Event Speaker Management: A Detailed Guide

Besides event registrations and ticket sales, event speakers management is another challenging task that event organizers have to deal with regularly. From scrutinizing speaker bios and headshots to preparing schedules, contracts, and handling last minute changes, for most event organizers, event speaker management feels like herding cats

Proper planning, a well-structured strategy, and the right tools for event speaker management can actually help your event shine. When it comes to event speaker management, event management and speaker management software help make the process stress-free.

In this article, we have shared a detailed guide on event speaker management, including the tools you can use to automate the process with efficiency. Let us begin with why event speaker management matters.

Why Event speaker management matters?

Believe it or not, event speakers add live to an event. They play a pivotal role in bringing audiences together and boost engagement in your event.

Here's why speaker management is crucial for every event:

• Better coordination: Efficient event speaker management ensure smooth communication between event organizer and speakers, helps avoid last minute  chaos, schedule conflicts and more such issues.
• Improves attendee experience: Clear communication between speakers and organizers helps speakers deliver high quality event sessions that drive engagement and attendee experience in your events.
• Safeguard event reputation: Well informed speakers and smooth communication reflect professionalism which strengthens event reputation.

• Keeps timelines on track: Efficient event speaker management allows you to avoid delays in preparing the agenda, rehearsals, and promotions.
• Strengthens speaker relationships: When you offer clear communication and proper timings, making the process transparent, if offers a satisfactory experience to your speakers, encouraging them to be a part of your event again.

Besides all these benefits, event speaker management helps reduce organizers' stress in finding, managing, and communicating with them.

Event speaker management tips

A good event management software undoubtedly simplifies the process of event speaker management, but you must have a proper plan to utilize the strength of your software fully.

Here are some effective event speaker management tips for you:

1. Set your goals

Every event begins with a clear objective based on which you must look for your speakers. Make sure to ask yourself the following questions to determine your event goal.

• What is the main theme of your event?
• What type of experience your attendees should have?
• Do you want to educate attendees about your products, or promote them or spread brand awareness through the event?

When you have a clear event goal, it becomes easier for you to shortlist speakers who can be the perfect match for your events.

2. Create a shared calendar

Managing an entire event is all about fulfilling deadlines, handling moving parts, and coordinating with people. Event speaker management also involves similar tasks, and a shared calendar can really help handling the process efficiently. It allows you to keep everything on track and maintain better coordination with the team.  

Create a shared calendar and include the following things:

• Presentation submission deadline.

• Rehearsal dates

• Content review deadline.

• Timeline for promotional activities

• Event day session timings

This keeps all your team members in the same page, eliminating the need for updating each member on any changes. 

3. Use good event management software

The birth of event management software has proved to be a turning point in the event industry. Whether it is about speaker management or handling registration or ticket sales, good event management software can be a solution to everything. For WordPress users, WP Event Manager is one of the best options for event management online.

It has a set of addons that simply redefine the process of event management.

• The speaker and schedule add-on of WP Event Manager helps you display the list of your speakers and their session schedule in your event on your website. This helps attendees attend their preferred sessions and also allows speakers to prepare before going live.
• You can create a separate list for speakers for efficient registration management with the Registration add-on.
• For event updates and more the marketing addons of WP Event Manager are really helpful. They not only sync attendee data including speakers across channels but also automates email marketing campaigns.

Besides this, WP Event Manager empowers your website with a lot of other event management features. To know more about them, discover the plugin now!

4. Tracking speaker materials

Tracking and collecting speakers' materials are truly challenging for event organizers because sometimes even good speakers share their presentation and other essential materials at the last moment. This creates chaos and mess before the event.

To avoid it, consider the below mentioned tips:

• Do not upload speaker bios on your website until you collect all essential materials from them including presentation.
• Set deadlines for presentation submission for speakers.
• Let speakers edit their bio on your website by logging in.
• Make sure all the tasks are completed and materials are shared from the speakers' side on time.

5. Post event follow up

Once your event is over, stay in touch with your speakers through follow up emails that contain post-event feedback, a thank you for participating email, and more. A thank you email is a great way to show gratitude, which makes the speakers happy as well. Similarly, post-event feedback from speakers helps you improve your speaker sessions in the future and their experiences in your upcoming events.

Wrapping up

Event speaker management does not have to be challenging if you follow the right technique and tools. We hope that the strategies we have mentioned here will help you manage your speakers efficiently and avoid any last minute chaos.