9 - Adding speakers to the workspace

Your event's speakers can be added to the workspaces and then linked to the sessions where they will be speaking.

Their profiles are accessible via the Speakers section in the app, but also via any session that they are associated to. Speaker profile pages can contain their personal information such as their name, title, company/organization, location, biography, profile photo, and the sessions they are speaking at. Pages and documents can also be created in the workspace and linked to their profiles.

This article will take you through the steps of adding speakers to the workspace.

To access the Speakers module in the workspace, click on the Content icon in the main menu to the left of the screen, and select Speakers. 

Adding a speaker to the workspace

Follow the below steps to add an individual speaker manually to the workspace.

Go to the Content category in the main menu to the left of the screen, then select Speakers. 

In Speakers, select the New speaker button. This will open the below screen, where you can add all the necessary information pertaining to the speaker that you wish to add:

First name
Add the speaker's first name.

Last name
Add the speaker's last name.

Title
Add the speaker's title. For example "Mrs", "Mr", "M.D", "PhD", etc.

Company
Add the speaker's company or organization.

Position
Add the position of the speaker in their company/organization.

Country
Add the speaker's country, for example the country of residence or the nationality of the speaker.

Biography
Add the speaker's biography.

Status
Here there are two options available for the speaker:

• Active means that the a speaker will be active and visible in the workspace to app users.
• Hidden means that the speaker will not be visible to app users in the workspace.

Linked documents
In this field you can add documents to a speaker's profile for app users to access, or create new documents to be linked. More information on uploading or creating documents will be provided later on in this Getting started series, in the Adding documents to the workspace article.

Frontstage page
When the app user opens a speaker's profile page, it is displayed using a page template. This field allows you to choose the page template used to display the profile. 
The default one is the "presenters" template, available in the dropdown list, however speaker profile pages can be associated with other display templates that can be created in the workspace, and then selected here. More information on pages will be provided later on in this Getting started series, in the Adding a page to the workspace article.

Speaker photo
Here you can upload a speaker's picture.
Recommended size is 400 x 400px minimum (1:1 ratio) - JPG or PNG (larger files will be resized automatically).

Click on Save to finish adding the first speaker to the workspace. The List speakers tab will now open and you will see that the speaker has been added to the list of users:

So how does this actually look in the app?

Here we'll take a look at how speakers look in the app. This will allow you to better visualize how the information added to Backstage is seen in the app:

Speakers list

Each speaker added to the workspace will appear inn the Speakers list in the app. This is how it looks:

Speakers seen in a session

Speaker profile pictures will appear in the sessions that they are speaking at:

Speaker profile page

The speaker profile page will display when a participant clicks on their thumbnail picture, fro the speaker list or anywhere a speaker is added (session, feed post, page, etc.):

Here participants can see:

The speaker's name, organization, picture (that can be enhanced).

A button to display the speaker's activity within the workspace (posts on feeds for example).

The speaker's bio, or any other information included in their profile (pages, links, documents, etc.).

A list of the speaker's interventions. These are the sessions that the presenter speaks at.

Note: The content of this page is customizable, so any information can be included here based on the event's needs.

Adding more speakers to the workspace

After adding the first speaker to the workspace, you can follow the steps explained above to manually add more speakers, or you can add all the necessary speakers in a bulk operation, using an Excel spreadsheet.

This is done by:

1. Downloading the existing list of speakers as a spreadsheet.
2. Adding all the necessary speakers to the spreadsheet.
3. Re-uploading the spreadsheet to Backstage.

Follow the below steps to perform a bulk upload of speakers into the workspace via Backstage.

1. Downloading the speakers spreadsheet

1. In the Speakers tab, select Export XLS.
2. Click on Download export.
3. Save the spreadsheet locally, and then open it.
4. The spreadsheet contains a list of speakers, and in this example it only contains one speaker (Jamie Knight):

2. Adding the speakers to the spreadsheet

The speakers spreadsheet is composed of 12 columns, each column and its content is explained below:

• fp_ext_id: This is the unique identifier that Backstage has automatically assigned to the speaker.
  To make things more simple, these can be changed to "Speaker_1, Speaker_2, Speaker_3, etc. in the spreadsheet (like in this example).
• fname: Speaker's first name.
• lname: Speaker's last name.
• title: Speaker's title ("Mrs", "Mr", "M.D", "PhD", etc.).
• company:Speaker's company.
• position: Speaker's position in the company/organization.
• country: Speaker's country of residence or nationality.
• biography: Speaker's biography.
• fp_status: Will the speaker be active (visible) or inactive (invisible) to app users within the workspace.
• photo: This is a path generated by Backstage to the photo associated with the speaker. Leave this blank when adding new speakers, photos need to be added directly via backstage.
• participant: This field is left blank if the speaker is not already linked to an existing app user in the workspace. In this example, the speaker "Jamie Knight" is linked to the app user "Jamie Knight", and this field is therefore populated with the fp_ext_id for the app user Jamie Knight.
• fullname: User's full name, generated by Backstage.

Using the above information, you can directly add all the speakers that you need into this spreadsheet, like in the example below:

Once you have added all the necessary information to the spreadsheet for all the speakers that you wish to add to the workspace, you can save the spreadsheet and then re-upload the spreadsheet to Backstage in order to import the speakers.

3. Importing the speakers spreadsheet

1. In the Speakers tab, and select Import XLS.
2. Click on Choose file, and select the updated speakers list spreadsheet.
3. Select Begin upload.
4. Verify that the system has selected the correct column headers in the spreadsheet, if necessary select the correct headers.
5. Click on Next.
6. The system will perform the import, provide a summary of the updates made to the speaker's list in Backstage, and notify you when the import was successful.
7. Click Next if the import was successful.

Note: This approach of exporting and importing speaker information via a spreadsheet can also be used to easily make multiple edits or updates to speaker information. Simply export the .XLS, make the necessary changes to the speaker information in the spreadsheet, and then upload the updated the spreadsheet to the system.

 

NEXT STEP
For the next steps in this Getting started series, please continue to the Adding a page to the workspace article.