Call For Speakers: Applying and speaking at conferences
By: Tutti Quintella
Tags: Career Development, Tech Talk, Public Speaking, Thought Leadership, Events

I was recently invited to give this talk at one of our Women Who Code events. A talk about talking #talkception. Anyways, after putting together some pretty slides on Canva.com and writing a few speaker notes and memos for my presentation, I thought I’d polish my notes and make it an illustrated article, because… why not? So here it is.

I started getting myself comfortable in front of larger crowds around my first year of college. Actually, at that time I was teaching English to kids on the weekends, so it was a very unique (and loud) crowd. But beyond that, I soon got involved in activities inside my university campus like leading the student union, then the sports league. In those activities, I often had to give announcements, organize and host big events or even fundraise on the campus, so I got used to speaking in front of people. And most importantly, I got used to messing up or looking stupid in front of people (yeah, it happens all the time), so I kind of had to overcome that fear early on. This does not mean it gets less nerve-wracking over time, I still get nervous every single time. But I just got used to being uncomfortable, so it’s less scary now.

In 2018 I started officially speaking at tech conferences and large events, as an organizer or guest speaker. That’s when I learned how to craft talk proposals, speaker bio, polish my content, etc. I tried to summarize the steps and what I’ve learned in 4 sections:

Index (order of topics)

But before we go into anything, I’d like to start with some essential DOs and DONTs that are important to remember across the whole process. And because it’s easier to explain this way, I’ll start with the DONTs.

Don’t reject yourself before you even try. A lot of people tell me they don’t have anything interesting to talk about, or that whatever they know is obvious or not good enough. Stop rejecting yourself before you even try. Conferences and events have people to analyze and curate talk proposals. Let THEM judge if your talk is interesting to their event, you might be surprised by how many people out there are interested in hearing what you have to say.

Don’t try to please or interest everyone. And we’re gonna go into more details when we talk about setting your audience, but this is a classic mistake. You start a material talking about the basics of web development and suddenly you’re freaking out that senior developers will fall asleep or criticize everything you say. Guess what? You’ll never please everyone, so you’d better narrow down your target audience. And in the same direction…

Don’t try to make it perfect or bullet-proof. I cannot stress how much time I’ve wasted trying to make my presentations perfect. Researching every single detail to make sure what I was saying was 100% accurate and bullet-proof. First, it’s a waste of time. You’re not trying to write a scientific research paper here (those take a little longer to produce, I can assure you you’re not gonna produce one in a couple of weeks). Second, leave the lecture to professors. If you’re feeling insecure that you don’t master 100% of the topic you’re trying to talk about, don’t try to make a bullet-proof lecture on it.

Which brings us to the DOs:

Remember everyone has something unique to say. Just reinforcing, no one is expecting you to present a scientific paper or teach a lecture. Actually, the most interesting talks are the ones where you present personal experiences and perspectives, and that’s why EVERYONE has something unique to talk about.

Set and care for your target audience. In line with not trying to please or interest everyone, remember to set a specific target audience for your content and then care about what THEY would be interested in around the topic you’re talking about.

Practice, rehearse, and get feedback. We’ll go more into that later as well, but it’s a given that you get good at whatever you practice the most. So if you’re feeling nervous about your talk, the best you can do is practice, rehearse and get some feedback from close friends, family, or even coworkers.

Ok, now we can move forward to…

Choosing a topic and an audience

As I briefly mentioned before, you probably don’t wanna make it a lecture, where you just replicate general or conceptual knowledge you found on a textbook, Wikipedia or WikiHow. That not only has little value more than a Google search on the topic, but it also takes you to the rabbit hole of insecurity, because you’re repeating what other authors said and not your personal views, you’re gonna keep wondering “How can I make sure what I’m saying is 100% correct?” and end up overcompensating to find evidence, cite credible sources for everything, etc.

On the other hand, as much as can choose to talk purely about a personal experience, you may end up with a talk that sounds more like your diary or a session of stand-up comedy, from which the audience may not be able to take any useful insights if you don’t structure it in a meaningful way.

So my advice here is to look for that sweet balance where your personal experience expands or exemplify some conceptual industry knowledge. For example, I read tons of articles about “effective leadership” and I also have been to leadership trainings throughout my career. But whenever I create content about leadership practices, I always like to link it to my personal experience and real-life anecdotes as a manager. It’s especially interesting when the real-life experience goes against theoretical knowledge, cause it reminds us why theoretical knowledge is exactly that: theory only.

Here are some useful questions to help brainstorming on topics you can talk about:

For your first talks, it may be easier to start with something broad like “What do you care about?” or “What have you done?”. As an example, when I started public speaking officially, my first talk was “Intro to the Software Development World” where I explained the basic jargon programmers use and where to start learning depending on what you want to accomplish. That was because I really care about making tech a more inclusive space, and I wanted to tell people who are interested in learning to code to not be scared of technical jargon, and that the path to learning programming is different depending on what you want to build using code. After that, on the line of “What have you done?” my second talk was about refactoring code and cleaning up technical debt, that was right after I did a big refactor at my job and I had just joined a “Code Health” project to help cleaning technical debt, so it was pretty easy to talk about something I had literally just done a few weeks earlier.

After the first talks, I particularly like to explore topics that fit into the questions “What do you wish someone told you a year ago?” and “What was the last article/presentation you disagreed with or felt was not good enough?”. These are a bit more challenging and require some extra confidence in your personal experiences, especially when you’ll explore a controversial opinion on a certain topic.

When deciding the topic you’re gonna talk about, it’s very important to define your target audience. As I mentioned earlier, you don’t wanna fall into the trap of trying to please or interest everyone, so one idea here is to think of one or more personas that represent your audience. For example, in this talk, I thought of: people who are attending a Women Who Code event about building a personal brand. I’m assuming a part of my audience will have some experience in tech, maybe some of them will have a little experience with public speaking, but most likely they’re people interested in becoming public speakers or an influencer and would benefit from actionable advice on how to get started.

Of course, if you don’t have a specific event in mind before you start working on your talk, you can decide arbitrarily on the target audience and then later you look for events where this audience would be.

Writing your speaker bio

When crafting a speaker bio, I really like this advice I learned on the Global Diversity CFP Day workshop: focus on answering the question “Why are you qualified to talk about this topic?”. And of course, it doesn’t have to be that you are an expert with years of experience on the matter, it could very well be because you’re talking about a personal experience in a project or activity you were part of. This also means that you’ll usually have a slightly different bio for each of your talk proposals.

Needless to say, you should follow whatever guidelines the event application gives you, and another rule of thumb is to always write your bio in the third person.

Crafting your content

On crafting content, I like to highlight 3 main aspects: storytelling, slide design and language & tone.

Storytelling

I’m not an expert in storytelling or anything, but as most people must have studied back in dissertation classes in school, you can make your story cohesive, easy to follow and dynamic by following certain patterns.

The most common I know and like to use is:

Introduction to the theme: explaining the background or the context of your topic; Problem introduction: explaining more specific details of the problem or situation you will focus on; Possibilities, solution attempts, trial & error and/or unexpected events that happened or were discovered along the way; End showing results and/or a conclusion, maybe lessons learned. Could have a hook to what’s next.

This classic storytelling framework helps to shape the dynamic of your talk and guides your audience to reach the same conclusion that you’re presenting, reinforcing the message.

For a more lecture or workshop-style talk, you can follow a similar framework, but more based on steps to get to the end: where to start, what comes next, possibilities from there and conclusion (what can you do or how to move forward after this workshop).

Slide design

You don’t need to be an expert in design or a super creative person to make decent slide design. Just compare the examples below:

Bad slide design

Better slide design (not perfect or great, but good enough)

Just following the few good practices listed above you can avoid the pitfall of terrible slide design. Luckily, we have those awesome online resources to help creating pretty cool slides:

Lots of templates and tools for media creation: Canva.com (where these slides were made)

Free splash photos: Unsplash, Pexels

Free illustrations: Freepik, Undraw

Color palette generation: Colorhunt, Coolors

Language & tone

Lastly, language & tone will shape the feelings and impressions your audience will have from your presentation, so it’s important to be at least aware and a little intentional about this.

On using more inclusive language, you should be mindful of pronouns, stereotypes, cultural or regional references, etc. Depending on the event or context that you are in, consider if part of your audience may not be 100% fluent in the language you’re speaking, you may want to avoid local slangs, speaking too fast, using figures of speech, or making jokes that don’t translate well. And of course, remember your target audience and mind the level of fluency you expect them to have in the topic you’re talking about, you may want to explain acronyms or technical terms you don’t expect everyone to know.

For the tone, I generally don’t feel the need to be super intentional about it, but my rule of thumb is to avoid extremes. I want it to be informative, but not a university lecture; funny, but not purely a stand-up comedy show; honest, but not self-deprecating; inspiring, but not blindly optimistic or like a sales pitch.

In any case…

Applying and preparing for your talk

My recommendation is to always start small, like local Meetups, a company meeting or internal event, and then grow from there to larger events, conferences and panels. This helps you practice and get feedback before you put yourself in front of a bigger audience. It will also help you build your confidence in the topic and public speaking in general, and hopefully provide evidence (if it’s recorded) that you have previous speaking experience (some conferences may ask that in the application process).

My recommendation to find local communities and small events is Meetup.com (or whatever other event/community platform is most used in your region — in Japan a lot of communities use Connpass). Women Who Code has chapters in more than 70 cities around the world, so that may be a good place to start if you’re a woman in tech ;)

If you cannot find small events near you, my recommendation is to make your own :) Either find a local community that you can propose to organize an event for, or just organize something on your own inside your company or among your friends and colleagues. These days, online events make it easier too, so you may not even need a venue or any crazy logistics.

For bigger events, you can always google and find local or international conferences on your area of expertise. On the conference site, you’ll usually find a “Call For Proposals” or “Call For Papers” where you can submit your talk proposal.

These are the common things you’ll see in proposal applications. Usually, the larger or more famous the event is, the more requirements they will have, and it will be more competitive to be selected. While smaller events will usually have fewer requirements or even a more casual application process (like exchanging emails with an organizer).

This is a personal tip, I like writing scripts because it’s almost like a practice session to me:

I can write down exactly what I would say for each slide and already catch problems like too much information per slide or sounding repetitive

Writing down helps me polish and memorize what I wanna say

I can write down jokes or observations that are not on the slides but I want to remember to say it

But after I write the script, my recommendation is that you don’t use it on the day of your presentation. It’s kinda obvious when a presenter is reading a script, it doesn’t sound natural and it brings down the tone and dynamic of the talk, it could sound boring or awkward.

So my recommendation here is to summarize your script in 3~4 bullet points with only keywords (no structured sentences) per slide and add it to the speaker notes section of your slides. This will help you glance at the keywords and remember what you wanted to say, but you’ll say it naturally and not sound like a robot reading a script.

In any case, one important thing is that when the day of your talk comes, you try to just relax and not worry too much about it. Accept that your first few times will suck, and that’s normal. Everything gets better with practice over time, and public speaking is no different.

That’s it!

Once you’ve decided to start public speaking, if you’re in Japan, me and two friends ( Ann Kilzer and Yan Fan) created this cool site called SpeakHer.jp. It’s an online database of women speakers in Japan, an effort to end all-male panels and bring women’s voices into a variety of topics in Japan. Go ahead and add yourself to the database so event organizers can find and contact you about public speaking engagements (all contact is moderated by us to protect your privacy and avoid spam)!

Thank you for reading my illustrated article :)