Solving The Pipeline Problem
Proactive outreach. A very common way that conferences build a program is to brainstorm speakers, come up with a bunch of familiar names, and then notice late in the game that you have almost no white women or people of color (at which point, you might scramble to find some or just complain that you don’t know any). Our initial brainstorm wasn’t magically diverse; in fact, it included an overwhelming percentage of young white men. But we immediately—during the same meeting—started digging deeper to think of people we’d left out, and when we came up with less top-of-mind candidates from underrepresented groups, we reached out to them early and often. We kept that up throughout the whole cycle.
Did proactive outreach make a difference? As we noted earlier, Eric’s previous conferences rosters were based almost entirely on people who were top of mind, and they skewed heavily toward white and male.
Enlisting help. There were two primary ways we asked other people to help us. First, when we had a call for participation, we posted it to mailing lists with lots of white women and/or people of color–we asked our friends to do the same–and we approached organizations like Women 2.0 to publish or cross-post our info on their blogs and Twitter accounts. Second, when we asked other people for speaker ideas or when we formed our few panels with moderators, we told them about our search for underrepresented speakers, and we said that we’d appreciate their support.
Did enlisting help make a difference? It can be scary to ask for this kind of help, because you don’t want to suggest that you’re interested in diversity over quality. But we found that people were consistently, surprising open to working with us on this issue. And it did make a difference: when we forgot to mention to people that we were looking for speakers we didn’t already know, we almost always got back suggestions for more white men who’d be great presenters. When we included a note about our efforts to reach farther, we almost always got back suggestions for white women and people of color who’d be great presenters. In addition, we heard regularly from people who’d found out about our call for speakers through Women 2.0 and other mailing lists we worked with.
Our four-pronged approached generated really encouraging–even exciting–results. We’re further encouraged by the fact that we didn’t execute this plan perfectly, so there’s still room for improvement. Here’s what we we’ll work on next time out.
Coordinating our approaches. As noted above, in addition to our public call for speakers, we also reached out to people we did already know in the Lean Startup community whom we thought would have really compelling stories. Although this group included some white women and people of color, it had a big percentage of white men. Because we started this process before the public call–and because we didn’t know if our public call would work–we quickly filled a number of speaking slots with these great candidates from the group we did know…and we didn’t leave as much room as we could have for terrific speakers new to us. We’ll use a hybrid approach again but, next time, we’ll trust the open-call process and be more deliberate about the distribution of speakers.
Getting beyond the easy wins. Related to the issue above, it’s just plain easier to put people onstage when you know them personally or by reputation. There are a few reasons for this. First, like most conferences, we want to put well-known people onstage, because they’re a draw. So when somebody has a big name and is available, we we’re more likely to consider them for our program, even if their story is only tangential to our angle. For instance, we were interested in having some well-known entrepreneurs join us, and we were willing to let them talk about their experiences generally rather than have them focus on Lean Startup principles. Unsurprisingly, all of the people who fit into this category were white men; white women and people of color with comparable stories but less prominence didn’t get this kind of consideration. Correspondingly, we had much stricter standards for people who were less well known, insisting that they have a direct Lean Startup story—and if we didn’t already know them, we were less trusting that their stories were really good examples of Lean Startup methods. (For the record, we had so many good Lean Startup speakers, we didn’t wind up taking anybody with a general entrepreneurship story. But we definitely considered a bunch of them.)
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