In practical terms, long story short, I need a certificate of participation with the name of a university or scientific association in the letterhead.
This echoes what I was told by a lecturer at the Australian National University. Academics would like to participate at these events, but they need to clearly fit into the academic narrative. Conference precedeeings, a formal call for papers circulated to academic listservs, some indication of how the peer review process is done for deciding who presenters are, highlighting university participation as a co-host/partner for the event, a list of other academics who have been invited and will be participating, etc. There need to be signifiers that the conference is intentionally being marketed at academics, with academics having something they can take home from it.
I'm uncomfortable with the thought spending much effort and money to meet the needs of for-tuition educational endeavors which are much less effective on a per-dollar basis than Foundation projects.
I think we should aggressively meet the demands of academics by asking them why their hiring, retention, and tenure decisions are based on the impact factors of journals with circulations typically averaging in the thousands without any regard to inclusions in and citations on Foundation project pages with orders of magnitude more page views.
Sincerely, James Salsman