How to run a speaker program

A speaker program is a meeting request like any other. Speaker program is one of the request categories on the meeting request form. A program is requested in the portal, routed for approval, budgeted, delivered, and closed on the standard event lifecycle. A speaker program is not a record type of its own and has no section of its own in Onomi 360. The request category is what marks it out in the portfolio calendar, in the filters, and in the reports.

The part worth reading before you request one is the faculty step. Each speaker is shown there with their eligibility status and their engagement count at the moment of choice. A speaker who is not eligible cannot be selected. Everything after approval is the event lifecycle you already run.

The Speaker program request category is available since the 2026.03 release.

Before you start

• The Speaker program request category must be set up for your organization and offered to requesters. Categories, their field sets, and their Available in the portal setting are configured on the Request form tab of Event requests in Onomi 360. See Configuring the request form and its categories.
• The category's field set must carry the Faculty field, because that is the field that renders the faculty list and shows the eligibility statuses. It is added from the shared field library with Add a field. See Configuring the request form and its categories.
• Each speaker's eligibility status is held on that speaker's own record and comes from your speaker qualification process. The request form displays the status and acts on it. It does not decide it.
• The request and approval flow must be configured for your organization, because a speaker program routes through it exactly as any other request does. See How to set up and use meeting requests and approvals.
• Requesters need only the meeting request portal, reachable by link and SSO, with no workspace access. Planners need workspace access for the events they run. The roles and scopes are documented in Role-based access and visibility for internal and external stakeholders.

Requesting a speaker program

1. In the meeting request portal, start a new request and select the request category Speaker program. The form adapts to that category's field set, as it does for a congress or an advisory board (see Submitting, tracking, and withdrawing a request).
2. Complete the request. The fields are the category's own, and none of them is specific to speaker programs. They are the title, the format, the proposed dates, and the country and city. They also include the dimensions your organization routes and reports by, the attendee and HCP attendee bands, the budget band, and the objectives. What each field feeds is documented in Configuring the request form and its categories.
3. On the audience and faculty step, select the speakers in the Faculty field. Each entry shows that speaker's eligibility status and their Engagements count, the engagements the speaker already carries. How much a speaker has already done and whether they are cleared to speak are both visible at the moment of choice. A speaker whose status is Not eligible cannot be selected, and the form says why: "This speaker is not eligible for selection in this program."

   

4. Submit the request. It routes on your organization's approval rules, on the same axes as any other request. Those axes are its request category, its budget band, whether HCP attendees are present, and the dimensions it carries. Follow it in My requests and read the decision there. See Submitting, tracking, and withdrawing a request.

Note: The speaker you need may not appear in the Faculty list, or may appear as Not eligible. That is a question for your speaker qualification process rather than for the request. That process maintains the status on the speaker's record, and a status changed there is what the form offers the next time it is opened.

Finding your speaker programs

Speaker programs are read where every other engagement is read. In Onomi 360, open the portfolio calendar and set the Request category filter to Speaker program.

The calendar then shows only the speaker programs in the period you are viewing, with the number of matching engagements stated under the heading. List view gives the same set as rows. Each row carries its Speaker program category value beside its date, location, audience band, dimensions, and status.

The same filter works on the World map and in the reports. A speaker-program view of the portfolio is therefore a filter you set or save rather than a section of its own. For the calendar, the filters, and saving a filtered cut as a report, see How to use Onomi 360: the portfolio calendar, engagement view, and reports.

What happens after approval

Nothing after approval is specific to a speaker program, which is the point of running it as a request category. Each part of the lifecycle is documented where it belongs:

• Approval, execution, and the audit trail. What approval creates, when the workspace appears, and what the record keeps: From approval to execution and auditing requests.
• Budget. The approved band carried from the request, the cost lines, the commitments, and the actuals: How to use the Budget module.
• Venue, travel, and accommodation. Sourcing the venue: How to source a venue from your event. The HCP travel and room blocks around the meeting: How to manage travel and accommodation for your event.
• Delivery. Registration, invitations, the agenda, and on-the-day execution run on the event's workspace with the platform's standard event capabilities. For adding the sessions themselves, see Adding sessions to the workspace agenda. For attendance, see How to manage agenda session check-ins and How to track attendance to your event.
• Transfer of value. Honoraria and hospitality allocate per attendee from the event's budget actuals. They reach the disclosure handoff from there: How to manage transfer of value on your events.
• Closure. The event's finance owner reconciles the cost lines and records the closure with Close event: Reconciliation, invoices, and closing the event.

For what the release added, see the speaker programs entry in the 2026.03 release notes.

* Onomi 360 MeetingsEQ exclusive capabilities.