Writing a Good Conference Summary or Trip Report: DevRel Superpowers

Sharing key takeaways from an event can provide benefits for you, your readers, and your company and products

Sep 17, 2023

I skipped posting last week as I attended the All-In Summit in LA. The event was fun and thought-provoking—if you listen to the All-In Podcast, you know what to expect! As I wrote up my event summary on the flight home, I thought I should share my approach to writing successful conference summaries and trip reports.

Why write a conference summary or trip report?

Early in my career, I started writing conference summaries to help clarify my learning from the event. I like to take handwritten notes and Tweet key takeaways during a conference, as this helps me lock in what I’m hearing from the speakers, but I often felt like there was an opportunity to learn more.

During my days as an academic, I found that the best way to really learn a topic was to attempt to teach it. Writing event summaries forced me to re-read my notes, “join the dots” with related topics, and dive deeper into what interested me.

DALL·E 3: Prompt “Please create a cartoon showing a developer superhero sitting within a big and diverse audience at a conference taking notes”

If you work in developer relations, there is also the content creation perspective to writing summaries. Sharing your key takeaways from an event can provide a lot of benefits:

Demonstrates your understanding of the key topics and technologies, which can build your credibility and reputation in the industry
Hones your writing and summarization skills, and helps to develop your online content portfolio
Highlights your company’s involvement with the space and event (driving top-of-funnel awareness)
Explores interesting problems and related solutions (helping with mid-funnel consideration and decision)
Provides an opportunity for you to give a shout-out to your partners, friends, and related OSS projects

With the benefits in mind, let’s explore how to create a good trip report.

A good trip report starts before the event

As part of my conference preparation, I always review the online schedule, looking for interesting topics, technologies, and trends. Not only do I do this to determine my agenda at the event, but it also primes my thinking around writing the summary.

I’ll often note the key themes and then watch for related social media posts during the event. I’ll also bring these up in my discussions with fellow attendees throughout the conference.

Taking notes during the event

During the event, I like to centralize my notes so that I can add commentary, thoughts, and social media links via my mobile devices and laptop. I’ve used Evernote in the past, and now I’m using Onenote. I take brief notes in sessions I attend and take a picture of these to add to my online collection. I typically capture key thoughts from interesting conversations with attendees on my cellphone. I also regularly monitor social media for the event hashtag and other key themes, and add the links to my online notes.

If I’m running a sponsored booth (or on booth duty), I’ll use this opportunity to ask lots of questions about the key themes I identified before the event, and I also look for topics and themes that I may have missed. Asking questions like “What’s your current biggest pain point?” or “What’s been the most interesting thing you’ve learned at the event?” can be eye-opening.

Regarding notes, brevity is your friend here. In the past, I’ve written pages and pages of notes, and I found this tricky to summarise at the end of the event.

When writing, start with the end in mind

When writing the trip report or conference summary, I advise starting with the end in mind and defining your key takeaways upfront. I aim to summarise 5-10 key takeaways, which seem manageable for me and valuable for readers.

Taking my recent All-In Summit summary, I reviewed my notes, and the top five takeaways instantly jumped out to me (and I had identified three of them from a pre-event scan of the schedule and talk abstracts). I looked again at social media and a couple of early summaries shared by other attendees and found roughly eight additional takeaways. I didn’t want to summarize more than ten takeaways, so I merged two and dropped a couple on the cutting room floor. I was left with this:

The top ten takeaways that I started with when writing my All-In Summit summary

Once I’ve found the key takeaways, I use this as a skeleton for the remainder of my report. I typically draft each takeaway sequentially and then conduct multiple passes over the entire article, adding additional details, social media links, and images. I usually conduct a final pass where I attempt to “join the dots” and add anything separate from the event that I believe the audience will find helpful.

An example of this in my All-In Summit summary is that I added a couple of links to recent articles in The Economist:

“Joining the dots” by adding additional related or connected information

Now, let’s put all of this into practice and look at some example final reports.

Example trip reports

As with many things in life, (deliberate) practice makes perfect. I’ve been writing trip reports for several years and across various roles. Here are some examples of my most popular and successful summaries:

As a guide, I aim for thousands of page views. An average summary in the cloud native space might get ~5000-10000 views, and my “bangers” have scored 25k+.

Event summary top tips: SEO and distribution

Writing an amazing event summary is no good if no one reads it. For this reason, you will need to focus on search engine optimisation (SEO) and distribution.

I’ve been lucky to work with some fantastic SEO specialists over the years, and so I have internalized (and constantly updated) many SEO best practices. Although SEO can rapidly turn into a game, my north star is to write content that people want to read and format the content in a way that is discoverable by fellow humans, i.e. create a good title, use sub-headings to illustrate the structure, write concisely, include diagrams where it makes sense, etc. Once you’ve mastered this, you can optimise for keywords, meta information, social media cards, etc.

There are several good SEO references available for DevRels—for example, Google’ SEO Starter Guide, Lauren Schaefer and Magen Grant’s SEO for DevRel, Mostafa Moradian et al.’s “DevRel content strategies with a focus on SEO optimization for developers”— but I always recommend searching for the latest SEO guidance. If you are creating a lot of content, I recommend hiring someone with SEO/SEM expertise. Trust me, it’s worth the investment!

Distribution is also super important. Some of my most significant bumps in page views have been due to a mention in popular newsletters and on social media, such as DevOps Weekly, What's Hot in Enterprise IT/VC, LearnK8s, etc.

Cultivating relationships with the people running these sites and accounts is key here, as is subtly highlighting the content you want to be shared. For example, I’ll tag people in social media posts and discussions where appropriate, and I’ll sometimes DM or email newsletter owners the article and ask for the share. My advice is to always focus on the win-win, not to be overly pushy, and ensure you are taking time to help these folks before asking for too much in return.

Common trip report and conference summary mistakes

Here are some of the typical conference/trip summary mistakes I encounter regularly (and note that I have made most of these at some point in my career!)

Being overly promotional and/or mentioning your company and products too much. Don’t get me wrong, most people sharing content on the Internet have an angle or agenda—and as the startup cliche goes, we all work in sales—but there is a delicate balance. In my experience, it’s okay to mention your company and products once or twice in a report, mainly if this is relevant to the discussion. Still, anything more than this will make the article look like straight-up marketing copy, and no one wants to read this type of content.
Writing an overly long event summary. I’ve made this mistake at least a few times, most recently with a two-part KubeCon summary. In my experience, readers generally want a concise overview of the takeaways and critical learning.
Creating the summary too long after the event. I get it; we’re all time-pressured, but if you wait to publish your summary more than a week after the event has finished, you may miss out on the surrounding buzz. And if you post your summary later than a month after the event, it just looks like old news.

Let me know in the comments if you have more conference summary antipatterns or trip report mistakes to share!

Want to know more about DevRel content creation?

I hope this post has helped to shed some light on how I summarize my learning and get extra value from attending conferences and technical events.

Please comment below and let me know if you want more content on writing in the role of developer relations. I also offer ad hoc advising and consultancy in this space.

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