Here is a sample email that you could send to a decision maker, extolling the virtues and benefits of attendance.
FROM: [yourname]
TO: [your supervisor’s name]
RE: Improvement of my PowerPoint skills and presentation effectiveness
With the uncertainty coming out of Covid, I appreciate how our company needs to invest its training budget wisely. There is a cost-effective professional education conference this fall that will help our team immeasurably. It will help us with presentation development and delivery, both in-person and virtual, while reducing expenses and resources needed to craft, design, build, and deliver presentations to the level expected of our organization.
I would like to attend the 2023 Presentation Summit, either in person or virtually. The Summit is hosted by well-known author and presentations consultant Rick Altman — he and his team will present over 35 seminars, workshops, and keynote addresses over three days. Topics cover all aspects of presentation: message crafting, presentation design, slide creation technique, and delivery. Here are a few that I think would be particularly helpful:
[Visit the seminar schedule and select the seminar titles that you think would provide the most benefit for your company.]
The registration fee is among the lowest of any I have found for a multi-day event — under $1,500 if attending in person in Monterey CA and under $600 for virtual. The room rate at the Asilomar Resort is $315/night and that includes all of my meals. Traveling to Monterey will cost about [________]. There are low-cost shuttles to and from the airport or I could rent a car (parking is free at Asilomar).
Of course, the virtual option is even more cost-effective, and we don’t have to make that choice now. We could register for either one and upgrade or downgrade without penalty.
With the current economic conditions, everyone at [your company] is being asked to spend wisely and control costs wherever possible. This conference is a small capital investment and yet a giant leap in empowering me and others involved in presentations to up our games. The seminars will provide us with essential knowledge about the best way to design and deliver presentations, and the technical sessions will teach us much more about PowerPoint than we could learn otherwise.
This knowledge will enable us to handle [a particular client or project] with more professionalism and confidence, which will reflect favorably on all of us.
