Speaker Management 101

This article originally appeared on the eventScribe blog by CadmiumCD.

The Problem With Speakers

In the 15 years that CadmiumCD has been part of the meetings industry, one of the problems that consistently comes up is managing speakers.

We haven't met many event organizers who haven't experienced the following phenomenon: You reach out, ask your speakers for their photo, bio, disclosure forms, and presentation slides. Then all you get is silence.

Then the day before your event you have a bunch of emails in your inbox with all their content.

Give Speakers a Break

Here's the thing. Your speakers are NOT at fault. It's common to blame speakers, saying they're a pain to deal with or that they're divas. Sometimes it's true, but mostly it's just hot air.

Julius Solaris highlights these problems perfectly in the following articles on Event Manager Blog:

1. Dear Speaker, I Loathe You. Sincerely, Your Event Planner
2. Dear Event Planner, I Hate You. Sincerely, Your Speaker.

The fact of the matter is that your speakers are just as busy as you. Your event may be low on their totem poll of priorities.Speakers are busy industry experts, they're sometimes unpaid, and they care about getting relevant content to your attendees.

Take these three facts into consideration:

1) Your speakers are often industry experts.

This means they're busy speaking at other events, writing big books about the past, present, and future of the industry, and probably get as many emails as you every single day.

In short, they're tightly constrained on time and availability and you're just being a pest.

They're probably thinking, "Who needs what? What have I already submitted?" It's tough work. And let's be fair. They probably received a huge email with a long list of things for them to do. At this point that email is long gone... out of sight, out of mind.

2) You're not paying your speakers.

Speakers come in many shapes and sizes. Some ask for a big paycheck and a long list of must-haves. Others are happy to simply share what they've learned with their peers... for FREE.

These uncompensated volunteer speakers are doing you a big favor. They're saving you money and they're building the content that will make your event a success with attendees.

Of course this comes with a caveat: you don't really have the right to micromanage them or enforce strict deadlines.

Paid or unpaid, speakers' priorities tend to trickle up to the top of their piles. Putting their presentation together always comes before sending you their headshot. Plain and simple.

3) Presentations often include "late-breaking" information.

This is especially true at scientific and medical conferences. Speakers want to share what's latest and greatest. Sometimes a piece of information is announced the day of, or enters the final stages of research.

Your speakers could care less about getting you their rough draft. What's important to them is getting the newest case study to your attendees. And you should appreciate this. It means they care about your members and the industry you represent!

Still, it can be frustrating if they never submit that newest research as part of their materials, especially if you want to distribute it to attendees who couldn't make it to the conference.

So What's the REAL Problem?

We get A LOT of event planners who are frustrated with their speakers. They just can't seem to wrangle this unmanagable bunch.

"It's like herding cats," is a common sentiment.

The biggest problem though is that we as meeting planners are trying to work AGAINST our speakers. We're not trying to give them a simplified workflow. See, it helps if we give our speakers tools to make the process painless. It helps if we provide incentives for them to submit the materials we need to make our conferences a success.

Using Event Technology to Manage Your Conference Presenters

Over the past few years, speaker management software has transformed the way tech-saavy event managers collect biographies, presentations, and disclosure forms from their speakers.

To learn how to use speaker management software to incentivize your speakers, download 5 Big Problems With Speaker Management (And How the Right Technology Can Help Event Managers Overcome the Frustration):