendee Making the Trade
Your Skill-Centric attendee is not there for the people, and is not there for another branded water bottle. They are here for one reason: can this session change what I do Monday morning. Every registration is a trade against three days of work piling up on their desk while they are out of office.
Don't sell to them. Don't repeat what they have heard a hundred times. That is the standard your RFP process should be enforcing, and most are not.
Why "Leadership and Unity" Keeps Getting Approved
Most RFPs ask for a topic and a bio. A generic proposal about leadership and unity clears that bar easily, because the bar is too low to catch it.
It also clears easily because leadership is already the default. Talkadot's 2026 industry data shows leadership content fills 17 to 19 percent of all association keynote bookings, every year, whether or not any individual session actually earns the slot. That is not a reason to stop booking leadership content. It is a reason to make every leadership session that gets approved clear the same bar a newer topic would have to.
The playbook's fix: publish the specific problems your members need solved, pulled straight from real frustrations, not session-title language. Then ask every presenter one question: can you run a Lab on this, and can you prove it?
Add a Third Format: the Lab
Most conferences run two formats. Keynote: big ideas, big energy, a different way to see the problem. Workshop: tactical instruction, here is how to solve it.
The playbook adds a third, and it is the one that actually filters your RFP pile: the Lab. Attendees bring their real, current scenario and leave with it partly or fully solved, working live with an expert facilitator. Doing is the highest form of learning, and a presenter who cannot demonstrate that in a sample video or a live breakdown should not clear your RFP.
One real example from the playbook: a live email teardown. Three actual subject lines on screen. "Which one would you skip?" Everyone in the room picked the same loser. The group rewrote it together, live, using a framework. Nobody left without an improved email program. That is a Lab. "Email Marketing 101" is not.
What to Change This Week
Rewrite your next RFP to ask for evidence, not just a topic. A sample video. A breakdown of a real scenario. Proof the presenter can run a Lab, not just talk at your members. That single change cuts through hundreds of generic submissions fast. It is the difference between a session members tolerate and one that changes their Monday.
This RFP fix works best alongside the reverse-engineering method we cover in Your Survey Is Lying to You: collect real frustrations first, then use this page to make sure the sessions you approve actually solve them. And if you are short on topics worth building a Lab around, The Topic Your Members Want Most Is the One You Keep Skipping has a data-backed one most associations are not booking.
The full Frustration-to-Diagnosis-to-Skill-to-Application method, plus real worked examples straight from Executive Director frustration lists, is in Talkadot's Association Event Design Playbook. Get the free 43-page playbook and the one-page framework at talkadot.com/playbook.
