Speakers Guidelines

By joining our speaker lineup as a presenter, you aren’t just presenting, you are setting the benchmark for where energy and commodity trading are heading.

This guide is designed to help you tune your content for maximum impact, ensure your key takeaways resonate, and make your time on stage seamless, professional, and genuinely rewarding.

SESSION DESCRIPTION CONFIRMATION:

Before diving into slide design, we need to finalise the framework of your session. Whether you have adopted a pre-defined topic from our core programme or are building a custom session from scratch, please confirm your direction with us. This allows our content and marketing teams to ensure your session aligns perfectly with the overarching narrative of the day and prevents topic overlap between sessions and rooms.

SLIDE DESIGN AND CONTENT BEST PRACTICES:

Our audience appreciates data, but they hate “Death by PowerPoint.” Please keep these principles in mind when building your deck:

• Less text, more impact: Your slides are a visual aid, not a script. Aim for a maximum of 3 to 4 bullet points per slide, using concise phrases rather than full paragraphs. Let your voice do the talking
• Focus on the “So what?”: Conclude your presentation (or even each major section) with explicit, high-level key takeaways. What is the one operational strategy or lesson learned that a delegate should write down in their notebook?
• Real-world over marketing: Avoid promotional content or company sales pitches. Share real ‘war stories’, architectural dilemmas, or market data challenges. Authenticity is what drives the highest engagement in our rooms
• Format and style: You are free to use your own template and slide styles, bearing in mind the readability of your text. Please build your presentation in 16:9 widescreen format and submit any non-standard font files you used along with your presentation (in PPT format). You can also provide a sharable PDF version

Please note: Your presentation can be given under Chatham House Rules – if you state this, it means you cannot be quoted in any public forum, media or article after the event. All you have to do is state ‘Before I present, just to let you know this presentation is being given under Chatham House Rules’.

SHARING THE PRESENTATIONS POST EVENT:

We aim at making the presented material available to attendees shortly after the close of the event, so we ask you to let us know, when you send your presentation, whether:

• You’re happy to have the presentation shared (as a pdf) with no further changes
• You’d like to send an amended version for sharing – and please in this case do send it along the original presentation
• You’d like your presentation not to be shared with attendees post-conference

Important: Please note that while Vevox live voting is featured on our main stages, it may not be available for all breakout sessions or smaller interactive formats. Please check the Speakers guidelines email you’ve received from us.

We use an online tool called Vevox for audience participation – it allows the presenters and panellists to ask questions to the audience (polls), and – unless instructed otherwise – to collect questions from the audience.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Attendees can either scan the QR code during the session or go to vevox.app and enter the session ID provided on screen.

POLLS:

You will be able to ask questions to the room with the answers appearing on the vevox screen in real time.

The switch between the presentation screen and the vevox one will be managed by the AV technician in the room, so you won’t have to worry about a thing.

The only thing we need from you is your set of 3 questions maximum ahead of the event as we will need to upload them onto the system in advance.

Please be informed that the system supports the below options:

• Multiple answers (from multiple choice) – It can be used for typical questions you may ask the audience but also to encourage gamification which is a great way to keep your audience engaged and increase participation
• Single answer (from multiple choice) – recommended
• Image picker: Instead of text answers, you provide images – quite a fun way of engaging the audience!
• Word cloud – not recommended as it takes time: Participants are free to enter any text they want. Responses will be assorted into a word cloud with the text most commonly used from your audience being larger

Please note that you can ask people to vote on a question without revealing the results straight away, however for logistics reasons it won’t be possible to launch several polls at the same time and then to go back to the answers. So please deal with one poll at the time.

IMPORTANT:

If you plan on asking questions to the audience, please take into consideration the time this will take from your presenting time, as well as the time you might want to comment on the results.

Panel discussion: we can have questions asked too, this just needs to be agreed with your co-panellists. Feel free to suggest some during the preparatory conference call.

Questions will be visible on the screen during panel discussions.

Q&A:

Unless instructed by our team to ask their questions by raising their hands, attendees will use vevox to ask their questions to the presenter(s) and panellists, anonymously or with their name. Participants can vote for the questions they like the most.

At the end of the presentation, we will switch the screen to the vevox display where we will be able to see the questions, with the most voted ones on top. The chairperson/moderator will ask them to the speaker(s). This will allow us to ensure the most popular and interesting questions are asked, in case we are running late and don’t have time for all the questions.