We Need to Talk About Speakers and Virtual Events

Originally published

Have you ever had a friend ask you for a favor, only to ask you for like 5 more while performing that favor? “Hey can you help me move? Oh also, I’m out of coffee; can you pick some up? Also I need to stop at the realtor’s office to get the key,” and so on. It might be an innocent mistake, but sometimes it feels like your generosity is being taken advantage of. And it’s kind of annoying.

That’s how it’s felt over the last few years with the emergence of virtual events. I’ve spoken at several, and many of them follow the same format of putting a lot of the onus on the speaker while reaping all of the benefits.

Now, a few caveats:

  • I’m not talking to any one event organizer, and I’m not mad at anyone. This is true for most virtual events and I think we’d all benefit from a few changes.
  • I’ve been considering hosting/organizing a virtual event myself, so this serves as a way to outline how I envision such an event going1
  • I also know that planning any event is a lot of work. I don’t think event organizers are undeserving of the benefits, financial or otherwise.

That said, I think we need to rethink our approach to having speakers at our virtual events. In my opinion, the speaker has one job: to deliver a great talk.

How You Can Help Speakers Deliver a Good Talk

The job of the event organizer, with respects to speakers, is to make sure the speaker delivers a good talk! So how can organizers do that?

Who is the Audience?

Communicate clearly who the target audience is, and how the speaker can best deliver the talk for them. There’s nothing worse (for a speaker) than delivering a mismatched talk2.

In particular, I always like to know the knowledge level of the audience. As an educator, I tend to want to start at the beginning. But if I’m talking to established podcasters with 50+ episodes, I don’t need to talk about gear or audio hosting.

Pointers on Delivery

Offer advice on delivering a good talk – what works for you, your audience, and other speakers. I’ve spoken a lot and have a pretty good system. But I want to know if an event is doing things a particular way.

Especially with virtual events – are the talks live or pre-recorded? Should the speaker be present during the allotted time to answer questions? Will it be just chat, or will you bring the speaker in after the recording?

Offer Some Sort of Coaching or Feedback

Many speakers may not take you up on this, but if you want to help your speakers, help your speakers! I’ve been coached and I’ve coached, and in both instances the talks were much better.

Invite Speakers to Share the Event, but Don’t Treat them as your Marketing Team

Look…as a speaker, I’m happy to share what I’m doing with my audience. I always do.

But I’ve seen too many organizers tell speakers to market the event, with edicts like, “you have to tweet about it X times,” and “share it with your mailing list 3 times with one dedicated email.” This is a huge win for the organizer because each speaker brings their audience. But it’s less of a win for the speaker, who won’t have the same benefits from that shared audience. Only a fraction will go to any one speaker’s talk, and the speakers don’t get everyone’s email addresses like the organizers do (not that they should)3.

What you can do is provide the assets to make sharing easy. Generate graphics and text, maybe even audiograms, and send them to the speakers. Make it as easy as possible for them.

On Paying Speakers

I personally think if you’re running a for-profit event, speakers should be paid. It doesn’t have to be a TON, but it should show you recognize how much work goes into a talk.

To deliver a good talk, speakers need to:

  1. Outline or script the talk
  2. Design and create the slides
  3. Rehearse it
  4. Deliver it
  5. For virtual events, even edit it.

Even if it’s a previously given talk, updating and rehearsing again can take several hours. Delivering a good talk usually takes me 8-10.

If you don’t have the budget, you could always go with a speaker gift. Some swag, a gift box, or a handwritten note. The main goal here is to make sure speakers know they’re appreciated in a tangible way.

Speakers are not free labor and I hate to break it to you: people attending your events aren’t super likely to buy our products or become our customers4. Positioning that as a benefit is the same as asking a web developer5 to do free work for exposure.

For comparison, I pick up maybe 3-5 new email addresses when I speak at an event. I haven’t made a single direct sale from my last 10 speaking gigs. Conversely, I pick up the same number of email addresses and have landed clients from podcast interviews, which are generally much lower effort.

On that same token, offering an affiliate program to sell some extra isn’t the same as payment. You’re essentially hiring the speaker to be a commissions-only salesperson. The benefit is nearly entirely on the virtual conference.

If you want to truly compensate speakers, make it part of the budget, increase the price of the upsells, and ask a sponsor to cover the cost.

Let the Speaker Speak.

The main takeaway here is this: don’t make speakers do what’s the organizer’s responsibility.

Marketing, promoting, selling, providing value on top of the talk, and anything else that isn’t delivering a great talk is outside the purview of what you’ve asked the speaker to do…especially if they’re doing it for free.

Thanks to Maddy Osman, Erin Flynn, and Brian Richards for providing feedback on an early draft of this article.

  1. You can also hold my feet to the fire – yay public declarations! ?
  2. I once gave a dev-focused talk to a group of bloggers, some of whom didn’t use WordPress. I got a lot of, “I’m sure it was great, but I didn’t understand any of it.” ?
  3. I’m not saying they should. In fact, it’s a pretty terrible idea from a privacy AND marketing standpoint. I’m just saying it’s a much bigger win for the organizer here ?
  4. Especially if it’s a free event where most comes from sponsorship or upsells. ?
  5. …or designer, photographer, landscaper, writer, course creator etc. You know, anyone who charges for goods and services. ?