How to treat your speaker at an event

There's a time-sequence and often a 'value chain' of people involved in a speaker arriving at an event. So let's back-up to the beginning. Whether you're a private individual within an organisation, a professional conference organiser (PCO), a speaker bureau or an agent, then in the interests of professionalism, all, or some at least, of the following, needs to happen:

1. Don't book the speaker to arrive under the bell. I've twice in the last year had PCOs insisting that the flights they'd booked would be fine. In both cases there were airline delays and the conference speaking order had to be reshuffled. That causes huge stress for the speaker and the audience might incorrectly get the impression that the speaker didn't pitch on time. It puts the speaker in the invidious position of having to tell the audience, however diplomatically, what happened in order to preserve reputation. In the process probably killing chances of a re-book with the clearly not-so-professional PCO.
2. If you're collecting the speaker at an airport, make sure the person collecting them is there before the speaker arrives. If it's in a foreign country, this is even more important. If it's through an African airport, you may well wish to use the services of a professional, politically-connected individual to ease their passage through immigration, customs etc.
3. If the speaker's staying over, try to book them into a room close to the actual function room or conference speaking area. We schlep equipment. We want to suss out the venue, do a technical check. We may want to rehearse. A trek from room to venue is a pain.
4. If you can, have a 'holding area' for the speaker/s. It's nice if they're able to wait in a room with tea/coffee/juice and perhaps some snacks. We've sometimes left home at four in the morning! We get low blood sugar.
5. Protect the speaker on arrival from the person with a dyslexic god-daughter who wants a free consult on how she might be helped. Or the conference or event management person who feels a desperate need to jabber on about utter trivia when the speaker might want to get the mind into 'the zone' of a relaxed Alpha, early-Theta state of concentration and relaxation.
6. Don't demand that the speaker put her or his presentation on your computer. I make it a condition that my own machine is used. I've learned through painful experience. 'State-of-the-art' means different things to different people. My top-end processor notebook computer, with awesome graphics card and 2GB of RAM, along with the latest presentation software, will run all the graphics and fonts I need. I've seen dated computers turn the speaker's fonts into gobbledygook on screen. That doesn't make the conference organiser look stupid. It reflects poorly on the speaker.
7. Ditto with video files. They often don't export fully on a memory stick. Go with what will keep the speaker most comfortable. Insisting that she or he fit in with your tech infrastructure is a recipe for disaster. This should of course have been resolved at booking stage. But sometimes the 'techie' on the day will be a rank amateur, brought in on the basis of price or politics. I've witnessed a high-ranking German Ph.D. standing pleading for his visuals on screen, in front of 1 000 people at the Cape Town International Convention Centre. The techies involved had a little mixing desk like you'd get your son when he wants to start doing Karaoke. They hadn't draped any equipment and were 'testing' other speaker's slides during breaks, for all and sundry to see.
8. Put a fresh 9 volt battery in the cordless lapel microphone for the speaker – for every speaker. The darned things cost R 30 for gosh sakes!
9. Have enough microphones available. And in reserve in case something goes wrong – and it can and will. Having one microphone that you share'n swap, in front of the audience, is unprofessional.
10. Manage the time! No, you can't get 300 people to tea and back in twenty minutes! If you're not good at logistics, speak to someone who is. Don't squeeze the speaker's time-slot. Use RAG (red, amber and green) lights at your event. Green, the speaker's fine. Amber, she or he's got 5 minutes and red, they bloody well sit down. I got even the late Chief Rabbi of Johannesburg, Cyril Harris, to sit down when he got the red light. Be uncompromising.
11. Negotiate any scheduling change with the speaker. I was slated to speak late afternoon at a game lodge in a highly inaccessible part of the country. The preceding speaker literally got lost (clearly not a GPS man!) and I was asked to step in over an hour early.
12. Ask your speaker to be there early enough to cover such an eventuality. Many will be there early to get a 'feel' for the audience, to suss out the vibe, their sense of humour (or lack of!), their level of engagement, etc.
13. Give the speaker a name and mobile number to make contact on arrival. Make sure that phone is on vibrate or flash. It's anxiety-inducing to arrive, dial the number and get voicemail.
14. Professional speakers will have given you a mini CV or custom-crafted introduction on them. Tell the MC not to try and memorise it. This is not the MC's Andy Warhol 15 minutes of fame at the speaker's expense. The info establishes suitability and credentials for that particular talk. So stick to the script.
15. Include breaks for the audience. An audience dying to smoke, that is low on blood sugar or invoking the gods for a catheter because they need a loo, can't focus on a speaker.
16. Finally: Don't summarise what the speaker has said. The MC is there to thank the speaker, briefly, for the presentation. Not to recap the talk.

Published in SA Conference magazine August/September 2008 issue.