262 - Online summits, attendee and speaker expectations

Interview with Nathan Wrigley and Joe Casabona

So this is something new to the podcast. I recorded this episode with Joe Casabona at the tail end of 2021, and this is the first time that he and I have created content to be shared across both of our podcasts. So right at the start, if you’re a regular listener to Joe’s podcast and you get a deja vu feeling listening to the this episode… you’re not going mad! It’s the exact same recording. What I’m trying to say is that if you’ve listened to this episode over on Joe’s podcast, there’s very little point in listening to it again here!

That being said, if this is the first time that you’ve heard this, there’s a lot of interesting ground that we cover.

The back story goes like this. I (Nathan) co-host the Page Builder Summit with my friend Anchen le Roux. We invite a range of speakers to come onto that podcast and create presentations which, it is hoped, the attendees will enjoy.

We do not pay the speakers for their contributions. We make this very clear and communicate it in advance. There’s an exchange here, but it’s not the usual one of ‘you create something and I will pay you for it’. It’s more of a ‘here is an audience you might like to present to if you’re willing’.

Joe has appeared in two of the Page Builder Summits as a speaker, and right around the second of his contributions, he published a post called ‘We Need to Talk About Speakers and Virtual Events‘. In that piece Joe put forward the idea that speakers ought to be paid for their time.

I think that it’s important at this point to make clear that Joe reached out to me to explicitly tell me that this piece was not written in response to his involvement with the Page Builder Summit; it was related to other ‘poor’ experiences he’d had with other events in which he felt that there was not the correct balance between speaker expectations and organiser requirement. It felt like the pendulum such that the speakers were being treated in an unfair way.

I reached out to Joe and we spoke about the issues that he’d raised and we agreed to get on a call to thrash out where we both stood, and add some clarity to why we stood there.

We are certainly on different sides of the debate here, but the conversation is polite and we each hear one another out. It was not really an endeavour to change one another’s minds, more, an attempt to air our thoughts and make clear why we think the way we do.

If you’re thinking of being a speaker at an event, or you’re thinking of organising an event this could be a really interesting conversation. It might well shine a spotlight on issues that you never even considered and make both sides have more empathy, especially when the event deadlines are tight and expectations are put under stress.

Have a listen to the podcast and let me know in the comments what your thoughts are, or head to the WP Builds Facebook group to comment there. I’d also really appreciate you sharing this on your platform of choice, that would be lovely!

Mentioned in this podcast:

We Need to Talk About Speakers and Virtual Events

Faceoff: Should Speakers be Paid for Virtual Events with Nathan Wrigley

Build Something Club

Page Builder Summit