Perhaps you're an experienced event planning professional and the idea of organizing a complicated event seems easy. Or perhaps you're entirely new to this, and your boss told you to find a speaker for your conference and you are completely freaking out. If the thought of arranging an event or picking a keynote speaker or professional event emcee has you speed dialing your therapist for support, or if you just need some brush up tips, it is entirely ok. Either way, I’ve got you covered.
Whether you like sticking with tried-and-true methodologies and simply want to check off the boxes to get through the event, or you need help setting up your event so that you don’t get fired or pass out from stress, these tips on how to choose a keynote speaker and emcee will be helpful. And in case your boss is in the hallway demanding, "I need an update on the event by today before lunch…" just politely ignore them for the moment. Smile kindly, close the door to your office, and take a few minutes to read this article.
Alignment and Reassurance: Thoughts from an Actual Keynote Speaker
I've been speaking and emceeing for over three decades, ever since I was kid. You can make this happen. Regardless of what stage you find yourself as an event planner I'd like you to consider some important things when it comes to picking the right presenter for your audience. Ultimately, you’re looking for alignment and reassurance.
Alignment refers to a presenter who will be a team mate for you. This is someone who works hard to make sure you look good. They will work with you and for you in order to make your event a success.
Reassurance is the feeling that you’ve made the right choice and the realization that you have far less to worry about than you thought. This is a good thing. Without reassurance, you are going to lose too many nights' sleep and you will be generally sad. With it, you're going to be a happier person and life will be great.
You need a keynote speaker or professional emcee who aligns with your core values, and who will share ideas from a perspective that upholds those values. Hopefully, ideally, you want someone who does all of that in a way which is engaging and entertaining for the audience as well. We are going to look at two onstage presenters, the professional emcee and the keynote speaker, who can each propel your event with the alignment and reassurance you need.
Hiring a Professional Emcee: Why You Should Do Exactly This
Before we say anything else: why do I keep saying “professional emcee” rather than just “emcee” on its own? It’s because you need a professional. Far too often, people think that Susan from Accounting or Jim from Sales will get the event to where it needs to be. And nothing could be further from the truth (unless of course Jim from Sales is Jim from The Office in which case your event really is in great shape!).
An emcee is far more than just a master of ceremonies. Think of your emcee as an experiential guide for your audience. A master of experience, a master of entertainment, and a master of listening to the event, moment by moment. They keep the event on time, the show flow going, and the audience enjoying themselves. An experienced professional event emcee has an entire career of providing reassurance to clients as they back that up.
The Presenter's Role: To Keep Your Event Flowing Perfectly
These are presenters who, if seasoned and well-experienced, will be the reason you have nothing to worry about once the lights are on and it’s “go” time. Keeping the energy high, and making sure that everything you planned flows smoothly, the emcee insures everything onstage is in order. And there is a lot to keep in order. The stage schedule, the impact you're working to achieve, the awards you're giving away, and your CEO who might want to say "a few words" at some point during the proceedings.
The right emcee will also maintain interaction at the same time to make sure the audience feels engaged from the stage throughout the event. This is important. Lose the audience, and you lose the flow of the event.
Event flow is a team effort. Do any of these situations sound familiar? A presenter runs over time. There’s a sudden issue with A/V. That important executive finally decides they’d like to speak after all. your emcee is the one you turn to in any of these situations to keep the event running smoothly and the entire flow connected to the expectations of the audience. The emcee makes proper introductions, opens and closes your event, captures people’s attention and can deal with anything that might go wrong at any point along the way.
From Good to Great: The Emcee's Ability to Read The Room
Let’s not focus too much on doom and worry. What if your event has all the promise of going well? How do you keep it going that way and even possibly improve on it so that it is going great? Being able to read the room and guide an experiential dynamic is an essential emcee skill that involves listening to the mood of the audience and the flow of the event. Its about knowing the event goals and sensing when to boost energy levels or get an uplifting laugh or even to take a break when it's most needed. These skills make the difference between an event guide who is good and one who is great.
Event planners who prioritize saving a bit of money by having someone in-house seem to think that an event without a professional event emcee is an acceptable route. But let’s not be thinking that acceptable is enough. The value of having a professional and seasoned emcee far outweighs any savings. And it doesn't have to be me. Read this not as an advertisement but as a plea for good events. A rising tide raises all ships, as the saying goes, and when events are good and not dreaded, there are more events. More events require more emcees. It all comes around in the end.
But it starts with you. You have to put in the energy and commitment to this last stage of your stage. The final push to make the event good to great is to have that solid team in place to make it happen. The benefits in terms of audience retention of information, overall enjoyment of your event, and impact throughout and afterwards are priceless. When you have a professional event emcee who is committed to the success of your event, this is the alignment we have been hoping for.
To Deliver Content and Enthusiastically Entertain: Hiring the Right Keynote Speaker for Your Main Stage is a Skill Unto Itself
Offering ideas that inspire, a style that’s interactive, and an overall approach that is entertaining, a good keynote speaker can transform your event. The feeling in the room before the keynote, when that speaker hasn’t yet hit the stage, should be entirely different than the beats immediately after they’ve left it. The keynote speaker, through dynamically sharing their ideas, experience, and perspectives, feeds into the “why” of your event and engages your audience. If they're good, they are going to do all of that while entertaining the room too.
We’ve all been in events when a dull or mundane speaker opens their mouth for the first time. They can literally deflate an event, and their uncanny ability to sap the energy out of the room is like a magical superpower. This is why it's important when looking for the right professional keynote speaker that you find someone with multiple strengths besides simply being the best in their field. Dynamic is important. Funny is important. And alignment is important.
It comes down to this example: if your event is about productivity and facing challenges, would you rather hire someone with a Powerpoint presentation about risk taking or someone who can juggle machetes while talking about risk taking. Your audience will thank you for choosing the latter!
From the moment they are booked, the best keynote speaker will plant the seeds of co-operation, and over the course of the months leading up to the event, will utilize their talent and experience to help those seeds continually grow.
When considering a keynote speaker for your event, think in terms of these traditional models and then find someone who encompasses all of them:
· The motivational speaker will engage your audience, working to inspire and elevate the audience to new levels of thinking and enthusiasm. You don’t need Tony Robbins level motivation, but someone who embodies even a bit of that approach. They will offer both insights and energy to a group who are ready and willing to learn and grow.
· The business leader empowers the room with perspectives and knowledge relevant to your organization’s mission and goals. They have sufficient life and industry experience from which to draw, and just the right amount of clever. These will make those experiences relatable and engaging while sharing ideas that matter. Keep the ideas flowing and your audience will always give you feedback that their time in the audience was time well spent.
· The comedian will entertain, keeping the room laughing, and will know how to deliver ideas uplifting the event's theme amidst humor. The best comedic speakers stay in the moment, and ensure alignment with the right perspectives on experiences that keep people engaged throughout their time on stage. And they keep it clean. A clean comedian is the right comedian for you. Why take risks with your reputation?
Combining all of these is a winning formula.
A presentation offering a combination of the elements mentioned above will bring an incredibly well-rounded experience to your audience. This is more of that alignment we mentioned earlier: where an audience member feels a real connection with the speaker and truly as if they are part of the event. The best keynote speech will have a blend of the right message, continual engagement, valuable information, entertainment, and integration into the theme of the event too.
That’s an important subtlety: a keynote speaker needs a great theme of their own, which then fits into your event theme. They shouldn’t be 100% adaptable to your event and have no basis of their own upon which to stand. Look for someone with a solid theme of their own, and then work with them to weave that into what you hope to do with your event.
If you find all of this, mixed with a deep degree of listening, you will have a winning combination in a keynote presenter. The ability to shift tone and approach between the styles we’ve discussed, and to do so in the moment, is an earned listening skill which experienced professionals gain over time. This helps the audience experience a journey rather than simply a speech. A complete package is what event planners need to find in a keynote speaker. That will lead to reassurance.
What Else Can a Keynote Speaker Bring to the Table and to the Stage?
While all a speaker REALLY needs to do is show up, talk, and leave, the one you want is the keynote speaker who will go far beyond that. You are looking for a keynote speaker will work to be integrated into your event and be by your side and truly show up for you. Through multiple pre-planning meetings with you, and an emotional and professional buy-in to your goals for the event, they really are on your team to ensure success. Again, this is the reassurance we discussed before. The keynote speaker is a teammate and the keynote itself is a framework through which that partnership manifests.
This should be a presentation that can be sculpted to include not only its own message but to incorporate aspects of your event theme, business goals, or industry focus as well. When the speaker sounds good, you look good. A good topic is one that is relevant and necessary to your audience. Not just that, but also adaptable to serve your event so that the keynote speech doesn’t stand alone. The keynote should be integrated into the greater impact your event will bring to attendees. All of this is a team effort with team impact.
People Want a Keynote Speaker They Can Relate to...
Above all else, audiences want a keynote speaker who exudes authenticity. That's a key focal point these days as mistrust seems to be at an all-time high. There are so many elements in society which leave us questioning what is authentic and what is presentational. Those who can share with a degree of authenticity and without massive ego inflation will always connect strongly with audiences.
Audiences want to feel not talked at, not spoken down to, but related to and as though they are on the level of the presenter. I write about this extensively in my book Reclaim the Moment: 7 Strategies to Build a Better Now. People want to feel as thought they matter.
Audiences need a sense of connection and community and to be a part of feeling like the presenter and audience members were sharing a cup of coffee together. Amidst feeling unsure, words have the potential to unite, to heal, and to make people feel seen and heard. When combined with a topic that matters, the results and impact can be profound. We might never perfect language and its use, we can certainly do our best to try, and a solid presenter from the stage will do much more than try. This is a Yoda moment: do or not do. By making the audience feel as though they matter, the very best keynote speakers do.
Audiences Want to Laugh and Learn
Maybe it is part of a residual memory from having to sit quietly in school for years on end. Maybe it is just because laughing feels great, but the combination of laughing while learning is incredibly effective. Studies have shown that retention of information increases in direct connection to the brain’s dopamine reward system being triggered by laughter (https://www.nature.com/articles/nn0301_237).
A 2004 study found that dopamine dramatically increases learning and motivation (https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn1406). The science supports this blog’s central idea: that having a professional keynote speaker who is comedic, or for that matter a funny emcee, at your event will substantially increase your audience’s attention span. In turn, their learning ability, and retention of critical information will be enhanced. This is all great news. Well, it is, IF you pick the right keynote speaker or emcee! Remember to look for synergy. Seek out someone who aligns with the impact you hope to achieve at your event.
The science is substantial. Engagement and learning happen when audiences are laughing. The keynote speaker or emcee is going to transform an event from being simply informational to being entertaining and educational. Being able to poke fun at oneself, or knowing some insider information about something funny that the entire organization is familiar with is handy too. So please help in that regard.
Offer information that the presenter can use onstage. Maybe its something everyone in the audience has been through, or knows about, or likes about the organization, or maybe its something that they don't like. All of this information helps a keynote speaker or comedy emcee score points with an audience as well as come across connected and relatable as well. And this leads to another level of alignment, where the keynote speaker, emcee, and the audience feel like they are one team.
Listeners Want Relatability: Hire a Subject Matter Expert
While it may seem obvious, you want the audience to feel as if their keynote speaker is a subject matter expert. If you have an emcee, let the same be true. After all, why should audiences listen to someone without relevant content? A full amount of life experience, and/or a degree in a subject, and/or decades of experience is a good place to start. Even personal experience, amidst a life well lived, is enough to help bring the audience on a journey. Talk to prospective candidates for your keynote about what their experiences have been. You can then ask how they see those experiences relating to your event.
Life lessons can go as far or further than simply being smart about a subject. Remember: relatability is when the audience and speaker feel connected and in synch. Look for someone who has made mistakes in life, has learned from them, and wants to share what they have learned. This is an absolutely relatable perspective. Ultimately you can have all the theoretical knowledge in the world through learning, but making mistakes is an art form.
Relatability and Connection Part II: What We Can Learn From Failure
People love hearing about mistakes. Especially if those failures forged a path toward success. Hearing about mishaps is where many people learn what not to do. This keynote ultimately saves them and the team both time and resources. The best keynote speakers have taken their life experiences and mistakes and are ready to share the lessons they’ve learned. This scores those authenticity points too, which only helps with engagement and having people really come along for the ride. So ask your potential speaker what their biggest challenges have been. See if their answer relates to the experiences your audience is facing. Relatability!
Keep in mind too that the same process of vetting a keynote speaker can be applied to choosing a professional event emcee. Either or, both can share experiences and anecdotes that elevate your audience’s experience based on everyone relating to one another.
We want to hear stories with creative approaches and insightful ideas which show a different path taken through life. One which didn’t include quitting when challenges arose.
And Now, Some Final Points to Consider
You want someone who takes the time to understand the event itself. You want full buy-in from your keynote speaker or emcee. Think in terms of emotional, topic, theme, and mission statement buy-in. Unless you're in the business of having events slowly wither as they go on, (which you’re not or you wouldn’t have read this far), then you'll want to find the speaker who takes substantial time to engage not only with the audience but with you, the event planner.
The right keynote speaker will take a holistic approach. They will value the extra time they take with you to understand who the audience is and where they might be impacted most. In multiple pre-planning meetings with you, the best keynote speaker will be looking for insights to use during their presentation. They are customer service experts when it comes to alignment with you and providing you with reassurance. Again, this is also to help make the event accessible, relatable, and impactful.
Do The Research
By taking the time to get into the details of what the company does and what the corporate culture is, a speaker can help to tailor their content. This approach makes their presentation far more meaningful. It would be preferable to find a keynote speaker or professional event emcee who understands this more than trying to pitch their own ideas. Or even worse, their own product and content at your event. You want a keynote speaker who is in sharing and education mode, not back-of-room-sales mode.
From the same angle and back to basics, but you also want to ensure that your speaker has extensive experience onstage. Pick someone with a great video and an extensive client list. This will mean they will know what event logistics typically look like. This will remove many of the headaches you might otherwise face when things come up in the moment. And again, reassurance is a huge part of what you’re buying.
A solid knowledge of the technological side too, from audio gear and microphones to basic stage management, means that last-minute decisions can be focused on impact first and foremost. A great speaker is going to be a true asset to your event on multiple levels. You want a proactive keynote speaker who helps you create event success.
Reassurance is Paramount
Ultimately, you want to get the most out of your investment in a presenter - because it is an investment in your event. I want you to feel confident in your buying decisions. Any event issues you might face are issues that are avoidable through strategic planning and some solid, basic considerations.
Plan wisely, ask as many questions as you’d like of your potential stage presenters, and do a solid amount of research so you can insure that the alignment and relatability you are seeking are there.
At the end of the day and above all else, work with professionals you trust. I hope you have a great event!
About me:
Greg Bennick is a keynote speaker, author, and world changer from Seattle Washington. He understands the pain-points that event planners face. Having been on stages nationwide since the age of thirteen (yes you read that correctly!) he has extensive experience with everything that can go right and wrong as a keynote speaker, a professional event emcee, and as an entertainer. He knows that alignment and reassurance come from listening. Find out more about Greg at www.gregbennick.com. When you’re ready to discuss your next event and the type of presenter you’re looking for, reach out and connect!
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