lisa-photo

I organized the first free, virtual Datawrapper conference from March 13–15, 2024, with 33 speakers giving 30 talks. You can learn more about it here: all talk recordings on YouTube / blog posts about all speakers / agenda as PDF.

The keynote speaker was Amanda Cox, and we could win speakers from the Los Angeles Times, El País, Axios, YouGov, Reuters, AP, The Times, Zeit Online, Spiegel, and more organizations. The conference ended with an interview of Alberto Cairo about his latest book.

Why a conference?

When starting to work at Datawrapper, I’ve quickly become amazed by what users achieve with it. We’ve showed some of their work on our blog – but to truly make these users benefit from each other, I felt like an conference was needed.

We called it Unwrapped, because that’s what it was: The conference opened up and unwrapped how others are making the most out of Datawrapper. It was a space for advanced Datawrapper users to learn from each other — and for beginners to get to the next level.

Datawrapper has a global user base, and we wanted to give everyone the chance to speak and attend, so the conference happened virtual.

Supported by the trust and advice of the Datawrapper CEOs, I organized the following:

Communication with the speakers

Unwrapped featured 33 speakers, from the United States, Germany, Ireland, Finland, Ghana, U.K., and Spain. They signed up for an experiment (we’ve never done that before!) and I was so grateful for them to do so.

  • Call for speakers in December 2023. Setting up a form for the call, deciding for the speakers, and communicating with everyone who applied to speak.
  • Reaching out to other potential speakers
  • Communication with every speaker before and during the event: Deciding on talk topics with them, keeping them informed, organizing that they could try their tech setup on our streaming platform (Streamyard), preparing a FAQ that answers all their questions, asking them afterward if they had any feedback.

Scheduling the agenda

One of the biggest challenges turned out to schedule talks into thematic fitting blocks while keeping speaker’s timezones and scheduling conflicts in mind. I decided on six main blocks (e.g. “News & design”, “Datawrapper API”, and “Creative use of Datawrapper”). Five of my coworkers agreed to host one of these blocks – introduce the speakers and lead through the Q&A –, and they all did a wonderful job. Find the agenda here (PDF).

Unwrapped agenda

Promotion & communication with attendees

More than 1,400 people signed up to attend Unwrapped. Here’s what I did to promote the event and connect attendees:

  • An article on the Datawrapper blog about every speaker, incl. a Q&A with them and showing some of their Datawrapper visualizations.
  • Planning the conference website (thanks to my Datawrapper coworkers David and Jonathan for making it happen!)
  • Posting about the conference on social media
  • Reminding people who signed and informing them through nine newsletters, incl. reminders in the mornings of each conference day
  • A pop-up Slack community that we opened in the week of the conference. It gave attendees the chance to ask questions. introduce themselves, and chat with other attendees.

Deciding on the tech stack & design

I took care of resarching and setting up the best solution for most of the technology involved, including sign-ups, newsletters, streaming platform (Streamyard), the pop-up Slack community, editing the videos, and more.

To help attendees to keep better track of when which talk will happen in their time zone, I set up a calendar with all talks that they could download or subscribe to.

I also designed the logo and, together with our head of design David Wendler, the overall look and feel of all conference material.

unwrapped word cloud

Nice things speakers have said about Unwrapped

"The planning and documentation were terrific. The buzz built around the community was also impressive, well done!"

“Communication with Lisa was great. All the resources she shared throughout (the speaker FAQs, the Slack channel, etc.) were really helpful and answered almost all of my questions before I even had to reach out. The calibre of talks overall was brilliant - really enjoyed them all.”

“I thought the range of topics and depth of information shared was outstanding. It was clear that a lot of thought went into making sure the talk topics, even those with overlap, were different enough that every session had real value.”

“Organisation has been perfect and the program super interesting so thank you! I really appreciate you finding the time to check in with all the speakers in previous days.”


Nice things attendees have said about Unwrapped

"The conference platform and chat worked great, the communication and programming was excellent (loved the speaker blog posts), and I just generally loved getting to hear about how different types of organizations use Datawrapper creatively. Came away with so many ideas!"

“An excellent mix of speakers and topics, and good moderation and guidance whats coming up when.”

“Great selection of speakers, interesting topics, overall thoughts provoking.”

“It did not seem at all like this was your first conference. The way you interacted on chat between presentations was so nice and supportive to all, viewers and your team. [...] All together, big thumbs up and congrats!”