So you’ve put your life on hold for the last 6 weeks while
you’ve been busy finalising the event details: going to the venue, checking and
rechecking the room layout, ensuring all AV equipment is at hand and working
and updating your list of back up AV suppliers, make final decisions and agree
sign offs, check the speakers have sent their material in and it’s on
appropriate slides… oh wait… hang
on… You …are…. Kidding!!!
The speaker isn’t coming?
What do you mean they are not coming?
Rather unprofessional of them isn’t it!
For the last umpteen months, you’ve been plastering their
name all across your event, raising their profile, marketing their topic and
advertising their name to their ideal audience only to have all this hard work
and effort undone. Let alone the cost
and time and effort of yourself and your team you’ve put in and the stress it’s
going to cause to get a replacement and somehow get literature together and
inform the audience ahead of the event because there will be someone who was
coming specifically to hear that speaker and if you keep quiet and decide to
only let everyone know on the day that the speaker isn’t going to be there, you
just know you’ll get complaints…..
Sounds familiar?
You are not alone.
Considering how many events are ran each year and how many speakers
there are out there, this does happen.
Sometimes during the beginning of planning before too much time and cost
has been sank into promoting them attending your event, while on other occasions,
you only hear from them on the day that they can’t make it.
It’s times like this you wish you had a crystal ball or
possibly heard from others that the speaker was likely to do this so you could
have planned in advance or not even bothered with them in the first place.
There should be at least somewhere a professional standard
for speakers and then know if they are willing to stand by it or not.
So we looked around because we too have experienced this and
we thought it was about time someone found a way to figure out how you could
predict if you are going to be given the run around or have a professional
service from the speakers… we discovered
not all the speaker bureaus and agents were honest about who they exactly
manage and not all the speakers showed all their testimonials on their website.
We realised there isn’t even a quantified standard for being
a speaker or even booking them!
So… we built one: iwantaspeaker.com
iwantaspeaker.com is the only online Speaker Management
software tool that gives you early indications about a speaker’s level of
professionalism.
It is a process that only those
speakers who have a minimum standard of experience or expertise in their
subject would be able to get through as well as giving you a perfect process for contracting them.
