Submitting a Great Speaker Application

Voiceover:
Welcome to the Underrepresented in Tech Podcast, hosted by Michelle Frechette and Allie Nimmons. Underrepresented in Tech is a free database built with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech overall.

Michelle Frechette:
Hi, Allie.

Allie Nimmons:
Hi, Michelle. How are you?

Michelle Frechette:
How are you? I’m good. How are you?

Allie Nimmons:
Good. Good, good, good.

Michelle Frechette:
Awesome.

Allie Nimmons:
Always happy to talk to you on a Thursday because it’s like the week is almost over. I feel relaxed. We usually do the in the afternoon, so I’ve already gotten a lot done today. Just good vibes all around.

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely, absolutely. Always good to see you too.

Allie Nimmons:
Well, today I’m actually really excited because I always really like when we talk about topical things. We try to keep things evergreen so that this content can be useful for a really long time. This content will still be useful for a long time, but I’m always happy when we find something that’s very relevant to the community right now that we can build a topic off of, right?

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely.

Allie Nimmons:
Either yesterday or today, I think today, the WordCamp Europe team announced their call for speakers is now open. You can go to their site, europe.wordcamp.org/2023/callforspeakers, and you can go ahead and apply to speak, which is super exciting. I think both of us have plans to apply to speak, right?

Michelle Frechette:
I already did.

Allie Nimmons:
Michelle already did.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s been open for almost a month. The conference speakers has been open since mid-December.

Allie Nimmons:
I literally just saw it for the first time today. I don’t know what rock I’ve been hiding under, but.

Michelle Frechette:
They didn’t publicize it a whole lot yet, so maybe that’s why you’re seeing it now.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, I only just saw it. Hopefully if you’re listening to this and you didn’t know like I didn’t know, this will be your wake up call that you can go ahead and apply to speak for WordCamp Europe, which is going to be an Athens, Greece, June 9th to June 10th. I have plans to go already, and so I’d love to also be able to speak while I’m there.

Michelle Frechette:
Same.

Allie Nimmons:
I really wanted to talk about how to fill out a speaker application so that you have the most possibility of getting selected. Both of us have a decent amount of experience working on teams where we review speaker applications, either review them or review them to approve them or organize them or whatever that might be.
What sucks is I feel like for whatever reason, part of I think the reason why, and this is a small part, because I’m not trying to put the blame on the victim in this scenario, part of the reason why a lot of our events are lower on we’ll say minority groups for this reason is the disparity between what an experienced straight white guy in tech who’s done a ton of talks, what their application looks like, and what a first time underrepresented person’s application looks like.
I don’t know where that comes from, why that is, if it’s just a matter of experience, if it’s a matter of training and resources, if it’s a matter of maybe one person asked a friend to review their application for them before they sent it in, whatever the case may be. But so many times I’ve seen like, oh, I know this person. They’re an underrepresented person. They’re really smart in this topic, and then their application is really weak. I thought it would be a good idea to talk about how to optimize your application.
If maybe you found that you’ve applied to a lot of talks and you’re not getting accepted and you don’t know why, it might have to do with the way that you’re presenting yourself. Because unfortunately, in our very appearance driven, capitalist, judgey Western society, oftentimes you only have the one time to make that first impression.
You can be a remarkable expert in a topic, but all you have is this tiny pinhole of a window with which to make that impression, and that might be an application like this. I wanted to talk about that and hopefully help people to see, okay, maybe I can do this differently or I can stop doing that and have a higher likelihood of getting accepted.

Michelle Frechette:
If I can put a couple words in here too.

Allie Nimmons:
Please.

Michelle Frechette:
If you have not spoken, if you don’t consider yourself well-known in the community, certainly these tips will help you. But let me tell you that even if you are well-known in the community, there’s never a guarantee that you’re going to be selected to speak at a WordCamp. I’m speaking at WordCamp Asia coming up soon, as are you. It’s the first flagship WordCamp that I’ve ever been approved for. I have not spoken at WordCamp US. I have not spoken at WordCamp Europe. I’ve gotten rejection after rejection.
And to be fair, I haven’t applied to WordCamp US in a while because I’ve been on the organizing team, so you can’t do both. But every year I get rejected for WordCamp Europe and prior to organizing WordCamp US as well. Just because we have familiar faces and voices in our community is never a guarantee, and we have to follow our own advice on what we’re going to share with you as well.

Allie Nimmons:
Yes, absolutely. Definitely, definitely, definitely. I’m just going to go ahead and start moving through this and calling it as I see it. Please interrupt me and interject, because the great thing about this show is you and I have different perspectives on this kind of stuff.

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely. I could even share a little bit how I structured my own application to this.

Allie Nimmons:
The first thing I’ll always say, a lot of times these pages are long. Sometimes the form is like 20% of the page and the rest of it is text and information and details. Read everything. Read everything twice. Because it’s so annoying to an organizer to work super hard to provide all of these details and instructions, and then people don’t read it. It just makes their jobs more difficult. Read every single thing on the page.

Michelle Frechette:
Last year I put together the WP Career Summit. More news on that later this year, but I put together a WP Career Summit literally all about working in WordPress. Somebody submitted a talk on using the, I can’t remember what the word is, the CPL.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, the AI text generator?

Michelle Frechette:
No, no, no. They submitted a talk on, I can’t remember, basically on coding, like on WordPress coding. I was like, what does that have to do with getting hired in WordPress? Absolutely nothing. Let me show you how to build a website. Wrong audience. If you’d even read one tiny little bit of the website, you would’ve known that you’re spending your time submitting to something you’re never going to get picked for because it does not fit at all. Yes, absolutely read it all, especially when they’re giving you topic ideas or at least topic categories that they’re looking to fill.

Allie Nimmons:
That was the next thing I was going to say is the WordCamp Europe team has provided three lists actually of topic ideas, development ideas, business ideas, community and design ideas. They’re doing that because they want you to talk about those things. I know that myself personally, I had this problem when I was in high school, right? If a teacher gave us a prompt or a selection of prompts for an essay, I always wanted it to be different. I just wanted to go above and beyond, so I would make it harder on myself and come up with a different, more elegant idea.

Michelle Frechette:
I’ll show you how special I am.

Allie Nimmons:
It was cringey and it never worked. My teachers would get annoyed because they’re like, “That’s not what I wanted you to talk about.” There are ways in which you want to stand out, and there are ways in which you want to adhere to the recommendations and instructions that are given to you. Your topic should stand out, but it should fall within the parameters of what they’re looking for. This is also really helpful, and you’ll find this if you read the full page as well. If this event is looking for more than one application, if you can apply with more than one topic, submit a development idea, submit a business idea, submit a design idea.
Don’t just take one topic and tweak it a little bit and a little bit. Give yourself very different topics that you apply with so that if… Because a lot of times what happens too is I can say I’ve denied an application specifically because two people applied to speak on the same thing. Maybe it’s like how to develop your own plugin. They’re the exact same topic, and one of their descriptions is just more detailed and richer. I’m like, right, well, I got to make a decision. You do want to be able to stand out, but you do want to be able to also do what the organizers are looking for for when they go ahead and pick a topic.
Presentation formats, you want to make sure that you read all of those. That’s I feel like a question that people will come and then ask after the fact. All of that information is right here. There’s a thing that’s become I think it’s fairly newly popularized is lightning talks. Instead of talking for 45 minutes to an hour, you’re expected to fill 15 minutes. Personally, I’ve heard people say that a lightning talk is better for beginners. I disagree with that. I think lightning talks are harder, because you have to be very concise. You have to know exactly what it is you’re trying to say at every single point.
You have to be able to be engaging and hit all your points within a super, super small period of time to where you’re not going to have a bunch of people asking questions and feeling lost afterward. I think lightning talks are a lot harder. If you’re a beginner or if you’re nervous, give yourself the time. It’s going to be more work upfront to develop that content. But on the day, you’re going to be glad that you had time to maybe sometimes lose your train of thought. I still lose my train of thought on stage, or hem and haw or something, or whatever. If you would like a challenging…

Michelle Frechette:
It’s so hard to be concise. For Asia, it’s 10 minutes, I’m doing a lightning talk. I submitted a full session and was approved for a lightning talk. Now, I have to take 45 minutes of content and condense it down to 10 minutes in a way that’s meaningful. Yeah, it’s very difficult. Unless you know that you’ve got only 10 minutes in a topic that you couldn’t possibly do, then submit for a lightning talk. But yeah, I agree with you. It’s so much harder.

Allie Nimmons:
Really take a look at whatever they’re offering in terms of the time limits. If you are applying for more than one session, maybe you want to apply for one as a lightning talk and one as a longer one and give yourself the options. Actually, I love when people do this. They provided some examples of past talks. Go look at those past talks because you’re going to get a… Every conference, every event is different, has a different vibe and has kind of different expectations. Some is more formal. Some are more casual. Some are at faster pace. Some are slower pace.
Go look at some of the past ones because I feel like doing that will answer questions you probably didn’t even know that you had about what’s expected from you as a speaker. I also seeing those to see how people do their slides, if they’re super detailed or if they’re super general and stuff like that. It’d be super inspiring. Oh, WordCamp Europe has included information about their speaker’s support program and their mentorship program, which is super amazing. There are things in there that can potentially help you to do an even better job than we’re helping you with right now. That all goes into reading the full page.
They included a timeline. This speaker application page is exceptional. They really hit it out of the park. They have a timeline. That’s going to answer a lot of questions about if you get accepted or not accepted, when are you going to hear back about that. It’s super annoying for organizers to constantly get messages of like, “Have I been accepted? Have I been accepted?” We’ll let you know. It has information about when the slides are done and everything like that, because that’s also a big thing of don’t be that person that forgot to do your slides on time.

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah, for sure.

Allie Nimmons:
That’s a good way to not have a slot anymore, right? If there’s an urgent thing, that’s a good way to get kicked out. All right, so finally, we’re at the actual form. I feel like this can be tricky sometimes because the WordPress community is a global community. For this form, it’s in English. I’m sure that I could translate it in a different language if I was in a different country. But due to the academic nature of filling out a form, your spelling, your grammar, all of that has to be pretty flawless, and that can be a struggle if English is not your first language. I would always recommend asking a friend whose first language is the language of the conference you’re speaking at to review the form.
If I had thought about it more and followed my own advice, I might have found someone who lived in Thailand to review my application for WordCamp Asia when I applied, just to make sure that everything would translate well, everything makes sense, that I’m not using any local idioms or aphorisms. Is that the word? Like sayings that wouldn’t make sense to a non-primarily English speaker, things like that. Proofread, proofread, proofread everything. I literally once saw somebody misspelled their name in their form application one.

Michelle Frechette:
Or your email address. Don’t put your email address wrong. Be careful.

Allie Nimmons:
Seriously. We have a whole episode on writing bios, so I’ll link that in the show notes because that needs its own entire bit of information. But your bio should be easily digestible, relevant to the topic. I have different bios, and I think you actually taught me this, Michelle. I have different bios for different reasons. Say I’m applying to just a general WordCamp, I have a bio that is very specific to my WordPress experience and my speaking experience.
If I’m going to apply to speak at a conference for podcasters, I want to have something that focuses more on my podcast experience and things like that. It should be relevant. Also, should not be a novel. I get so frustrated when I’m looking at a speaker application spreadsheet, the spreadsheets that we would work out of, and one person’s row is like this long.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s a whole book.

Allie Nimmons:
As their bio. It’s so long.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s a whole book. You want to make sure that your bio, and like Allie said, go back to that episode and look at it, but you want your bio to say the pertinent things about why somebody would want to not only pick you to speak. If they’ve selected you to speak, people need to be able to see your bio on the website that says who you are. First of all, third person, always third person. Your bio should never be written in first person.

Allie Nimmons:
Give an example of third person, Michelle.

Michelle Frechette:
My bio, for example, says, “Michelle Frechette is the Director of Community Engagement for StellarWP at Liquid Web. Michelle is called the busiest woman in the WordPress by Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp US 2022,” and it goes on to talk a little bit more about the things that I’m involved in.

Allie Nimmons:
It doesn’t say, “I am a,” blah, blah, blah.

Michelle Frechette:
Correct, correct. If I’m filling out a form, I’m telling you about myself, maybe first person in my head might make sense. But if I’m then later reading the bio on a website, it’s not me talking to the person who’s reading it. It’s them reading about you on the speaker website. Your speaker bio should always be in third person.

Allie Nimmons:
Yes, absolutely. I always treat it as it should be skimmable. Because in reality, people aren’t really going to read all the bios. It’s kind of mean to say, but nobody cares that much. They want to be able to skim and see, okay, this person is talking about themes. Oh, I see the word theme developer. They’re a theme developer. They’ve developed one, two, three themes. I’ve heard of that theme. Cool. I now have an impression of this person in my head, and I feel like they know what they’re talking about. It should be as skimmable as possible.

Michelle Frechette:
Oh, can I tell you one of my pet peeves?

Allie Nimmons:
Yes.

Michelle Frechette:
As somebody who reviews these things for all kinds of events all over the place, I hate, and I’m going to use that word hate, when people think they can use markup language on my form and now I have to go back in and edit out the freaking markup language. Don’t put the HTML links.

Allie Nimmons:
To make something bold or something?

Michelle Frechette:
Right. No, it’s just mostly to the ad link. If I was going to say, “Is a cohost at underrepresentedintech.com,” and I put Ahrefs and whatever around it, that’s not translating into the way I’m doing it. Trust me, I can pick up underrepresentedintech.com and make that a hyperlink on my own way faster than having to edit out the stuff that you put in there.

Allie Nimmons:
I’ve never seen someone do that.

Michelle Frechette:
Oh, it happens so frequently and it’s so annoying.

Allie Nimmons:
It’s so annoying too, because the next field area on this form is for links. Most speaker applications will ask you to provide links already so you don’t have to put them in your bio. Don’t do that. Don’t give Michelle a heart attack. That being said, read the way that they ask for links. Sometimes it’s like, oh, we want the link to your Twitter, sometimes they just want your Twitter handle. Pay attention to…

Michelle Frechette:
This one doesn’t say with or without the at symbol. A lot of the time they don’t want it and sometimes they do. This one is really ambiguous, so they’re going to have to do a lot of cleanup when they use this later because they haven’t asked for that. Make sure that you are paying attention though. Usually they don’t want the at symbol included.

Allie Nimmons:
Yes, totally. They also ask for past speaking experience. I have mixed feelings about asking for this. I feel like it’s a little bit othering. Because if you don’t have past speaking experience, you kind of feel like, “Oh, well, I guess I just have to leave that blank,” and that might be a hit to your confidence a little bit. Don’t worry about it. Usually this is just an extra qualifier, but a lot of events are specifically looking for first time speakers and they want to inject first time speakers into the selection. This question is not meant to make you feel like you lost a point, right? It’s just an additional qualifier.
If you do have past speaking experience, just share exactly what they’re asking for, details and links to the recordings. You don’t have to go crazy with it. One thing that I have, which Michelle, I’d like to know what you think about this. I have a page on my website. I think it’s just allienimmons.com/talkslides, yes, it’s just one page with links to all of my past talks so that I can have them in one place, but I can also share them with people. If you were on the organizing team for WordCamp Europe and I just put a link to that talk slides page, is that helpful to you, or would you find that annoying?

Michelle Frechette:
That would be annoying.

Allie Nimmons:
It would be annoying?

Michelle Frechette:
That’s an extra step. I don’t want to have to take those extra steps.

Allie Nimmons:
See? I was wondering about that because it’s like, well, they’re all right there. If you do have a page like that, maybe just copy and paste and put the relevant ones in there.

Michelle Frechette:
I can actually share this. I don’t know how to share it in the tweet because there’s way too many of them. But a way that in academia that you list the talks that you’ve had in the past, very much like a…

Allie Nimmons:
Bibliography.

Michelle Frechette:
Bibliography. I cannot not think of the word. Bibliography. For example, mine starts with “2022 WordCamp Montclair; Atom Digital Agency Summit,” then “2021 WordCamp India; WordCamp Northeast Ohio; WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley.” You can see them going all the way back in time. I have spoken a lot, and so I’ve got a really huge paragraph, which you don’t have to have, of course. Mine has outside of WordPress as well.
There is a way that you can do it. I just keep it updated, constantly keeping it updated. All I have to do is cut and paste or put it in a text expander, which I love, text completion, and then just do the keystroke and then it automatically fills in.

Allie Nimmons:
Nice. I love that.

Michelle Frechette:
I did that for my bio too, by the way.

Allie Nimmons:
I would say too, if you do have a lot of speaking experience, it might make sense to say, “I have spoken at X number of events. Here are some relevant ones.” If Michelle was doing a talk on podcasting, maybe she includes links to talk she’s done about podcasting or similar topics, because that’s kind of what they’re looking, right?

Michelle Frechette:
I’ll tell you, if you search for yourself on wordpress.tv if you’ve given talks, they’re all there under one person. I actually have two because I’m Michelle Frechette, but I was Michelle Ames, so I’ll include both of those links so they can go back and see previous talks that I’ve given in the WordPress community.

Allie Nimmons:
Love that. But all of that is to say, if you don’t have anything to put in that box, don’t worry about it.

Michelle Frechette:
It’s okay.

Allie Nimmons:
Then they ask about your session. You have to choose whether it’s a talk or a workshop. Really pay attention to these. A talk is typically I’m talking, everyone else is listening. Maybe there’s questions at the end. A workshop means that there’s interactivity. I’ll die on that hill. A workshop means you’ve designed this talk for people to actually be doing something with you the whole time. Maybe they’re building a site with you or they’re building something with you and you plan to walk around, help them do things. Please don’t select a topic or a talk type that doesn’t actually apply just because you think it sounds cool or something.
Be specific. Be really specific. They ask which session suits your talk. If you’re not sure, just say you’re not sure. That’s totally fine. What is the general category of your session? Sometimes they allow you to choose more than one. I remember looking at an application once where they just chose everything. Like, oh, my talk can fit into all of these. It’s like, be specific. You’re marketing yourself, right?

Michelle Frechette:
Yes.

Allie Nimmons:
One of the rules of marketing is being specific, being targeted. This is not an opportunity for you to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks.

Michelle Frechette:
Right, a good point.

Allie Nimmons:
The exact topic of your session, so that’s like the title. Do we have an episode on naming your…

Michelle Frechette:
I don’t think we do, but this is where you should definitely have somebody else reading over what you’re submitting. For example, when you’re submitting a talk, you are marketing yourself and you’re marketing your knowledge. If you are not somebody who is creative in a marketing way… 100%, developers are creative people. Don’t get me wrong. The analytics can still be creative. I’m not saying that somebody who’s a developer isn’t a creative. But if you want to sell your topic, you want to make sure that you’re writing titles and description in a way that’s got some marketing bent to it. I think it’s great.
I work at Liquid Web. When people within StellarWP are thinking about submitting an application, usually they hit me up and say, “Can you read this over? Give me any feedback.” Usually the feedback is it’s either too long or too short, but there’s other feedback as well as far as to how things are written and what can be included and how you can say something. You say the same thing, but make it a topic that people go, “Ooh, I want to go listen to that one.”

Allie Nimmons:
Yes. Before we sat down to record this, I asked Michelle, I was like, didn’t we talk about this already? It’s because I wrote a blog post about this topic. That’s why.

Michelle Frechette:
There you go.

Allie Nimmons:
I just pulled it up and I do talk about it. I’ll include a link to that in the show notes too because I have some written examples and details and stuff. I definitely agree, one of my biggest pet peeves about submitted talk titles is when they’re too long or when they’re too vague. Your title should be concise and snappy and tell people what it is they’re going to learn. It doesn’t have to be fancy.

Michelle Frechette:
And that’s going to change a little bit depending on whether it’s a dev talk or a community talk because you’re appealing in a different way. When I did a talk on developing a plugin, it was a different title than when I applied. I’ll tell you, the topic I put in for WordCamp Europe is How WordPress Changed My Life and How It Can Change Yours You. Definitely a community talk. It’s not a dev talk. It isn’t a design talk. It’s not a blogging talk. It’s literally about how to get involved in the community. It’s like people are going to be like, “Ooh, how did it change your life? What is she talking about?”

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, exactly. Mine is I forget the exact wording of the title, to be honest with you, but it’s how to get a job in tech without coding or something like that. It’s very specific. I mean, there might be some conferences that are okay with these. I recommend avoiding puns, unless you are really leaning into humor in your talk topic. I would say avoid puns, avoid cliches. At this point, I’m so sick of themes and plugins and whatever. Oh my!

Michelle Frechette:
Oh my!

Allie Nimmons:
I’m really sick of those.

Michelle Frechette:
Especially for an international audience, because international audiences, everybody all over the world hasn’t watched the same movies. Maybe everybody’s seen The Wizard of Oz, or maybe it’s at least one that’s known around the world, but don’t count on those old tricks and tropes to continue forward.

Allie Nimmons:
I think of it like if you’re writing a blog post and you’re maybe optimizing that for SEO. A lot of times, how to or why you should or a guide to, or if it’s a case study. There are naming conventions that are safe and okay to stick to. I think if the content of the talk is good, then you can display that in the description and if it’s something that is somewhat unique that you think people are going to want. That’s enough. You don’t have to be super cutesy with the title. They ask here about the intended audience for the topic. I love that. I’ve never seen the way they do this before.
If they ask you something like that, who this is for, choose appropriately. I have seen, is this for beginner, intermediate, or advanced levels? Don’t choose all three. That’s not helpful. That’s really confusing. Be specific.

Michelle Frechette:
I will say though, when it’s a community talk, it’s really hard to pick one, because it does really go across everything, right? For certain talks, definitely lend themselves more to one. And to be fair, I did not pick all five when I submitted my talk because I’m not dumb. But still, it is hard to choose sometimes.

Allie Nimmons:
So then they ask for a description. They ask for main takeaways and what attendees will learn to do from those talks that they could not before. They’re asking a lot of questions here, which I love. I know in my post, I talk about writing descriptions as well. I feel like that can be its own topic because descriptions are really tricky. I have a formula that I use for talk descriptions. That’s how nerdy I get about this. I will share that with you now. This is not to say this is the only way or the best way or anything like that. It’s how I’ve found success doing it. I start with the problem or conflict to be solved.
That way the person can say, “Oh, I have that problem. I identify with that issue. Or no, that’s not something I struggle with. That’s not something that applies to me.” Because the talk description should bring someone in just as much as it… What’s the alternative of that? It should be just as easy for someone to say that talk is not for me as it is to say that is for me. You know what I mean?

Michelle Frechette:
Yeah. People should be able to self-identify in or out based on what you’re written.

Allie Nimmons:
I’ve definitely gone to talks before and been sitting there for 15 minutes and be like, “This is not anything that I… I misunderstood what this talk was, and this isn’t helpful to me.” Establishing the problem or conflict. Then I mentioned, the content within the talk that solves the problem. What’s that solution? What’s my method? What’s my answer? And then I end with, in this talk, I will blah, blah, blah. And that allows me to get specifics. I’ll mention the format. Will I use a walkthrough? Will I use a demo? Am I going to build something? Am I going to tell a story? How am I going to explain what the solution is?
Even though I answered that in the application, I might sprinkle in who this talk is for. Is it for beginners, advanced people, business owners, freelancers, designers, developers, whatever? I have an example. While blogging can be extremely profitable for companies of all sizes, it can be hard for beginner to know how to start a blog, much less monetize it. With WordPress and a few plugins, starting a blog that brings in money can be quick and painless solution to a problem. In this talk, Allie will or I will, I think Allie will, demonstrate how to start a blog with WordPress and then walk through the process of setting up free and paid monetizing tools.
I talk about in three sentences what the problem is, what the solution is, and how I’m going to present it to you. And that’s, I think, really all that’s necessary. I’d say this one is on the shorter side. I could see it being a little bit longer, but again, skimmable. People want to be able to skim, find the buzzwords that apply to them, and be able to know, okay, this talk is for me.

Michelle Frechette:
My top talk topic starts with WordPress is more than software. It’s more than web designer development or Gutenberg versus the Classic Editor. It’s about you. It’s about me. The small S and the Big S. It’s more than open source code. It’s open source community. And then I went in from there and I end it with, “In this talk, I’ll share how it all came to be and how WordPress can change your life too.” Now, because the title is How WordPress Changed My Life, the entire thing’s written in first person because the title is first person. If you’re like, well, why didn’t this say Michelle will share? Well, because it’s about me, not about something else not about me, if that makes sense.

Allie Nimmons:
That makes total sense. And then they’re asking about, will you record a short overview of your session? They’re asking for all these additional things. Read these things really carefully. Only agree to do the things that you really are actually going to do. If you know won’t have time or availability to do any extra stuff, don’t agree to it, and then raining on it later. That’s really frustrating.

Michelle Frechette:
Especially if you haven’t spoken before, doing the little three minute video is really advantageous for you because it can show that you have poise, that you speak well, that you enunciate, whatever those qualities are that they’re looking for. I will tell you, if you are going to record yourself, go ahead and script yourself. You don’t have to just get up there and ramble about your topic and feel like you’re drowning in trying to come up with three minute video.
Script it. Record it. If you don’t like it, record it again. I think I did mine three times before I was like, “Ugh, I flubbed a word or I did that.” I was like, “Okay, it’s good to go. I’m sending that in.” Go ahead and record yourself. Give them an opportunity to see you talking, but script it and do whatever you want to make sure that you feel confident in what it is that you’re saying.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, it’s good practice. The rest of it are like additional, do you want to make your session a case study? Do you want to get mentorship support? They ask if you’d like to be a backup speaker. That can be hard. This event is in Athens. If you’re not really local, it’ll be very hard to be a backup speaker because you might have days really to plan to be able to travel. Be very mindful of that. If it’s a local thing, yeah, probably being a backup speaker would be a great idea. Be cognizant of the challenges.

Michelle Frechette:
If you’re going to attend anyway or you’re sponsoring or something like that, if you’re already going to be there. Now, the one thing they did at the end of this application that was a little off-putting to me is they said, “Please don’t purchase a conference ticket yet. If your application is accepted, you’ll receive a free ticket as a presenter,” but they’re not letting you know until… When was the timeline for it? They’re notifying speakers the second week of March. They could very well sell out of tickets by then. If you are planning to attend anyway, I would say go ahead and purchase the ticket if you plan to attend.
If you are offered a free ticket, you could always either sell your ticket or gift it to somebody else. I like to gift tickets to people who might not otherwise be able to attend an event. But even if you give it to a coworker or something else, sell it, turn it back in, donate it, whatever, you’ll make sure that you have a ticket to walk in the door as opposed to finding out that maybe you didn’t get selected and now you also don’t have a ticket.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, that’s a really good point. I didn’t even notice that. If you’re planning on just going even if you don’t get selected, buy the ticket. I mean, I guess maybe they should have said, if you only plan on going as a speaker, don’t buy a ticket because we won’t be refunding you for that. The ticket is given to you later. And then they ask if you have any questions for them and take advantage of that opportunity to ask any questions and get anything clarified for you to be clarified. Now that you’ve reached the end of the application, go back over it and read over everything you wrote again and proofread it.
Pay attention to the way that you formatted things. Pay attention to spelling and grammar. If you had to copy and paste things from other places, did you do that correctly and so on and so forth. This is your shot to make that good first impression and you want it to be as flawless as you can. Again, like we said before, if you want somebody to look over it for you, this would be a good time to have somebody review it and give you any feedback.
Maybe we can do a follow-up episode one day on what to do after you send in your application, because I feel like that can be a whole other episode of how to prepare and what questions you should ask and what questions you probably shouldn’t ask that are probably on the website. You should go check that first. I would say that’s a good overview of how to really get the most out of this sort of an application. The last thing you want to do is rush it, because you’re going to throw your chance in the garbage.

Michelle Frechette:
Like we’ve said more than once, find somebody to read it through for you and give you feedback. Allie and I can’t volunteer to do that for all of you because we are already overwhelmed with a lot of other people we’re helping. However, you have people at your work, you have people in your social circles, you have people in your local meetups, somebody that you can ask to take a look at what it is that you are submitting. If you don’t ask on Twitter, ask in Slack, ask somebody, “Hey, does anybody have five minutes that they could review my application?”

Allie Nimmons:
What I’d say is don’t ask an event organizer of the event that you’re applying to.

Michelle Frechette:
Correct. Correct.

Allie Nimmons:
Don’t ask them. If you know somebody who had organized a different event and they’re not organizing an event right now, but they have experience with these kinds of applications, that’s a great person to ask. I’d even say on the flip side, ask somebody who has no connection to any of this stuff at all, because they might notice something that you took for granted as somebody who’s familiar with this industry. I ask my husband to review stuff all the time because he has no experience with development, no experience with WordPress. He has a completely unique lens and perspective on how I talk about this kind of stuff.
Ask people to help you. Ooh, one thing I will say is if you get an email after you submit this, sometimes they’ll send you an email that has your answers all listed out, kind of a receipt or a copy of your submission, save it, bookmark it, favorite it, whatever you have to do not to lose it, because it’s going to be very handy. I had to hunt for my WordCamp Asia one because I applied right when the applications came out. I was one of the last people to get notified that I was accepted, and I completely forgot the talk that I submitted.
Instead of doing the really embarrassing thing of asking them to remind me what I applied with, I found the email and I was able to re-review it. Make sure that you save that receipt email. That’s going to come probably immediately before you get accepted or denied or whatever, and just make sure that you save that. If you think that you did a really good job, you just weren’t accepted for other reasons, you can use that again. You can use that topic and that description all over again.

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely,

Allie Nimmons:
Go ahead and save that.

Michelle Frechette:
Let me add just a couple little other things that I wanted to mention is if you’ve given the same talk already 12 times in the WordPress community and you’re applying for WordCamp Europe, I’m not on the committee, but I would think that you have a pretty low chance of that talk being picked up, especially if it’s already in WordPress.tv five times and everybody’s heard your topic. Find something new and interesting or a twist on it, change it up. You could talk about the same topics. I talk about community a lot, but I change it up and I find different ways to infuse different life into it for different events so it’s not always the same talk over and over.
Nobody wants to put out old information on their website. You have a better chance of getting picked if it’s newer information. The other thing is some events won’t tell you if you didn’t get selected. They’ll only tell you if you did, which I hate that. Quite honestly, whenever I’m in charge, I make sure that all of my speakers know whether they were selected or not. This one does say that applicants receive a response to their applications, so I’m assuming that means that you’ll know either way whether you were selected or not, which is definitely an easier way to… Instead of sitting on the edge of your chair.
But if you find out, you’re not supposed to publish it until they announce the speakers. If you hear that you were or you haven’t heard back yet, Allie’s like, “Oh, I got picked for WordCamp XYZ. Have you heard yet,” and I haven’t heard yet, that either means I’m not selected, or it means they’re waiting to see. I’m on the second string. They’re waiting to see if anybody else says no, and then they’ll move me up into a yes position. Don’t lose heart if you don’t hear anything right away. It may mean that you’re kind of in the second tier of acceptances based on just the fact that there’s not enough seats for everybody to be able to speak.
The other thing that I would warn against doing is reaching out to the organizers to say, “Why wasn’t my topic selected? What was wrong with it?” Because these are volunteers who have no time to respond to a thousand people saying, “What was wrong with my topic? What could I do differently next time?” People just don’t have enough time to be able to respond to those kinds of questions. A better thing to do would be then to go to somebody else besides the person who reviewed it the first time and say, “Hey, could you look this over for me? It wasn’t selected for WordCamp XYZ, and I want to make it better for next time.
What would you recommend that I do differently?” You have a better opportunity there than to make the organizers feel bad that you weren’t selected and feel like they have to respond to you about why your topic wasn’t selected.

Allie Nimmons:
Because that’s not something that somebody could just check and say, “Oh, well, this.” They’ll have to go back and find yours. That person answering that email might not even be the person who chose the speakers. So then they have to find the person who made that decision and trying and ask them to remember what it… It’s so much extra resources and work. It’s unfortunate that that can’t be a thing. Like in an ideal world, yes, you’d get a response and say, “Hey, your talk wasn’t selected because we already had someone with this topic,” and whatever.

Michelle Frechette:
Whatever reason.

Allie Nimmons:
It would be great. Has that ever happened to you? Have people asked you why? Oh boy. I’ve never gotten that before and I’m so glad because I would cry.

Michelle Frechette:
I have a generic response that I send to anybody that does that, which is basically, “We were overwhelmed with the number of topics. We simply couldn’t select everybody. We wish you best luck going forward.” I’m not going to dig into it. I’m not going to go back and look at yours. I’m not going to tell you what was wrong with it, because maybe nothing was wrong with it. I just had 10 people that submitted on SEO and I don’t need 10 at SEO talks.

Allie Nimmons:
It’s a thing.

Michelle Frechette:
It is a thing.

Allie Nimmons:
This is one of our longest episodes on record, I think. It’s a good one though.

Michelle Frechette:
It is, but I want to talk about, we’re doing a giveaway. Let’s talk about a giveaway real quick. We’ve been doing this for a while now. Allie, you probably know what episode we’re on. I never know what episode we’re on.

Allie Nimmons:
We’re in the 70s. I looked at it recently.

Michelle Frechette:
The pursed lips. She was like, “Hmm, let me think.” But we’ve been doing this a while, well over a year, for sure. We do miss a week here or there because we have lives and this is not our livelihood, but we do the best that we can to make sure that we’re…

Allie Nimmons:
Wait, this is going to be episode 80.

Michelle Frechette:
Ooh, episode 80. All right, well, we’re celebrating episode 80. We’re doing a giveaway. One of the services that we offer is a one hour pick our brain session where you can come to us with any questions you have about underrepresentation in technology. Maybe you want your company to do better. Maybe you want us to answer some questions about what works well and what doesn’t. Take a look at your homepage with you and see what’s wrong with it, if there is anything wrong with it. Those kinds of things. How you can do better, how to use better inclusive language, whatever your questions are that pertain to underrepresented.
That’s a $250 value. We charge $250 for that hour of pick our brain time. We are giving away not one, not two, but three pick our brain sessions. Three, the big three. You need to go to our website, underrepresentedintech.com. Up in the navigation, you’ll see contest. The navigation will be contest. On there, there’s just going to be a simple form you fill out by the end of day on January 31st. On that week’s episode, at the end of that week, we will announce who the three winners are and be excited to share with them the opportunity to come talk to us.
Make sure you got an underrepresentedintech.com/contest. Find it in the navigation if you don’t remember that and we’ll be happy to entertain all of the applicants. Hopefully the three winners will find really good stuff to talk about and make their businesses even better.

Allie Nimmons:
Awesome. I’m so excited. I love doing these calls with people. They’re always so emotional, emotionally kind of charged sometimes, but it’s really gratifying to get off a call with people and feel like we’ve moved the needle a little bit with them. It’s always very, very gratifying. I don’t know if I can list the companies we’ve worked with. I think some of them have asked to be anonymous and some of them haven’t, so I’m not going to…

Michelle Frechette:
Ninja Forms is very open about the fact that we’ve worked with them and they were pretty excited about that, which is super awesome.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, they were really great to work with. I can’t wait to see those, get those in. $250 value, not bad.

Michelle Frechette:
Not bad at all. Not bad at all. Tara Claeys has used Underrepresented in Tech database before. Matt Cromwell has used the Underrepresented in Tech database before. We have some testimonials on our website that talk about things like that too. People have found it useful. Get in there. Get your chance to win an hour-long conversation with me and Allie.

Allie Nimmons:
Yeah, excited. Cool. Well, thank you again for another amazing episode, Michelle.

Michelle Frechette:
Absolutely. Thank you too.

Allie Nimmons:
All right. Bye.

Michelle Frechette:
Bye.

Voiceover:
This episode was sponsored by the following companies. YIKES, Inc. YIKES, Inc. is a collaborative, results-driven, Philadelphia-based WordPress agency dedicated to sustainable business practices. If you’re interested in sponsoring an episode using our database, or just want to say hi, go to underrepresentedintech.com. See you next week.