To Our Speakers

Speakers: you are the core of our conference. You’ve offered your time and experience for the benefit of the community. Of course there are many benefits in a conference — networking and deep discussions with the entire community are extremely valuable — but people are attending because the speakers came together to form the framework of the conference. So you should be treated like it!

How do we show our appreciation for the speakers?

For starters, we pay for your travel and hotel expenses to get you to the conference. I know some companies will pay those expenses if an employee is chosen to speak, but not all will. We don’t want to limit the diversity of our speakers to only those who can pay their own way.

Of course, if you’re local, or work for a company that will pay your expenses, we don’t want you to feel less appreciated! So in those cases we arrange an honorarium for you.

After we’ve chosen the speakers, we also are going to provide something new this year — we’re offering design help on slides and coaching on talks, for whoever would like them. We want to help the talks be the best they can be — a better experience both for you and the attendees.

We try to maintain good communications with you — we want to make sure you know everything you need and feel comfortable asking us anything you aren’t sure about. We’ll also publish interviews with some of our speakers leading up to the conference.

That’s a good start.

Then comes the actual conference. We have a top notch A/V team to make sure everything “just works” when it’s time and also create quality videos, we have an easily visible timer for your talk, and help with any other needs you may have.

Finally, the post-conference appreciation. Posting on social media about you. Getting audience feedback and sharing it with you. And a final piece — all of the speakers will receive free passes to next years conference. We’re very grateful to you, and we would love to have you come back and enjoy the conference as an attendee.

That’s what we’re doing for our speakers — without you, we don’t have a conference. There is probably more we can do for you — what other ideas do you have? If you organize a conference, what else do you do for your speakers?

Our CFP for the 2017 Empire City Elixir Conference opens Jan 17 — we’d love to have you submit your talk proposal.