You Can Use These 6 Methods to Find Your Conference’s Keynote and Other Speakers

Is it difficult to recruit presenters for your conference? It’s not just you. Among the many difficulties faced by those organising events is the quest to get suitable speakers.

The conference would not be complete without your speakers and panellists. The keynote speaker is often the most anticipated part of an event. However, if your technique for locating speakers becomes stale, the quality of your presentations will suffer.

Find Your Conference’s Keynote

Don’t know where to start when looking for a keynote speaker or developing a plan for locating speakers. You can count on us to take care of everything. You may use this compilation of typical approaches to sourcing to determine which ones are best for your conference.

Submission of Talk Abstracts and Proposals Invited

Allow interested parties to submit their suggestions by issuing a call for abstracts. This might provide you with a big pool of potential speakers. But if you want qualified applicants, you’ll need a strategy for drawing in proposals and the means to evaluate them.

An first step in locating conference speakers is to put out a call, and there are several channels for doing so. The first place you should look for anything is on your social media accounts. It’s also important to pay attention to internal talent pools and industry-specific publications.

Finding the ideal speaker for your event is less difficult than you would think.

At first, you should publish a brief announcement regarding requests for proposals (RFPs) on your social media accounts (requests for proposals). Don’t forget to highlight the facts that will encourage the most submissions from prospective speakers. The title of their example presentation is fine, but you may also want to see the whole set of slides. The people who follow you are a rich source of possible volunteers for your event. Also, don’t overlook the power of email marketing. Make use of your contact list to touch base with everyone you know.

Examine each of your suggestions thoroughly afterward. Checking the speakers’ credentials before sifting through proposals and abstracts may save a lot of time and effort. Finding the right conference speaker to deliver your message, provide a fresh viewpoint, or share your knowledge is a top priority.

Start doing quick interviews with the people you’ve chosen to be potential conference speakers. You need to make sure that the people who are going to be delivering your message do it effectively. Inquire as to their level of expertise by probing them with pertinent questions.

An open call is a great method to find new, up-and-coming speakers who won’t cost an arm and a leg, even if you’ve already secured a well-known, high-priced keynote speaker.

Audience Questionnaires

One option for locating conference speakers is to put out an open call, but what if you could also find out who your guests would want to hear from? Sending out surveys to guests shows that you value their feedback and consider them an integral part of the creative process. Who knows, maybe they know someone who will be speaking at the event. Gather input on the finest social events, scheduling, food, entertainment, and event locations by polling participants.

Take the results of the poll and use them to invite speakers to your conference. To boost interest in and attendance at your event, consider including surveys into your marketing plan. The resources on Eventbrite allow you to design and publish a professional survey. Utilize online survey tools like SurveyMonkey or Typeform to make data collection a breeze.

Participating parties and supporters from inside the organisation

Speakers at these events often come from inside the company or organisation. The same applies to any outside parties that help fund the project. Investors back projects financially in return for promotional opportunities. Unlike partners, they usually don’t have a say in how events are run. Investors in the event have put up money. All aspects of the event are the responsibility of the internal members. Success of the event is important to everybody involved, including internal members, external partners, and sponsors.

However, it’s important to avoid giving the impression that you can’t locate or afford to pay for credible external speakers by including too many sponsors or employees in your speaker roster.

Catalogs and directories of speakers

You may search through and narrow down thousands of speakers on websites like Speakers’ Corner, Great British Speakers, and JLA. These sites, like anything else, have their pros and cons.

Pros of the Speakers’ Corner:

Extensive variety of voices
Filtering options aplenty for honed results
Explicitly indicates the cost of the speaker.
Compensation for Representation
Excellent Native British Speakers Pros:
Research Presenters by Subject and Event
Speakers might either be live or recorded.
Professionally-crafted biographies of each speaker.

JLA Advantages: Only upon request do we provide pricing details.

Many eloquent speakers

Separates speakers according to fee restrictions

Add items to your “Favorites” list to keep track of them and quickly access them later.

Cons:

Compensation for Representation

All three methods are quick and efficient for finding performers, but you’ll be up against other event organisers. Although not always the case, keynote speakers may be hard to come by in certain currently fashionable fields.

One effective strategy for reaching a larger audience is to publicise your open call on many different lists or databases. More proposals and abstracts mean more work, but they also provide more opportunities to find promising new researchers.

Before committing to a service, make sure you read the terms and conditions carefully. However, searching speaker databases may be a productive technique to generate new ideas.

Publications

If you’re looking for speakers who are experts in your field or cover a certain issue, the best places to go are academic publications, news sites, bestseller lists, and blogs. You should also search for people using LinkedIn and peruse Facebook groups. When looking for a keynote speaker, both of these may be quite helpful. Many professionals would welcome the chance to network with new people via your speaking engagement.

Take a look at newspapers and trade journals in your area. Many conferences include keynote authors who also give presentations. Your networking efforts will pay off even if you are unable to get a speaker for this particular event.

Maintain a library of industry-related books and include their writers in your pool of possible presenters. Use a service like Buzzsumo to quickly locate the most popular posts on any subject.

Web-based Social Networking

Web 2.0 platforms such as YouTube, LinkedIn, and SlideShare are gold mines for public speakers. You may find out who will be speaking about what at your conference by searching for related subjects on YouTube, for instance. Then, you may refine your search by the amount of views to get to the most popular results faster.

Do not ignore the potential of platforms like Instagram and TikTok. You may expand your pool of potential candidates by targeting a certain demographic with your open call.

Insights from social media may also be used to find potential speakers. Facebook Audience Insights lets you learn more about your target demographic by revealing the pages they like and the people they follow online. The findings may direct you toward the best possible public speaker.

Be selective in your selection of desired speakers.

Keep in mind that your current objective is to compile a wishlist of desirable applicants. Don’t fret about their cost or how they’ll fit into the schedule. Next, you’ll have to make a judgement on who to reach out to based on your assessment of the speakers.