I’ve been speaking for over 20 years and at community conferences like Code Camp and SQL Saturday for over 10 years. Based on my experience, here are tips and suggestions for anyone who wants to give back to the community and speak at these types of conferences.

Prepare Your Slides And Demos!

Don’t wait until the last minute to work on your session. It does not matter that you aren’t getting paid for giving the session, you need to have the mindset that you are and it has to be quality. If you do speak at paid conferences, pre-viewing your session first at a community conference or even a user group will help make it better.

I see many tweets each year from my speaker friends hold up in their hotel room the night before their session coming up with the PowerPoint deck and coding the demos… DON’T DO THIS! If you do, you might not be asked back for the next year. My goal is to be completely done with my presentation, slides and demos at least two weeks before the conference.

Be Prepared

Most of these events are held at a community college and they do not provide any tech support to help you setup for your session. You will be lucky to get one person shared among all the sessions. It’s your responsibility to come prepared with everything you need to put on a great session. You can not count on what will be there or that it even works properly.

The Internet

You can not expect the internet work in your room. If there is only wireless, it often gets saturated with all the attendees to the point it might not be useable at all. I even see presenters at big conferences like Microsoft Build and Microsoft Ignite struggling with this issue. Got a hotspot? Well, I once spoke at a Code Camp in Utah and I had NO cell coverage anywhere in the building. I had to go outside to check my voice mail. You should prepare your session demos so that it does not rely on an internet connection. If there is one great, but that should actually be plan B.

Equipment

Here is a list of equipment that you need to bring to your session. You can not count on what you need to be in the room.

• Power: For some reason when they design rooms they never put a power outlet near the podium or desk. Even if they do, sometimes all them are taken by other equipment in the room. Make sure you bring at least a 6ft extension cord.
• Internet: If your presentation requires the internet for demos, make sure you bring an adapter for your laptop or tablet for a wired connection. If one is provided it will work out much better than the wireless.
• Display: Make sure you bring an adapter for your computer for both VGA and HDMI. Unfortunately most places I speak are still using VGA so make sure you bring both just in case. Also, it’s a good idea to bring a VGA extension cable.
• Audio: If your presentation needs audio to play videos, make sure to bring an male to male and male to female headphone cable at least 6 feet long. You never know how far away the input jack will be.
• Backup: You need to have backups of your presentation and demo code. Not that this has ever happened to me but you never know when your computer will fail. This has happened to friends of mine.. even last year. When I was speaking at Silicon Valley Code Camp one of my Microsoft MVP friends came up to me and said he was working on demos the night before and his computer died. I asked if he had a backup of his session and he did. So I pointed him to the Microsoft booth and said I’m sure they will lend you a computer, and they did. His session was saved, but he was lucky they were there. I’m a bit anal about this so here is what I do:
  • Presentations are on my Surface. They are backup on OneDrive, Google Drive and are on a thumb drive.

Other Stuff To Bring

Here is a list of other items you should think about bringing.

Business Cards

It’s important to bring professional looking business cards to your session for any attendees that want your email address etc. It’s also a great way to market yourself, you never know who will be in audience. The current contract I have is because the owner of the company attended one of my sessions at SQL Saturday.

Survey Forms

Feed back is really hard to get at conferences. So if you do want feedback, it would be a good idea to bring survey forms for the attendees. Place one on each chair and collect them at the end of your session. You could use these to giveaway swag which would incentivize the attendees to fill the survey out.

Giveaways

It makes for a more fun session if you giveaway swag (software, books etc.) during or at the end of the session. I found that this makes attendees pay more attention, especially if you give it away if someone answers a question correctly. It will also get them to fill out the survey, if you have one. Some conference will have swag you giveaway in the speaker room.

So have fun by giving back to the community by speaking at a local community conference near you soon. If you have any tips for your fellow speaker, please leave a comment.