Conference Organizers: Pay Your Speakers
The Independent Sector National Summit is a conference I've been watching for years. Like many other conferences, they have historically treated leadership transition as a footnote (if they’ve recognized it as important at all). When I saw the focus list of topics for 2026 included succession planning, I genuinely celebrated. This topic was perfect for my expertise:
Succession Planning as Organizational Strategy: Executive transitions consistently destabilize funder relationships and institutional trust. Sessions address how organizations move beyond individual relationship dependency to build governance structures, leadership pipelines, and transition protocols that sustain organizational effectiveness through leadership change.
Finally!
Then I read the speaker terms.
Speaker Benefits:
Complimentary pass to the summit for Independent Sector members ($1k annually for an Associates membership or $500 annually for a for-profit consultancy with 1-4 employees)
50% discount off the early bird rate to non-members
Special recognition in summit materials
Networking opportunities with fellow presenters
*Please note that speakers are responsible for their own travel expenses and hotel arrangements
Fifty percent off the registration fee if you’re not a member. No honorarium.
Travel? Accommodation? Your problem.
Here's a super high level explanation of what I would pitch, if ISNS actually paid their speakers:
Succession Planning as Organizational Strategy
Executive transitions consistently destabilize funder relationships and institutional trust — not because leadership change is inherently dangerous, but because most organizations have built everything around a single person instead of building systems. This session would address exactly that: how organizations move beyond individual relationship dependency to build governance structures, leadership pipelines, and transition protocols that sustain organizational effectiveness through leadership change.
Succession planning is necessary infrastructure, and shouldn’t be treated as crisis management.
The session will challenge the idea that succession planning is something you do when someone announces they're leaving. Through this session, attendees will learn that succession planning is something you build into the DNA of your organization from day one — your board, your funders, your programs, your culture. When you do it right, leadership change becomes a strategic moment, not a destabilizing event.
The full pitch would be solid, timely, and exactly what Independent Sector says they want (apparently for the very first time) … and yet I won't be submitting it.
Here's why this matters beyond my frustration with Independent Sector:
Conferences that refuse to compensate speakers are making a values statement, whether they intend to or not. They are saying that expertise is a marketing opportunity for the speaker, not a resource worth paying for. They are saying that the labor of preparation, travel logistics, intellectual development, and on-stage delivery is worth a 50% discount code.
For speakers who are building and running consulting practices, speaking is work. Exposure doesn't pay my subcontractors, my flight from Atlanta, or my lodging.
This topic—succession planning, leadership transition, organizational sustainability—is one that requires seasoned practitioners. It’s a topic that requires folks who have sat with a board chair who is in a panic, trying to make heads or tails of a sudden and unexpected departure, or who have supported a new manager who has just been told they need to step into the ED’s shoes after a public termination. This topic merits hearing from people who have actually done this work, and those people have rates.
This isn't a topic I stumbled into. I've spent years doing this work—writing a book on Leaving Well (with a second coming Summer 2026), hosting nearly 100 podcast episodes on leadership transition, and developing Leaving Well™ (a proprietary methodology) and People Leave™ (a signature concept), both of which reframe departures as organizational infrastructure rather than institutional crisis. I provide interim executive leadership to organizations mid-transition, which means I'm not just teaching this work from a stage — I'm in it at the hardest moments, when the stakes are real.
I've built and delivered board governance curricula, developed The Well Lab as a structured learning community for nonprofit leaders (launching Summer 2026!), and work directly with foundation program officers to help them provide succession planning support to their grantees (through workshops, retreats, online cohorts, and direct services support) since succession instability isn't just a grantee problem — it's a portfolio problem and I know funders have to be part of this conversation.
So here's what I'd like conference organizers (all of them, not just Independent Sector) to actually reckon with:
Pay your speakers. A flat honorarium, even a modest one, signals that you understand expertise has value. It changes who says yes to you, and it changes the quality of what lands on your stage.
Cover travel. If you're asking someone to leave their clients, their work, and their home to represent your conference's credibility, the least you can do is get them there.
Stop calling a registration discount compensation. It isn't. It's a mild inconvenience reduction. These are not the same thing.
Build speaker investment into your budget from the start. If your conference model can't sustain paying the people who make it worth attending, that's a budget problem — not a speaker problem.
The nonprofit sector talks constantly about valuing labor, centering equity, and building sustainable systems. It's past time for our convenings to reflect those values.
As it turns out, the same days that ISNS will be happening, I'll be in Charlotte at the Contagious Culture Conference as a paid speaker talking about Leaving Well and succession planning to a room full of nonprofit leaders. The irony that Independent Sector and Contagious Culture share the same dates is not lost on me. Contagious Culture pays their speakers, and that tells you everything about how they value the work.
Don’t get me wrong. I'm glad succession planning is finally on the Independent Sector agenda, and I’m still celebrating that reality. It's a topic I've been pitching to conferences for years, and most have declined. Progress is progress.
But progress doesn't mean free.
If you are a conference organizer or want to bring Leaving Well to your organization / city / ecosystem, you can learn more about my speaking and submit a contact form for booking.