What’s your story? Call for Speakers in San Diego now open!

Maybe you joined us in Vegas and the idea started percolating then. Perhaps you attended your user group and realized, “Hey, other people are really benefitting from what I have to share.” Or it’s possible you started your Tableau journey and are bursting to shout from the rooftops about how it’s changed your life.

Regardless of your inspiration, you should apply to be a speaker at Tableau's 5th Annual Customer Conference. You’ve got until Friday, April 20 at 5pm Pacific to submit your idea.

The Conference is November 5-8 in sunny San Diego, CA. Great customer speakers will be a highlight of the agenda. So will a line-up of terrific Tableau sessions, inspiring keynotes, and useful networking. If you're not keen to speak, then you should at least go ahead and register now to save your place and block your calendar.

But you should seriously consider speaking. Last year, more than two dozen customers shared their experiences, tips, suggestions, and enthusiasm about how to use Tableau to help deliver big benefits. They talked about how analytics and Tableau have impacted their teams, organizations – even their careers. These perspectives not only provided a huge benefit to our attendees but also gave a speakers a chance to showcase their work, hone their presentation skills and network with people who responded to their stories. We’re excited to offer the same dimension to our 2012 conference participants.

What’s in it for me? A free ticket to a fabulous conference

In addition to the warm, fuzzy feeling of helping your fellow Tableau enthusiasts and adding another line to your resume under “speaking experience,” Tableau will give you a complementary registration pass to thank you for your contribution. While this will not include the cost of pre-conference workshops, guest passes, travel, hotel, etc., it will cover the entire cost of your registration.

What makes a great customer presentation?

• Content is informative. Attendees will travel from all over the world to San Diego to participate in the conference. They’re hungry to take back information about how to do more with Tableau – whether that’s visualizing better, analyzing more, ramping faster, sharing more widely, using mobile effectively. What imprint can you leave on them?
• Presentation is visual. It wouldn’t be Tableau without this one. Some of the best Tableau learning comes from seeing what others are doing with it. How will you incorporate examples? PowerPoint has its role, but how will you captivate your audience with more than bullet points?
• Session delivers on its promise. With so many sessions to choose from, attendees rely heavily on abstracts to build their schedule. Make sure yours captures the key points you'll present so the audience knows it's for them. When you present, stay true to the topic so your audience walks away with what they came to hear.
• Speaker is engaging. Can you tell a great story? While some speaking experience is helpful, your experience can range from addressing standing-room-only crowds to presenting to internal teams. The bottom line is you to be confident you’ll enjoy standing in front of a room of ~50 peers and sharing your story.

Make no mistake, being a speaker takes some effort. Our customer speakers definitely put in some time to create and deliver their presentations. In order to help speakers deliver fantastic content, Tableau requests that each speaker participate in presentation reviews. Prior to the conference, we will record your presentation to make it available to attendees after the event.

While we are together in San Diego, we will request a few minutes of your time for a video interview that will be made into a customer case study video for our website. (If you haven't seen them yet, we recently posted all the new videos based on the interviews in Las Vegas.) A complete list of milestones will be provided to selected customer presenters in June.

What if my topic is more of a quick “tip”?

We like those, too! Last year we hosted our first ever “Tips and Tricks in the Wild” panel session. It was a smash hit so we’re bringing it back in San Diego. The panel featured a handful of customers who shared their rockstar suggestions – things like how to use parameters to select the hierarchy you want, clever ways to incorporate dashboard instructions, and ways to plot Likert scales – in short presentations.

If you’d like to be considered for this panel, fill out the application and select “Yes” where we ask about it towards the end of the form. Include a brief description of what you’d like to share in the designated space. Tips & tricks panelists will receive a discount on their registration. You’re welcome to apply for a full session as well as be considered for this panel.

Sounds great! Where do I apply?

We’re excited to hear about your topic proposal. Please use this online application to submit your application. If you’ve got more than one session in mind, please fill out one form per idea.

Occasionally customers like to present with more than one speaker. We’re happy to consider this. At the end of the application there’s a place to provide additional information and you can use this space to let us know there will be more than one person presenting. Please note that only one registration pass is available per customer session.

What’s the deadline?

All applications are due by Friday, April 20 at 5pm Pacific. Once they’re all in, the Tableau Conference content committee will review the applications and then we’ll get back to you by June 1 regarding your status.

Don’t wait to register

If you know you will be joining us in San Diego regardless of whether or not you are a speaker, we encourage you to register now to take advantage of the Early Bird registration discount which ends on April 20. If you are selected to speak, your pass will be refunded after June 1, 2012.

Other questions?

Feel free to email our conference speakers team with any other questions.

See you in San Diego!