Tips for After-Hours Proposal Submissions

Year after year, hundreds of proposals for the annual meeting are submitted in the last two days before the deadline for submissions; in the last hours, proposals typically come in by the minute. 99% of them will come through successfully and without incident. Still, we stay alert in these last days to solve problems that may arise—but we’re only there during business hours.

This year, we’re extending the proposal deadline to May 2 to allow you the weekend to finalize your proposal. We will return on Monday to address any last-minute concerns. Be assured that we will take time on Monday, as necessary, to resolve remaining problems with all good-faith efforts to meet the deadline.

Many questions may be answered in the instructions starting with How to Submit a Proposal. Here are some additional tips for resolving problems without staff intervention:

Deferred proposals
If you deferred a proposal from last year, we sent an email on March 30 from [email protected] with the subject line “Your deferred 2020 AFS proposal” and instructions about how to proceed. Do not follow the general instructions for “how to submit a proposal,” which cover only new proposals. If you can’t find that email, contact us as soon as possible at [email protected], and we will help when we return on Monday. In that case, plan to have your proposal complete by midnight May 3.

Trouble finding the proposal forms
ALL PRESENTERS must 1) register, then 2) submit their own program information to AFS. These are two separate steps, to be completed by everyone who is to be listed in the program, including forum participants and co-presenters. You will receive an email with a personalized link to the submission system after you’ve registered for the meeting.

Meeting registration is not the same as submitting personal information for the meeting program!
The link to the online proposal system is on your meeting registration confirmation page, and in an email sent to your primary email address to confirm your meeting registration (Subject line: “Thank you for registering for the event.”)

If you did not receive the registration confirmation email, please send a message to [email protected] with the subject line “Need Registration Confirmation Email.” If you can do this during business hours, we will send you the link to the proposal form as soon as possible. If this happens over the weekend, let us know. We will be in touch on Monday with further instructions for accessing the portal; in that case, plan to have your proposal complete by midnight May 3.

Bookmark or note the URL of the proposal submission portal! That way, if you can’t find your confirmation emails, you will still be able to return to your submitted information.


Trouble adding participants to your forum or paper session

If you receive an error message saying “The confirmation number you entered does not exist in our system,” it is likely because that person has registered for the annual meeting, but has not yet submitted their personal information in the proposal system (see above–these are two separate steps). Confirm with them whether they have done both steps, and try again.

If the problem persists, let us know by sending an email to [email protected].


High traffic errors and other oddities

The high volume of proposal submissions sometimes leads to error messages concerning processing errors on the website. Those frequently resolve themselves if you wait and try again later. If the page content doesn’t resolve or behave, try another web browser or computer, preferably one that is up to date.

If you run into a problem that isn’t so easily resolved, don’t worry, but do send us an email right away at [email protected] so that we can address the problem as soon as possible on Monday.