5 Tips: How do you brief your speakers?

Briefing renowned speakers may not always be easy. After all, they are both experts in their field and often speak with great regularity, which can make you think: "who am I to tell him or her how the story should be conveyed?". At the same time; it is not their event, but yours and your organisation's. Aligning a few conditions benefits everyone and is often strategically very valuable. So it actually makes perfect sense to brief your speakers properly to mutually align expectations. Below you can see in the video and read in more detail in my blog how to brief speakers.

On what points then do you brief your speakers?

1. 1. Theme in relation to organisation: When you ask a speaker to give a talk on e.g. "sustainability", it helps the speaker to know how the organisation already relates itself to the theme. Where are there tensions? What successes have already been celebrated? Is there internal consensus on the theme? A speaker referring to this quickly creates more rapport with the audience in this way: "Very good to hear that the organisation has been a fully paperless office has".
   2. Theme in relation to audienceHow does the audience relate to the theme the speaker is presenting? For a healthcare conference, you can figure out that your audience will consist of doctors, nurses and informal carers, but what do they themselves think about automatic donor registration, for instance? As an organisation, you can brief a speaker on this, but with low-threshold polling tools (such as Sendsteps), a speaker can also easily profile the audience himself and live at the kick-off. With online surveys, you can even survey your audience on a number of topics prior to the event. You can then also use the output to brief the speaker, but you can also translate the output into, for example, a Word Cloud which you show when entering the room. By referring back to the results repeatedly during a story, the story suddenly becomes everyone's: "30% of you indicate that you still find the conversation about donor registration with next of kin difficult".
   3. Length and content of the presentation: Many PowerPoints are on speakers' shelves in a standard format. Convenient for them, but with the risk that it is insufficiently tailored to the audience of the moment (think especially of stories by "trend watchers"). Avoid repeating content with individual speakers and also challenge speakers to show fewer slides: a shorter story is often many times more powerful than a longer one. Our attention span is around 12-20 minutes. The well-known Ted Talks always last 18 minutes: it would be the ideal timeframe to convey a story in.
   4. Interaction with the audience: Build in short interludes by walking very briefly into the room and asking some people some questions. After all, there is plenty of knowledge and experience in the room. It would be almost inappropriate not to involve other professionals in your story at a time like this. After all, they have just as much knowledge and experience. As an organisation, tell the audience what you would like to find out from the speaker: "How innovative does the sector consider itself to be?", or "Does it consider itself to be sufficiently internationally oriented? What do you want to know from those 300 enthusiastic professionals as soon as they leave the room? So consider other people's presentations as clever market research in disguise.
   5. Take time for Q&A: Many speakers claim they need enough time to finish their PowerPoint. The joke is often that in the conversation after a presentation, things often get really interesting. People mirroring their own experiences with the expert speaker, upon which the speaker puts the experiences into an enlightening context for everyone. So no "Too bad, but we have to move on", but "Hey nice, another question". Fewer slides means more quality time with the audience and thus deepen the subject matter. The possible fear among speakers, of being incomplete in a short speaking time, often seems unfounded: in fact, feedback from the audience provides nice hooks to expand on a number of themes.

In short, when organisation and speaker attentively inform each other and align goals, it costs time in the short term, but pays for itself twice over during the actual presentation. Who will be your next speaker? And do you think, as an organisation, you can also step into his or her shoes for a very short time?