Almost everyone who went to trainings on presentations said there that the audience must perform an action after the performance. Something to buy, somewhere to register, to call somewhere, to start every day for twenty minutes to do some kind of exercise. This action for the presentation is the goal that you need to understand before you prepare everything else. After that, they sometimes recommend that these actions be formulated in a SMART format so that viewers have no doubt how much and when to pay you have to do it. However, for people conducting technological speeches, this recommendation often causes aversion: we are not some sales people, we have no water here, only technology, if we start to do that, just scare people, leave me alone. And speeches on technical topics suffer from the fact that their authors are unable or unwilling to formulate a call to action. Let's see how to do it correctly and why there is no contradiction here.

Motivation

If we came to the conference to give a lecture on a technical topic related to our work, and direct advertising of our company is prohibited under the terms of the conference, then what could be a call to action? Let's look for the answer to this question from why we came to the conference at all. There can be several motives here:

• Share. It happens that you have learned something that you definitely need to share with the whole world, otherwise you will just be torn apart. I place this motif first not because it is the most frequent, but because it is the most noble. At the conference, we all go? Well, you know what is not frequent.
• Make contacts. Post a banner so that other people doing something like this will find you on this banner.
• Recruiting See what cool things we do! Come to work with us! Or recruiting the opposite: look how cool I am! Hire me quickly for a lot of dollars!

Perhaps there are some other options, but as a starting point we will also have these.
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Now we need another lyrical digression. How do viewers rate you? Why do they decide that we are cool, why they want to communicate with us more?

It is appropriate to recall here that a person perceives himself not in the same way as everyone else. For example, we tend to evaluate our actions by intentions, and others - by results. Here Vasya Pupkin did so, and it turned out nonsense. So, Vasya Pupkin is not a good person. But I did it, and it turned out about the same nonsense, but I had good aspirations. So who is well done? The often forgotten consequence of this is that other people, in particular, our audience, do not perceive us as we do. In their heads, something like "moves - does not move, it is dangerous - safe, useful - useless."

I suggest focusing on the last point and try to make it useful . To make it so that after our presentation in the life of the audience something has changed or at least could change for the better. This is where the prerequisites arise for calling people to action: new information seldom changes our life by itself, because you also need to use it correctly. In order for them to feel good, they have to do something , and we just tell you what it is. At the same time, we will still be useful people, and this is good: it is interesting to keep in touch with useful people, what if some bonus comes out of them?

How it looks in practice

In any presentation, in fact, we talk about the problem and its solution. In a technical presentation, you usually have to give a lot of details, but you still need to come to some practical recommendations (benefits). With these recommendations there are the following subtleties.

Not relevant for everyone

If you are telling something specific to Java, then those who have never written in this language and have no plans for the foreseeable future are not your target audience. This is normal. It is not bad to understand your target audience in advance, ideally not to forget to describe it in the theses of the report, so that only those concerned can come to you. For an advertising and marketing presentation this is also true: for those who already accidentally have an advertised product or service, our presentation is not really needed. Analogy: if you buy something from an online store, first look for it, then for a few more weeks the ad will jump at you from all angles, without benefit to you.

If, on the whole conference, people for whom the problem is topical, will be typed with a dozen, then maybe you shouldn’t even speak there.

Not applicable immediately

Unlike buying, people can not always immediately follow your advice. Recommendations may have the form "if you happen to X, you should do Y". It can easily be that half of the X listeners never happen, and very well, because X is terribly unpleasant. And those who have it happening right now, maybe, in general, two people in total. However, this is also a call to action, just the action is conditional and, probably, deferred. This is normal too: the most intelligent people will be able to recognize good advice, even if they cannot be used right now. Please see eleven minutes from this video by Alexey Shipilyov:


The fragment of interest to us begins at 35:55 ​​and ends at 46:45, here is the exact link to the beginning . The last minute of the fragment (starting at 45:45) is a direct impact on the worldview, an attempt to make the audience more correct, competent people, to give them an important element of a professional approach to measuring performance. Not everyone is engaged in benchmarks (are there many who even once started benchmarking results?), But for some it will help to do everything correctly in the future. Well, I want to believe. So this is quite a call to action, and it is not only appropriate, but also necessary where it is.

Require generalization

Special attention should be paid to this: often our concrete results are of little use for other people, but the accompanying ones or the process of obtaining them is useful. For example, I once observed a story about migrating a large cluster from OpenSuSe 10.2 to CentOS 7. From the list of critical issues that arose when trying to launch a new distribution out of the box through stories about investigating these problems, quite useful tips appeared on debugging and because There may be some symptoms such as uneven loading of cores on the processor. The specific problems that the speaker encountered were not in themselves as useful as the general principles that he was able to illustrate with these specific problems.

Finally

Summary

Try to formulate for yourself how viewers will be able to change their professional life for the better as a result of your presentation. What should they do differently to solve the problems you talk about or avoid them? A call to action may be conditional: "if you come across such a situation, then here is a possible solution." Consider whether people can apply the specific results you get. If not, would a method for obtaining them be helpful? Something of what you are talking about, the audience must necessarily be able to use, now or in the future, and it is very important to explicitly talk about it .

Bonus for attentive readers who get to the end

Could anything be improved in the recommendations given by Alexey? Is it possible to make them clearer?

This, of course, does not negate the fact that the performance is excellent.