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Call for Expressions of Interest to host the 11th European Survey Research Association Conference – July 2025

The scientific organising committee of the European Survey Research Association (ESRA) is calling for expressions of interest (EOI) for organising and hosting the 2025 ESRA Conference. We would like to hear from ESRA members, or other scholars working in survey research who would be interested in bringing the conference to their organisation.

The conference will be held in the month of July and is anticipated to attract around 900 participants. The conference is primarily funded by a combination of core funding from ESRA, registration fees paid by delegates, sponsorship, and contributions by the host organisation/venue. In line with ESRA’s aim of making the conference as inclusive as possible, efforts have always been made to keep the organisational costs to a minimum. In particular, the conference has always been held in universities providing meeting rooms free-of-charge, making it possible to maintain relatively low registration fees for the conference. The ESRA Committee would like to continue this convention for its 2025 conference. Furthermore, it is important that the venue has enough rooms to accommodate around 18 parallel sessions, as well as a larger auditorium for at least 400 delegates. The venue should be located in a town that has sufficient hotel capacity (see detailed specifications).

Hosting the ESRA conference offers numerous benefits for local organisers. In 2023, we expect around 900 delegates. We hope to have similar numbers in 2025. This means that the hosting venue benefits from a significant amount of publicity among international (European and non-European) survey researchers. It also means that the host town is able to profit from the large number of visitors – before, during and after the conference. ESRA makes every effort to cover costs to the local organiser (e.g. for personnel involved in the conference planning), so that no or only minimal costs are incurred. However, the budget for local organisation must be agreed with the ESRA Committee to ensure that these are reasonable and in line with expenditure in previous years.

Organisations interested in hosting the 2025 ESRA conference should submit an initial EOI by November 20, 2022. This should include information about the location and venue, approximate dates when the conference could be held, and the name and contact details of the person who would represent the local team. The application should have a maximum of two A4 pages.

All EOIs received will then be reviewed by members of the ESRA committee and depending on the number received, a shortlist will be drawn up. Those shortlisted will be contacted and may be asked to provide additional information to inform the final decision.

Inquiries and initial EOIs should be directed to Daniel Seddig at the University of Cologne, who will be serving as Conference Chair for the 2025 conference at: dseddig@uni-koeln.de. Further specifications are available here.