Call for Speakers Digest
A weekly HTML email digest of open Call for Speakers (CFP) opportunities matching your topics of interest, sourced from real CFP-tracking sites rather than general search alone. Works in Copilot Studio, Cowork, or Scout.
Why this skill exists
Finding open CFPs is scattered work: no single site has everything, deadlines change, and it’s easy to either miss an opportunity or keep seeing the same one every week with no new signal. This skill does the recurring legwork, checks known CFP aggregators plus targeted search, filters out anything already closed, and only resurfaces something you’ve already seen if its deadline is now genuinely urgent.
What makes this different from a generic “find me some conferences” search
- Real sources, not guesses. Pulls from confs.tech and Papercall’s public open-CFP listings, plus targeted search, rather than trying to infer deadlines from a conference’s general marketing page.
- Verifies openness. Discards anything whose CFP has already closed instead of listing it “for reference.”
- Honest about unknowns. If a page doesn’t state speaker benefits, the digest says “not specified,” it doesn’t assume travel and hotel are covered just because that’s common.
- No repeat noise. A CFP that already appeared in a previous digest won’t show up again unless its deadline is now inside the final week, that’s the one case worth a second mention.
- Remembers your profile. Set your topics once; each run just checks in briefly rather than re-running a full interview.
Requirements
Needs web search. Sending the digest as an actual email needs a connected email tool (Gmail or Outlook), without one it still builds the digest, just delivers it as a file instead of sending it, and says so plainly.
The weekly cadence itself comes from the platform’s own recurring task scheduling where one exists (Cowork and Scout both support this), not from anything inside this skill. If the platform you’re using doesn’t support scheduled tasks, you’ll need to trigger it manually each week instead.
Pitfalls, read this before treating it as complete
This is a helper, not a guarantee. It’s built to be genuinely thorough, but it can still miss things, and it’s worth knowing why so you don’t quietly assume full coverage where there isn’t one:
- Coverage depends on what’s discoverable. Some sites are only searchable, not browsable (their listing pages are JavaScript-rendered and return no real data on a direct fetch), so the skill relies on search indexing catching individual event pages. If a search engine hasn’t indexed something yet, this skill won’t find it either.
- Scope is a real tradeoff, not a solved problem. Broadening to a whole platform or ecosystem (Microsoft 365 instead of just Copilot Studio, for example) catches a lot more, but “a lot more” isn’t “everything,” and it also means more judgment calls about relevance that could go either way. Staying narrow is more precise but will miss events branded at the umbrella level even when their actual content matches. There’s no scope setting that guarantees zero misses.
- New and very niche communities are the likeliest gaps. A CFP from a brand-new event series, or one from a small regional community with no web presence beyond a Meetup page, is exactly the kind of thing general search and aggregators are slowest to catch.
- Treat this as a strong starting point, not a replacement for occasionally checking yourself, especially for a marquee conference you really don’t want to miss. If something matters enough that missing it would sting, it’s worth a manual look too every so often, not just trusting the weekly digest alone.
Author
Michael Heath (Get Automating)