Speakers are the most essential component of making your event a success. We’ll be giving you a few useful tips on how to find fitting speakers that won’t make the audience drift off during your event.
1. Pick a theme
The first step you need to take is define the main theme of your event and what you want the speakers to enlighten the attendees about. This makes the next few steps much easier and also helps with the overall organisation and promotion of the event. The event manager blog put together a 100 cool ideas for event themes, which you can check out here.
Now that you’ve figured out a cool theme for your event, the search for awesome speakers can commence. There are various approaches and techniques, so we gathered a selection of the most effective ways and it’s up to you to figure out what works best!
2. Keyword search
As you have a vague idea on what you’d like the speech to be about, an easy approach is to search for keywords relating the chosen topic. For example, if you’re looking for somebody to speak about the future of artificial intelligence, type in the keywords “artificial intelligence” in your search engine and look for active users on professional forums and you’ll find spokespeople for their industry. Also explore popular blog posts or industry news and scroll through the comments. Response to questions on the given topic on sites such as Quora or Reddit, upcoming book releases or youtube videos and TED Talks on the topic are all great ways to find speakers.
3. Social Media
The best way to get to your target audience in this day and age is over social media platforms. Write a short but gripping text vaguely explaining what the event is about, what you’re looking for in a speech and contact information and post it on your social media accounts (don’t forget about LinkedIn!). In a few of the past events we organised we were astounded by the response and we reached inspiring personalities that we never would’ve thought of contacting.
Websites such as the national speakers association, TED’s official list of past speakers or Speakerhub are also helpful whilst searching.
The Takeaway
We hope you enjoyed our 3 creative ways to find the perfect speakers for your event and that you put them to good use.
Have any questions or think we forgot something? Drop us a line in the chat.
