{"id":3283,"date":"2019-12-12T20:35:07","date_gmt":"2019-12-13T02:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/?p=3283"},"modified":"2019-11-03T17:28:33","modified_gmt":"2019-11-03T23:28:33","slug":"tips-for-meetup-speaker-wranglers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/archives\/3283","title":{"rendered":"Tips for meetup speaker wranglers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-3287\" src=\"http:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/jewelry-625723_640-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Ruby pendant\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/>So I&#8217;ve been a speaker wrangler for the <a href=\"https:\/\/boulder-ruby.org\/\">Boulder Ruby Meetup<\/a> for the past year. This means I screen, find and schedule speakers for the meetup. It&#8217;s been a lot of fun. You get to meet new people and often help push people past their comfort zone. For many developers, public speaking is a hardship, but a meetup is the perfect place to start. At the Boulder Ruby Meetup, we have between 10 and 40 friendly people, and talks can range from 10 minutes to 60+.<\/p>\n<p>I wanted to capture some tips around doing the speaker wrangling for technical meetups.<\/p>\n<p>Think about what your audience wants to hear, and how they want to hear it.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You need to want to attend (not every night, but most nights). This is substantially easier if you work in the technology, because you&#8217;ll be motivated to attend as well.<\/li>\n<li>It also helps to hang out at the meetup for a few months. You learn who the regulars are, which people are really knowledgable, and what kind of talks the community likes and is used to.<\/li>\n<li>Think of alternatives to the traditional 30-40 minute talks. Panels, social nights and lightning talks are all alternate ways to have people share their knowledge.<\/li>\n<li>Tap your personal network, but not just your network.<\/li>\n<li>If you see something work in a different meetup, steal it!<\/li>\n<li>Leverage external events. We move our meeting every year to happen during <a href=\"https:\/\/boulderstartupweek.com\/\">Boulder Startup Week<\/a>, which is good for BSW (more sessions) and good for us (more attendees and visibility).<\/li>\n<li>Don&#8217;t be afraid to stray outside of your core technology. We focus on ruby, but have had popular talks on\n<ul>\n<li>Interviewing<\/li>\n<li>AI and ML<\/li>\n<li>User experience<\/li>\n<li>General software design<\/li>\n<li>CDNs<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>If you have facilities for it, remote presentations are great. This opens up who can speak at your talk to a lot more people. We&#8217;ve had guests from Google and AWS and the founder\/owner of SideKiq come, at zero additional cost.<\/li>\n<li>Recording talks is something that I think has a lot of value, but we&#8217;ve had a hard time getting that done. If you do record the talk, make sure to get permission (some folks are ok with it, some speakers are not).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Actually finding the speakers is of course crucial.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Whenever possible, schedule the talks as far ahead of time as you can. I just use a google spreadsheet to keep track of speakers and follow up a month or two ahead of time.\n<ul>\n<li>Sometimes people cancel (travel and personal events happen) and it&#8217;s nice to know about it ahead of time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Since you know who the experts are in your group, you can often ask them to fill in if a speaker has to bail. (It&#8217;s extra nice if one of the meetup organizers has a talk in their back pocket.)<\/li>\n<li>To find speakers, put the call out where people are:\n<ul>\n<li>Slack workspaces and channels around the technology<\/li>\n<li>On a website (this is super low effort once you have a website up). A website is a great place to put topic ideas, audience size, expected length, etc.<\/li>\n<li>At the meetup. At every meetup I put a plug in for speaking.<\/li>\n<li>Twitter is full of people that might be good speakers.<\/li>\n<li>Anyone you have coffee with.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>I also always ask people that I meet. You know those &#8220;so what do you do&#8221; conversations you have? Always be on the lookout for someone who is doing something that might be interesting to your meetup.<\/li>\n<li>Ask folks new to development as well as experienced developers. Newer folks may feel more comfortable with a shorter timeslot, but they also deserve the chance to speak.\n<ul>\n<li>Remember that the chance to speak professionally is a benefit. By asking people to speak you are actually doing them a favor.<\/li>\n<li>Reach out to heroes or other big names that you want to build some kind of relationship with. They may ignore you, but so what.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Some meetups have a form on their website where people can submit. I haven&#8217;t seen much luck with that.<\/li>\n<li>You can even do outreach. If you see a company in your area posting on slacks, StackOverflow or HackerNews with either articles or job postings, reach out and ask if they have anyone that would be interested in speaking.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Don&#8217;t forget to run through the finish. Make sure your speakers have a great time speaking and that you set them up for success.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Reach out to them a few months ahead of time to make sure they are still interested and available. Get their email address, and talk description (so you can have it posted ahead of time).<\/li>\n<li>The week of:\n<ul>\n<li>tweet about them speaking.\n<ul>\n<li>reach out to them about recording or anything else. If you have another volunteer who handles that, this is a great time to hand off. I always hand off via email because everyone has that.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>The day of:\n<ul>\n<li>make sure you greet them when they come to the meeting and thank them for their time.<\/li>\n<li>have a good question or two up your sleeve if no one else does.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>The day after, tweet thanking them for their time.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Getting good speakers is a key part of any meetup. There&#8217;s a lot else that goes into a successful meetup (a good space, sponsors for food and drink, publicity) but finding and scheduling speakers is important. Hopefully some of these tips will be helpful to you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;ve been a speaker wrangler for the Boulder Ruby Meetup for the past year. This means I screen, find and schedule speakers for the meetup. It&#8217;s been a lot [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[88,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-rails"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3283"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3291,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3283\/revisions\/3291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mooreds.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}