Last year when we opened the Call for Speakers for Nordic Summit 2023 we published a post related to submitting sessions. In that post we shared what we believe are the key ingredients for a successful session abstract.
The Call for Speakers for Nordic Summit 2024 starts today. We are back reminding you about the guidelines we outlined last year, and below you’ll find them packaged along with some additional tips for success.
1. Find an interesting topic
The topic should be in line with one or several subjects that the organizers are looking for. If it is, that is a great start to make it interesting for us and the attendees. Also think about: What’s YOUR passion? If you are passionate about your topic it shines through. Do not pick a topic you are not passionate about.
On our Call for Seakers page you can see that we are looking for sessions with topics related to Power Platform & Dynamics 365. More specifically: Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Copilot Studio, different Copilots related to Power Platform & Dynamics 365 as well as other AI services in the Microsoft cloud. On the Dynamics 365 side we are specifically looking for content related to Sales, Customer Service, Customer Insights, Field Service, Project Operations, Business Central and Finance & Operations.
We are extra keen on content related to newly introduced features. Learning journeys are also great, as are sharing your experience from implementations. E.g. My 10 learnings from implementing… Dos and don’ts when configuring… What NOT to do when implementing… etc.
2. Include the What Why How and Takeaways
If you have read our post from previous year, you might remember the What, Why, How and Takeaways. That is what we suggest you make sure to included in your proposal. Here follows explanations.
What What are you going to talk about? What topic/topics?
Why Why do you want to share this with the audience? Why is it good for them? Why should they know this?
How What format? Lot’s of demos? You and a co-speaker challenging each other? Telling a story?
Takeaways What will they learn? Best Practice? Inspiration? How-to?
3. Find the perfect title
Put some thought into the TITLE. The title is important. Spend time to come up with an engaging title that will catch the interest of the organizers (and later the potential participants). Not too long, but still descriptive. Will the audience understand what the session is all about? It should reflect what the session is about and stand out in the crowd.
Examples:
“Top 10 tips…”, “How to…”, “Get started with…”, “xyz basics…”, “xyz advanced…”, “xyz explained…”, “What I wish I knew about xyz before I….”, “A beginners guide to…”
4. Make it unique
How to make your session stand out in the crowd?
It is always extra interesting when someone gives their session a twist and combine their technical knowledge with something personal like comparing the tech world or building solutions with a twist of…
Lego… Super Heroes… Gardening… Doing your laundry… You name it! Or make up a fictive story. That’s fun too.
5. Try a touch of AI
If you struggle to find a creative way to put together your proposal, try to ask Copilot for help. Let AI help you, but don’t get lost while listening to the prompt answers. Give it a try! Copilot Notebook.
Make sure that the parts that make this session YOU still shine through though. ⭐
Bonus Tips
New to speaking at events? We want to encourage new people to take part in community and submitting sessions to Nordic Summit 2024, therefore we will provide a mentoring program. More info will follow soon, stay tuned!
To end this post we asked three of our Nordic Summit 2024 organizers what would be their dream session proposals. Of course it was mentioned that a dream session proposal would be a well-written abstract following the guidance we described in our earlier blog post, covering the session’s WHAT, WHY and HOW. But what topics are they extra keen on seeing?
I am looking for sessions that show how all the products in the Power Platform work together. I love the “better together” storyline. Also, how to do more with less – and that doesn’t have to mean copilots 😏 Real life customer stories with a hard problem and a creative solution always provide great value as well.
I as someone coming from the developer side would love to see deep-dive technical sessions about pro-dev topics like Plugin development, Testing, ALM or extending the Power Platform with Azure. But techy sessions on low-code topics are always a good learning opportunity. A session with a good ratio between PowerPoint and (in best case) live demos would always be preferred from my side.
I am excited to see submissions about Dynamics 365 and hope to see a workshop even! Also, experience and learnings about combining the tools from Power Platform together with Dynamics 365. And please write more than a sentence 😉
By the way, something that is new year is that we are not only looking for session submissions, we are looking for pre-day workshop proposals as well.
We hope to see your session and pre-day WS proposals soon!
The Nordic Summit Team
Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash
