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Promoting a Diverse Speaker Lineup

Of utmost importance is to make it clear to prospective speakers that organizers care about Diversity, Inclusion & Accessibility. Successful conferences spend a considerable amount of time developing and nurturing relationships with diverse ecosystems to motivate them to participate in their CFP process.

What follows are considerations to guide conference organizers through a journey toward success.

Why should I care?

It has less to do with social justice and everything to do with providing attendees with the best possible value, and ensuring the consistent, and long-term success of a conference.

If a speaker lineup ends-up being of a single narrow demographic, odds are strong that the CFP process failed to attract a larger swath of the population of available speakers. With less speakers to choose from, the chosen lineup is bound to be of lower quality.

And this “quality” doesn’t necessarily mean that individual chosen speakers aren’t excellent, it can just mean that with a smaller pool of CFP participants, attendees are missing out on fascinating and original viewpoints and research from a wider range of areas of expertise.

In addition to the above, our experience shows that conferences with a demographically-diverse speaker lineup attract demographically-diverse attendees with higher ticket sales.

Could it be that diversity and inclusion are just good business?

In our combined experience, conferences that remain consistently successful with growing numbers of attendees every year, are conferences which make diversity and inclusion a priority.

Why do I need to work at it?

Why do we need to put so much effort into attracting a larger pool of diverse speakers? Why can’t we just put our CFP out there and assume that things will work out?

As further explained below, our tech industry marginalizes between 50% and 70% of the overall available workforce with various exclusionary practices.

Far too often, tech conferences are concentrated microcosms of exclusionary and harassing behaviors, and many speakers feel that they will not be welcome or even safe at those conferences.

As a result, speakers of marginalized demographics will refrain from applying to conferences for which it is not readily obvious that diversity and inclusion are a priority.

With a growing number of new conferences and meetups sprouting-up all over the World, many of which are making diversity and inclusion a priority, speakers have plenty of conferences to choose from.

In an increasingly competitive landscape, conferences ignoring diversity and inclusion are inevitably fated for doom.

Qualifying Motivations

While it may be tempting to promote Accessibility, Diversity & Inclusion for their own sake, it is of utmost importance to convey to prospective speakers that they are being sought out to improve the overall quality of the conference, and to give attendees the best possible value, by:

  • Providing attendees with a wider range of areas of expertise in the speaker lineup, exposing them to a wider range of knowledge and concepts.
  • Encouraging participation from attendees of all demographics, such that we might augment the pool of talent in our industry.

Let’s dwell on this last point, “augmenting the pool of talent in our industry”.

While demographics will wildly differ in various regions of the World, in the United States, according to their Government Accountability Office, demographics in the Tech Sector are as follows:

  • 78% are Male
  • 70% are White

And yet, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, white men are only 33.43% of the civilian labor force. Which means that, in the United States, our industry is excluding nearly 70% of the available work force.

At the same time, in any given market, it can easily take several months to a full year to hire someone for a given position. In that process, every year, billions of dollars are being lost in business opportunities, from companies failing to achieve their business objectives.

While a few well-established companies get no shortage of applicants for a given position, most younger and smaller companies, which make up the majority of the hiring market, struggle deeply with receiving any applicants to the positions they post on job boards.

In his keynote at Chicago Code Camp , Jeff Smith informed us that in the Chicago market, at any given time, there are over 6,000 unfulfilled positions in the tech sector.

Many tech companies have recognized these struggles and are putting into action various plans to reach out to more diverse pools of talent. Upon reaching various degrees of success in these endeavors, companies are also interested in training and growing their new hires, and participation in conferences is key.

It is incumbent upon us to support these efforts by clearly signaling to all attendees that they do, in fact, belong at this conference, in our industry, regardless of their physical abilities, ethnicity and gender identities.

Establishing D&I as Core Values

Prospective speakers will look for “evidence” that a conference cares about Accessibility, Diversity & Inclusion, and as such, that they are weaved into the Core Values of the conference.

Cultivating Expertise within Organizing Staff & Selection Panels

Conference organizers might consider enlisting individuals who are well-connected across diverse tech ecosystems. Here are some lists:

Building Relationships

Reaching out to folks for a specific purpose simply because they belong to some demography or list, is very likely to lead to monumental failure and severe burning of bridges.

Building meaningful relationships is everything. And it takes a lot of time and investment.

As such, it is important to start following on social media, and engaging with speakers of diverse backgrounds, to build and nurture relationships. Doing this will help on several fronts:

  • Finding co-organizers
  • Requesting participation in a CFP
  • Requesting participation as an Invited Speaker

Things organizers can do on Twitter and in-person:

  • Re-tweet posts of theirs which you find meaningful
  • Reply to their tweets with positive, thoughtful, insightful comments
  • Watch their talks on Youtube and Vimeo, and tweet about them while tagging them
  • Attend their talks at conferences and provide thoughtful feedback on joind.in
    • Live-tweet a couple of their slides with encouraging, positive remarks
    • Live-tweet a couple of pictures of them
  • Thank them in person after the talk, with positive & encouraging feedback

When reaching out to a person for a specific purpose, it is important to demonstrate to them how their participation will improve the quality of the conference in relation to their field of expertise:

I was a big fan of your talk on X because it did a really good job of digging into topics Y & Z by calling out “….”, and I also really liked how you structured the presentation with a very logical progression which kept me engaged until the very end. I think that it would be a great fit for our conference and we would be absolutely honored & thrilled if you could join us as one of our “invited speakers”.

Invited Speakers

Some conferences have had some success in inviting specific speakers from diverse backgrounds, but as previously stated, it is of critical importance to demonstrate to them that they are being sought after for their field of expertise, and not the demography to which they belong.

And this outreach is far likelier to be successful if a meaningful relationship had previously been established with the invited person.

Several members of our community are also members of Innovation Women. We have seen very positive feedback about this organization from both speakers and conference organizers.

Promoting the CFP

Upon having built relationships with diverse speakers, conference organizers should consider targeting several CFP announcement tweets at specific individuals and organizations with significant reach within various ecosystems:

Hello @PersonOrOrganization, we have just launched our CFP, and as we are committed to building the best possible speaker lineup, we would like to invite you and folks in your network to participate in our CFP.

We are starting a list of twitter accounts to which conference organizers might consider reaching out, to promote their CFP to diverse ecosystems.

Well ahead of opening-up their CFP and reaching out to these organizations, conference organizers should consider:

  • Having put in place or in motion all of the initiatives covered earlier in this article.
  • Following these accounts today.
  • Engaging with them.

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