How to Submit a Disarmament Week 2026 Side Event: The Organiser's Guide

You have the panel. You have the speakers. You have a room or a video link, and a question worth debating. What you do not have — and what determines whether your session reaches thirty people or three hundred — is visibility.

Side events live or die on discovery. A brilliantly designed roundtable that only circulates on one mailing list reaches one network. The same session, published in a searchable, filterable directory alongside the rest of the Disarmament Week programme, reaches delegates who were looking for exactly your topic and never knew you existed.

Disarmament Week Hub is built to close that gap. This guide walks through the entire submission flow at /submit-event, explains the contribution model, and covers what happens after you hit submit.

Who can submit

The portal is deliberately open. It is designed for:

Diplomatic missions and permanent representations hosting briefings, treaty-focused panels or national report discussions
UN partner entities and intergovernmental organisations launching research, convening expert dialogues or running technical workshops
International and national NGOs organising advocacy events, survivor testimony, humanitarian briefings or capacity-building sessions
Grassroots coalitions and community organisations working on armed violence prevention, small arms control or victim assistance
Youth networks and student initiatives running intergenerational dialogues, education programmes or youth-led declarations
Research institutes and academic centres presenting findings, hosting seminars or convening closed-door roundtables

There is no minimum organisation size, no institutional gatekeeping and no accreditation requirement to publish a listing. A five-person coalition and a permanent mission use the identical form.

Before you start: get four things ready

Submissions go faster when you have these prepared:

A clear, specific title. "Verification Without a Treaty: Technical Options for the Next Decade" tells a delegate what they are walking into. "Disarmament Panel" does not.
A description you have already drafted. Two or three tight paragraphs covering the policy question, the format, and what a participant takes away.
Your speaker list with roles and affiliations. This is the strongest signal of substance a listing can carry.
A banner or event image. Cards in grid view are visual. A clean image with your organisation's identity makes your session recognisable at a glance.

Also confirm your date, start and end time, and time zone before you begin, and — if you are non-profit — have your registration documentation available as a file.

Step 1: Event details and classification

The first step captures everything that will appear in your public listing.

Event Classification (required)

Before anything else, you choose one of two classifications:

Disarmament Week 2026 Official Side Event (24–30 October) — for sessions taking place within the observance week itself and framed as part of the Disarmament Week programme.
Year-Round Global Initiative / Side Event — for disarmament-related events outside the October window: preparatory meetings, treaty review side events, ongoing seminar series, campaign launches and regional workshops.

This choice is required because it does real work in the directory. Visitors arriving to plan their 24–30 October week see a coherent Disarmament Week programme; visitors researching a theme year-round can still find your event months later. Classifying a February treaty workshop as a Disarmament Week event would dilute the first group's experience, and hiding it entirely would waste the second group's search. Pick the one that honestly describes your session.

The listing fields

You then provide:

Organisation name — exactly as you want it credited publicly. This is searchable, so use the form people actually know you by.
Point of contact email — for moderation correspondence and any follow-up about your listing.
Event title — specific and substantive.
Event type and format — In-person, Hybrid or Virtual. Be accurate: this is one of the most-used filters on the platform, and a mislabelled format produces frustrated no-shows.
Date, start and end time, with an explicit time zone selector — never skip the time zone. Disarmament Week audiences span every region, and an unlabelled time is the single most common cause of missed international sessions.
Venue or joining link — a physical address with room detail for in-person events, or connection information for virtual and hybrid ones.
Description — objectives, framing, format and takeaway.
Target audience — delegates and negotiators, researchers, civil society practitioners, youth, or general public. This helps the right people self-select and protects your session from mismatched attendance.
Logo, banner and event image upload — high-resolution imagery for your card and detail view.

Write the description for a reader who is not already inside your community. Spell out acronyms on first use. A delegate scanning forty listings will give yours a few seconds; make those seconds informative.

Step 2: Pay-What-You-Wish Support Contribution

This is where Disarmament Week Hub deliberately departs from how most event directories work.

Conventional platforms charge a flat listing fee. In this field, that fee is regressive: it is trivial for a well-resourced institution and a genuine barrier for a survivor-led organisation, a national NGO in an affected region, or a student network — precisely the voices that disarmament diplomacy is most often criticised for excluding. A pricing model that filters out those participants degrades the quality of the dialogue.

So the Hub uses a voluntary contribution model:

The Disarmament Hub is free for non-profits, grassroots coalitions, and youth networks ($0 minimum). If your organization has the capacity, consider a voluntary solidarity contribution to cover domain hosting, security, and moderation operations.

You choose from a contribution selector:

$0 — Free for NGOs
$10
$25 — Suggested
$50
Custom amount — any figure you enter

Contributions fund the unglamorous but necessary parts of running a credible public directory: domain and hosting costs, security, and the human moderation time that keeps the listings trustworthy.

If you select $0

Choosing the free tier requires two things:

Proof of non-profit status — a 501(c)(3) determination letter, a national NGO or charity registration certificate, or the equivalent documentation in your jurisdiction. International equivalents are explicitly accepted; this is not a US-centric requirement.
A certification checkbox — confirming that the documentation you have uploaded is valid and current.

Once both are complete you move straight to review and submission. No card details are requested, no payment screen is mounted, and nothing is held pending. The verification step exists solely so the free tier remains meaningful for the organisations it was designed for.

If you select any amount above $0

Selecting $10, $25, $50 or a custom figure mounts a secure Stripe checkout for the exact amount you chose. There is no fixed price being quietly reapplied — the charge is the amount you selected. Custom amounts are validated server-side within sensible bounds (a $5 minimum and a $10,000 maximum) to prevent processing errors and abuse.

Payment happens before final confirmation, and you are returned to a confirmation page showing the contribution amount that was processed.

Which tier should you choose?

Be honest rather than strategic. If you are a grassroots coalition or youth network, take the $0 tier — it exists for you, and using it is not an imposition. If you are a mission, an intergovernmental body, a well-funded institute or a commercial entity, the suggested $25 is a small solidarity contribution that helps keep the platform free for everyone else. Nobody's listing is ranked, promoted or deprioritised based on what they contributed.

Step 3: Review and submit

Before anything is sent, you get a full preview of your event exactly as it will appear publicly — the card, the badges, the imagery and the complete detail view.

Use this step properly. Check:

Date, time and time zone — the most consequential field on the form
Format label against reality (a hybrid session labelled in-person will lose your remote audience)
Organisation name spelling, and speaker names, roles and affiliations
That your registration link actually resolves
That your image is sharp and correctly cropped
Acronyms expanded, and no unexplained internal jargon

Then submit.

After submission: moderation

Every event enters with a status of pending and is reviewed before publication. Nothing appears in the public directory automatically.

Moderation is a quality safeguard, not editorial control over your content. Reviewers confirm that the listing is a genuine disarmament-related event, that required fields are complete and coherent, that imagery is appropriate, and that the classification matches the actual date and framing. Once approved, the status moves to approved and your event becomes publicly visible at /events — searchable, filterable and viewable in grid, list and timeline modes by anyone, with no sign-in required to browse.

Submit early. An approved listing sitting in the directory for weeks before the observance accumulates far more visibility than one published two days out, and it gives delegates building their schedules a real chance to include you.

Get started

Open the event submission portal
See how visitors will find your session in the events directory
Learn about the observance itself on the about page
Read more organiser guidance on the Disarmament Week Hub blog

Disarmament Week is only as strong as the range of voices convening around it. If your organisation has something worth discussing, publish it — the barrier is intentionally close to zero.