Justify Your Attendance

Seeking approval to attend IAIA22? Check out the justification toolkit below, featuring a sample attendance justification letter and a cost worksheet. Be sure to check out the Why Attend IAIA22 page for more reasons and stats to support your request.

SAMPLE JUSTIFICATION LETTER

Use the sample letter below as a starting point for putting together your request for attendance. Simply copy and paste the text into an email or Word document and personalize it as necessary. This letter, geared toward in-person attendance, will help outline the value that attending IAIA22 provides not just to you as an impact assessment professional but also to your entire organization.

I would like to request approval to attend IAIA22:Confidence in Impact Assessment: Policies, partnerships and public involvement to be held 4-7 May 2022 in Vancouver, BC, Canada (http://conferences.iaia.org/2022). This four-day event is expected to attract over 1000 impact assessment professionals from 80+ nations both in-person and virtually. It will give me an opportunity to share and learn best practices and network with a wide range of industry experts and peers from all over the world in a single trip.

The International Association for Impact Assessment (IAIA) has hosted annual conferences for over 40 years. IAIA22 will be composed of plenaries with well-known keynote speakers, many concurrent sessions, and a wide range of networking opportunities. Based on information from the IAIA website, delegates at the 2019 conference found the event to be valuable: 97% would recommend future IAIA conferences to their colleagues, 93% met at least one person they planned to contact after the conference for something related to their work, and 86% felt they had acquired significant new information, knowledge, and/or techniques directly applicable to their work.

I expect IAIA22 will be a great opportunity for my professional development. [If the conference theme relates directly or indirectly to your work, add a sentence to describe this.] I can attend sessions such as [insert applicable session names here; view submitted sessions at http://conferences.iaia.org/2022/sessions.php] that are directly applicable to my work and to our company. Practitioners and researchers from around the world will be presenting their case studies, results, and lessons learned. [Insert text here if you have submitted your own abstract and/or can showcase your organization!] Not only will I be able to learn from those experiences and gain new ideas and techniques, but I will also be able to meet and interact with these top-level IA experts and other local participants with whom our company could collaborate in the future.

There will also be pre-conference training courses and technical visits. I am particularly interested in [insert course or visit name], because [describe how it relates to your work]. The registration fee for this event is [see cost worksheet or registration form]. I request approval for the registration fee plus travel costs. For your convenience, I have attached an estimated breakdown of the anticipated expenses.

Thank you in advance for your consideration and please let me know if you would like additional information about IAIA22.

COST WORKSHEET

To demonstrate a valuable return on investment, you should reinforce the long-term value of your conference expenses to your organization. To help you calculate your conference expenses, complete and share the cost worksheet below with your management to obtain approval.