In her webinar titled Selecting and Managing Conference Speakers: Converting Talking Heads into Learning Liaisons, presenter Tracy Petrillo of EDUCAUSE encouraged meetings professionals to cast a fresh eye on their speaker development process. When it comes to speaker development many of us hold fast to the old adage, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” when in reality, snapping your program apart could be a major step toward refreshing your conference.
Petrillo stressed the importance of pre-conference prep to ensure the engagement and satisfaction of all participant groups. She offered these ideas to meetings managers and education program coordinators in the process of recruiting speakers for an upcoming event:
- Get away from using the name speaker. Instead, from the very start, call them a content leader, facilitator, knowledge community curator or presenter.
- Make sure your subject matter experts come from the corporate side as well as the community side to ensure all of your constituents are represented.
- Review how you recruit speakers. Do you go back to the same folks year after year? Maybe it’s time to look at how you get new people into the pipeline. Get them involved in other programming- mentor them!
- Change expectations from the beginning. In your call for proposals, it’s important to explain the presenter’s role, define expectations and expand involvement.
- Evolve from lecturing to storytelling. Have speakers prepare their content to be a story of why they did things instead of how. Encourage speakers to demonstrate application of knowledge. At the end of the session, the speaker should be able to explain why it matters to the members of the audience.
- Look at how to make your sessions more interactive through polling using a tool like IdeaScale,
Google Docs/Google polls or Cahoot.it
- Take the time to “train” your speakers so that they understand what is expected of them. Create a speaker guide/manual, consider a 5-minute video, webinar or best yet, a personal call to review. Webinars and 1 on 1 consultations are worth the investment!
- Wield the power of “Yes.” Rather than being in the position of saying no- no PowerPoint, no special equipment, no special staging- instead, position it as this is how we are setting up because this is the environment we found works best.
- Consider a Speaker Ready Room, set with snacks and AV to run through their session. It’s mostly a quiet place where they can relax. Staffing it is optional.
Remember, it’s up to you who gets the microphone at your conference. Who gets invited? Who gets paid and what benefits do they get? What accountability do they have to do a good job? As an educational session producer, you play an equally important role in content delivery.
Don’t be discouraged by pushback; people get complacent and they like the old models that most benefit them. Your attendees will notice the changes and respond positively!
