Looking for a unique way to educate and entertain guests at your event? You need a professional! Dr. Ron Shapiro, professional speaker and creator of Education By Entertainment Programs, shares tips for choosing the right speaker as well as fun activity ideas for keeping your audience engaged!
Dr. Ron Shapiro offers tips for engaging your audience.
You are planning a program for your business, college, community group, conference, convention, meeting, school, university or youth group and need to select the right speaker to meet your objectives. What should you do?
Choosing the Right Speaker
1. Know what your guests need.
Clearly specify (in writing) your objectives for having the speaker. By doing so, you will quickly recognize when you have found a speaker who meets your needs.
2. Determine your budget.
One factor to consider when determining the budget is how much the audience is paying to attend the session (or how much the employer is paying in salaries for the audience members to attend the session). Another is the demand for a speaker with the skills that you really need. A third factor is how much additional income you will bring in by having that speaker’s name on the agenda.
3. Get recommendations.
Speak with potential audience members and sponsors to see if they can recommend an affordable speaker to meet your needs. If so, you are in luck. Contact the speaker and interview them to see if/how they will fulfill your objective.
4. Search for other options.
If potential audience members and sponsors do not have any specific nominees, it is time to begin a search. Check with professional organizations relevant to the objectives specified above. Check with your local chamber of commerce. If you have a large budget and are looking for a big name speaker (say $10,000 or more), check speaker’s bureaus that represent celebrities. Do online searches using services such as GigSalad as well as your search engines. Speak with the potential speakers and find out how they plan to meet your objectives.
5. Make a decision.
Once you have a list of speakers, it is time to decide who you would like to feature in your program. Here are some criteria:
- Is the speaker knowledgeable and qualified to meet your objectives? Do they have the appropriate certifications, education, experience and/or licensure? It is relatively easy for an entertaining speaker to get great ratings even if the content presented is meaningless, so do not rely just on audience ratings from previous events. Check credentials!!!
- Is the speaker’s presentation format consistent with your needs?
- Will the speaker work with you to meet your needs in terms of time scheduling, content, and fees?
- Will the title, abstract and speaker’s biography help attract people to your event?
Choosing a Presentation Style
There are, of course, many styles for presenting. Generally speaking, presenting materials using a variety of styles is best for everyone from a pedagogical perspective.
From a marketing perspective, having highly interactive sessions may increase interest in your event for many attendees. Other attendees may prefer more traditional lectures. You need to select the format that will bring people into the program (and keep them awake throughout the program, too.)
Similarly, having a big name speaker may help bring people to the program (or keep them away, depending who the speaker is.) Having the big name speaker may or may not help keep the audience awake and tuned in.
Speakers who tell interesting stories are normally entertaining. The stories may be about overcoming adversity, completing an interesting adventure, or performing very successfully (or failing) in business. As an event sponsor, you need to be sure the stories the speaker will tell address your objectives in having the program. You also need to be sure the speaker will help link the stories to your objectives and be sure the audience will actually remember the critical messages rather than just the stories.
My Game Show Style Program
I use a TV Game Show Style in presenting many of my programs. I begin my custom programs by showing and explaining what I am trying to accomplish based upon the sponsor’s objectives. I then have numerous games and activities which illustrate the principles. I follow each game and activity with an explanation of how the activity matches the sponsor’s objectives.
Some of my activities involve all members of the audience and some involve selecting members of the audience to come up on stage. At the end of my session I have the audience members who participated in the on-stage activities come back on stage and explain the activity, what they did, how it relates to them (and hopefully the sponsor’s objectives).
This is followed by a final exam. I’m confident that audience members will remember the games and activities. I’m less certain they will remember the principles being taught without presenting the material in numerous ways, which is why I have many reviews during my programs. No matter what format your speaker is using, be sure that they present their content in multiple ways so that it can be easily remembered.
Generally speaking my programs are designed to show people more about how they think so that they can be safer, more productive and better communicators. My programs for technical professionals and students have the additional objective of helping the attendees learn to design better products and systems.
An additional goal is to provide all of our attendees with a toolkit of activities which they can use at their events. We believe that our structure makes it easy for people to remember what they learn without making lots of notes. We also believe that our programs are more fun than most parties. Since they are so much fun, we offer a special edition of our programs for parties, making them both educational and fun!
More Fun Activities!
You deserve a reward for having read through much of this blog (smile), so I’m going to present a few activities which I include in some of my programs. You may wish to use some of these at your own events!
Multitasking
Sit down on a chair with proper posture. Now lift your right foot off of the ground and draw clockwise circles with it. Place your right hand in the air and draw a big “6” with it. Tell me what happened to your foot. Going forward, remember that you will make more errors if you multitask rather than completing one task at the time. Applying this to driving, if you talk on your cell phone while driving, you will make more errors. Oftentimes, you will get away with these, but sometimes you may not and the consequences may be a collision, potentially a costly or fatal one.
Memory
Ask the entire audience to spell SPOT really fast five times. Just as they finish, ask them “What do you do at a green light?” They will probably say STOP. The correct answer is, of course, GO. Applying this to your workplace, remember that if you try to go too fast, you will make errors.
Perceptually Inverted Navigation
We invite a member of the audience to come on stage and try out our inversion prisms which make everything appear to be upside down. While wearing the prisms, we ask the audience member to shake hands, read, and direct a blindfolded audience member to place a sticker on a chart in a designated location right side up. We talk about flexibility (in 3 weeks someone could learn to drive wearing these prisms) and how much flexibility is reasonably expected from colleagues, employers, and employees.
Find the Present
A blindfolded participant is told to find their present by asking the audience — which has been shown a description of the present — yes and no questions while remaining blindfolded. We talk about optimizing strategies for asking questions.
Final Exam
Our audience elects a champion (selected from the on-stage participants) based upon their performance in our program. The Champion is blindfolded and asked to name everyone who appeared on stage, describe what they did, and how it relates to the program’s objectives. Then, they are presented with a prize which they need to identify (while remaining blindfolded). This gives us one final review to help reinforce our objectives. We also discuss who the Champion may have forgotten to name and why. Who do you think they forget? After the Champion describes their prizes, we discuss the cognitive strategies they used to identify the prizes.
Bonus Tip!
We blindfold our on-stage contestants for several reasons. First, we do not want them to have visual cues as they complete their activities. Second, we find that blindfolds attract attention! If we are presenting in an open area, passersby are not likely to stop. Add in on-stage contestants and more people will stop. Blindfold the contestants and even more people will stop to see what we are doing.
We use many of the same activities for all of our audiences from professionals and graduate students to third graders (though our explanations may vary). Sometimes the younger students outperform experienced professionals and graduate students!
Measuring Speaker Success
While there may be some appeal to asking audience members numerous questions about a given speaker, numerous questions might be out of proportion to the length of the presentation itself. I have found that simply asking the audience members to describe my program in one word gives me a quick summary of how people felt about the program. I then input this feedback into a word cloud tool (Wordle). The picture tells a story which I frequently share on my website (and in my GigSalad profile, too). The top 6 words used most frequently to describe my programs in 2016 were Awesome, Amazing, Entertaining, Fun, Funny and Interesting.
I would like to thank Industrial Consultant, Dr. Margarita Posada Cossuto, and GigSalad Content Strategist, Tessie Barnett, for their helpful contributions to this article.
Dr. Ronald G. Shapiro earned his doctoral degree in psychology with a specialization in designing easy-to-use products, solutions, and services. As an experienced educator, manager, leader and consultant, his educational programs offer participants valuable knowledge through fun, unique experiences. Visit his GigSalad profile to learn more!
Really educational! Thank you!
Thank you, Laetitia!!!
Speakers can motivate an organization, and this is a great road map to helping an organization choose the right one for their needs. Plus, the games that Dr. Shapiro has put together teach basic proven psychology theories that provide insight into the way humans’ think. This in itself can help a business, a student, or an entrepreneur navigate their way a little easier to success. Straight forward and precise writing–great guide!!
Thank you, Cynthia!!!
So many good points and tips!! Speakers can either definitely make or break an event.
Thank you, Kate!!!
While this is quite an impressive list to pull off, it couldn’t be far from the truth. The purpose of the speaker is to ultimately leave a positive impression and have them wanting more….that’s the main goal but it’s not as easy as it looks. Thanks for posting…these are Great points that I will have to remember for my next speaking engagement !!!
Thank you, Lisa!!!