Someone asked for feedback on a conference proposal.. You wouldn’t believe what happened next.

Well.. maybe you could believe what happened next. I gave her feedback. I have been a mentor for the Speak-Easy, a great group of people looking to increase diversity in tech conference. They are mainly focussed around getting more testers, especially women to apply to speak at conferences.

So someone signed up, got assigned to me and send me her proposal. This is the (lengthy) email I sent her. But I figured it might help some more people.

Hey <redacted>

I sat down and read your proposal and I am afraid you fell into the same trap we all fall into when we start submitting proposals. We try to be complete, factual and safe. Where it turns out none of that is necessary. This is nice proposal, except it is a bit long. Problem is that nice proposal do not get picked. Only proposals that stand out do.

The purpose of a proposal (and an abstract) is a desire to learn more.. to entice people to take that next step. To include your talk into the program or to get them to attend.

Which brings me to the point of a talk. We often think a conference talk is about presenting information. It is not. And the sooner you can let go of that notion the better. I took me a while :)

The purpose of a conference talk is to entertain people while nudging their thinking along. You need to be able to keep people’s attention if you want to get anything across. And think back to the last conference. Try to remember the content of any of the talks. You won’t be remember anything except a “I should really look into X more”, or “I should really try Y tomorrow.”.

The worst nightmare of a conference organiser is speaker who speak their audiences to sleep.

So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to entertain and nudge people.

Which brings me to my last point. We like to think of ourselves are rational beings, but nothing could you further from the truth. We make decisions almost completely based on emotions. So our proposals should convey emotions. There are a few ways to do that. The easiest one is to use emotionally charged words. Government, Bureaucracy & Regime all mean pretty much the same, but there are very different connotations & emotions associations with them. Avoid boring, flat words. Always go for words with more emotions. Never use good, or even great, use amazing or ecstatic.

The other thing is to talk about struggles (especially your own) and how you overcame them. A very simple outline I love using is:

Explain Context

Talk through overcoming the Challenge

Share the Celebration

So.. let’s put all of this intro practice:

The title is one of those complete, factual and boring ones. So let’s go from “How Test Driven Development helped our Software Integration Project” to something like “How TDD saved our.. uhh.. project”

It is exactly the same title, but now also shows you have a sense of humour. If I go to this talk I might not be bored for an hour :)

Lose all the explanation of TDD and why it might be adopted..

Talk instead about the problem and the challenge. <redacted> had just paid $<redacted> million for a startup and it was up to us to integrate it. Then do not skip ahead to tell how awesome it was you used TDD, but explain your challenges. Why did you choose it? What specific problems was it meant to solve? And what went wrong? These are things that draw people in. No one wants to watch commercials, but reality TV is extremely popular. People want to identify with you, but won’t be able to do that if you don’t talk about your problems, your doubt or your fears.

Then talk about all the good things that happened. We improved quality, testers were more involved.

And then bring it back to the audience. What can you learn from it?

A tool I sometimes use is http://wordcounttools.com. It allows you to count words (you want to be around the 100 to 200 words) and it gives you a readability index. The lower it is the easier it is to understand. Something to keep in mind.

I really think there is a great story in the rough in your proposal, but you just need to make it stand out more (and a lot shorter). Let me know if you need more specific help or want to send me another proposal. More than happy to look at a few more :)

Regards,

Erwin