TL;DR
Conferences are a high-variance tool. Their value depends on your role, timing, goals, and constraints. Attending one or two a year for serendipity can make sense, but conferences should be a deliberate choice, not a default.

Acknowledgements: thank you to Naomi Nederlof, Kevin Xia and Therese Veith for your feedback and suggestions!

Why I needed a framework

When I was early in the movement, I didn’t go to conferences simply because I didn’t know how impactful they could be. When I finally discovered them, I wanted to go to everything. And honestly, that phase was great. Conferences gave me context, confidence, access, and relationships I would not have built otherwise. Almost all of them felt worth it.

As my work grew, my responsibilities increased, and my network expanded, that changed. My time became more fragmented. I realised that many conversations I used to travel for could now happen online. I could learn a lot just by reading, writing, and talking to people remotely. Some conferences still paid off, but others crowded out core work without delivering much in return.

Conferences as a tool, not a default

People often ask whether conferences are worth attending, how many to attend, and which ones are worth it for them. The most accurate answer I’ve found is: it depends on where you are, what you need, and what you are trading off.

Conferences are not inherently high- or low-impact. They are a tool whose value varies sharply by context. They compress access, learning, and trust, but they also consume time, energy, and attention.

Their impact is also uneven: you can attend several and see little return, then have one conversation that leads to something significant. For that reason, attending one or two a year for serendipity can make sense, as long as the opportunity cost is acceptable. But the right question remains: is this conference, right now, a good use of limited resources?

A practical decision framework

Before committing to a conference, I now try to answer a small set of questions:

• What specific outcome would make this conference worth the time and cost?
• What work will be delayed or dropped as a result of attending?
• Can the same goal be achieved another way, such as online meetings, writing, or smaller events, even if that would only be 70–80% as effective?
• Is this the right conference for that goal?
• Can someone else from the team or a volunteer attend on my behalf?

These questions force trade-offs into the open, which is crucial to an honest assessment.

When conferences are more likely to be worth it

Conferences tend to be a good use of time in a few recurring situations:

• You’re early in the movement or your career, when access, context, and informal knowledge are still scarce. Almost any solid conference in your cause area will accelerate learning and connections. If you’re unsure whether a conference is relevant, you can check previous speakers, ask the organizers who it’s designed for, or ask peers about their experience.
• You’re starting something new, launching a project, looking for a job or role, or facing a trust bottleneck where meeting people in person speeds things up.
• You’re a funder who wants to meet grantees outside formal settings or meet potential grantees in person.
• You provide a service, and it’s likely that many people from your target audience will be at the conference.
• You’re experienced and can contribute by sharing expertise, making your work visible, or convening discussions.

One more thing: conferences can be beneficial because they can be energising. For many people working remotely in this movement, they’re rare chances to meet colleagues from across the world. That social connection has value on its own. 

It’s also worth noting that retreats, side gatherings, or focused meetings organised around a conference can add more value than the main programme itself and sometimes justify attendance on their own.

When conferences are more likely to be low-value

You might want to skip a conference if:

• You’re already well-connected and can meet most relevant people outside conferences, or your work needs long stretches of uninterrupted focus.
• There likely won’t be many people from your target audience.
• You’re attending by default, going to talks or meetings without a clear purpose, or doing ad hoc advising that’s not linked to your role or impact goals.
• Your organisation is already well represented. If 5 people from your team are going, an 6th person rarely adds much. Assess the marginal value of your attendance, given who else will be there.
• You want to meet funders but haven’t checked in advance. Many people travel, hoping to connect with funders who may not be there or don’t have time. If funding conversations are your main reason, confirm beforehand whether they’ll attend and be open to meeting.
• The costs outweigh the benefits. If attendance is expensive and you can’t secure support to cover it, or if logistics (location, visas, caregiving, health) make it genuinely hard, that’s a real constraint.

Diversifying across “conference bubbles”

Beyond deciding whether a specific conference is worth attending, it’s also worth thinking about which types of conferences to prioritise over the course of a year.

One heuristic my colleague Kevin Xia suggested recently is to think of conferences as distinct bubbles rather than interchangeable events.

An example from animal advocacy: instead of attending three similar conferences in the same ecosystem, he encourages us to spread attendance across different types of spaces, such as:

• one Animal and Vegan Advocacy Summit–type event,
• one Effective Altruism conference,
• one broader future-facing event, such as Sentient Futures Summit.

The exact mix will differ by role and interests, but the underlying idea is to deliberately expose yourself to different norms, assumptions, and ways of thinking.

This matters because conferences often reinforce the perspectives of the bubble they sit in. Attending only one type of conference can lead to diminishing returns, while attending a small number of genuinely different conferences can increase the chance of encountering ideas, collaborators, or framings you would not otherwise encounter.

I find this framing helpful as a second-order filter: after deciding how many conferences to attend in a year, I then ask whether they expose me to meaningfully different contexts, or whether I’m just repeating the same conversation in slightly different rooms.

If you do go, plan

Conference upside rarely happens by accident. Turning up with no plan and hoping something happens significantly lowers the odds of a good outcome.

Planning usually means being clear about who you want to meet and why, deciding which meetings you will accept or decline, pacing your time and energy, and defining what would count as a “good enough” outcome. Many conferences now offer pre-conference planning tools or structured networking, which are usually worth using. I wrote about this in a separate post you can check out.

If you would like to learn more about conferences in the animal advocacy movement, check out Hive’s resource page.

Closing thought

Conferences are one way to build trust, learn, and be visible. They are not the default way.

The question is not whether conferences are good or bad. It is whether this conference, right now, is a good use of your limited time and attention.

How do you decide whether to attend a conference?

Hi, I’m Sofia Balderson. I lead Hive, a global community for people working to end factory farming. This is a link post from my Substack, Notes from the Margin to share the messier, more personal reflections that don’t fit in formal updates. If you care about leading, belonging, or building something that matters (especially from the edges), feel free to subscribe here.