3 reasons you should tour a conference talk

In 2023-2024, I gave my conference talk Entertainment as Code six times. It should have been eight times, but you know, life happens. Writing a full-length conference is no trivial matter; it can take weeks of full-time work to craft a captivating story around your chosen topic, and even longer to build technical and/or representative real-world examples to support your narrative. All of this hard work should not go to waste. I want to share my experience of touring a conference talk, and why you should be touring a conference talk, too.

The first performance of Entertainment as Code was very different to the last. This was mainly because this talk centred on a new and evolving project I was working on throughout 2024, but also because the very notion of this conference talk inspired the project itself. Entertainment as Code became kind of an ouroboros; the more I gave the talk and spoke to attendees about how they enjoyed it, the more inspiration I received to evolve the project and the talk into its final form.

By giving a conference talk multiple times, you also learn what works and what doesn’t work about your talk. As a (former) comedian, I learned a lot of hard lessons about what works and what doesn’t work for particular audiences in particular venues. I will never forget the time I referred to a fictional seven year old as the c-word to rapturous applause from an audience of twenty-somethings in Camden (trust me, it was funny), whilst repeating the same to a room full of middle-aged people in Blackburn almost ended up with me getting booed off the stage.

I like to weave in jokes to my conference talks, and telling these jokes multiple times gives me the opportunity to iterate and land them as well as possible. The same goes for the content of the talk. In my opinion, no talk should be given in the same way any two times. On the one hand, as the speaker you will get bored. And on the other hand, conference attendees may attend multiple events and end up seeing you give the talk more than once (this definitely happened to me) and so you owe it to them to give them just a little bit more fun, insight, and technical depth than before. They’ll remember you for that.

Speaking from experience, musicians, and comedians especially, never give the same performance twice. They also never give a performance just once. Each performance is a practice to make the next one better. As a performer, you have a duty to adapt your material to the room in which you’re in and the audience that is before you. A conference talk is also a performance, and it should be no different. And in intentionally adapting and iterating on your conference talk as you tour it, you learn more about public speaking, how to tell a really compelling story, and the content of the talk itself.

My conference talks usually start with a strict script. As time goes on and I give the talk more times, I know the material more, my confidence grows, and as a result I’m able to improvise and go off-script, adapting the material to the audience and the room with little effort. It is incredibly satisfying for both the speaker and the audience to deliver the material in a way that resonates particularly with that room of people on a particular day.

According to a quick internet search for “average tech conference attendee numbers”, the average number of attendees at a UK conference is 100. Giving your talk to just 100 people and calling it a day is not a good return on investment for potentially weeks of work. After putting in that work, you owe it to yourself to submit those CFPs, and get yourself an audience. The more people you reach, the more opportunities you may get in the future. And the cycle continues. You become the ouroboros. And the cycle is complete. And if you enjoyed the process, write a new talk, and do it all again.