Why being an Event Organiser is a tough job.

I didn't realise just how tough the Event Industry was until doing research into the typical experience Event Organisers and Meeting Planners go through when engaging speakers.

When I asked the question, 'Have you ever had a bad speaker?', I was stunned to hear the response: 'No.  I only work with good speakers.  I've been doing this for 15 years and I've never had a bad speaker apart from 2 years ago'.

Confused by the double statement, I engaged a little further and the conversation went something like this:

Me: 'How do you normally search for speakers?'

EO: 'I first go through my little black book where I keep the names of all the good speakers I've used'

Me: 'So that will be all the speakers you've used over the 15 years?'

EO: 'That's correct...'

Me: 'And...  the speaker you considered to be bad isn't in your book?'

EO: 'That's correct...'

ME: 'So basically you have everyone's name in your little black book who you've worked with apart from the one that you had two years ago',

EO: 'No.  Not everyone gets in,  only the good speakers do...'

Confused?

This is what psychologists call, 'cognitive dissonance' - it's a state of mind when a person is experiencing two conflicting thoughts at the same time, each struggling to be recognised and dealt with.

In this case, she had two things going on in the brain - a definition wrangling match over the terms, 'Good and Bad' speaker.  And then admitting if she had had a bad speaker or not.

Afterall, in this industry who's going to hire an Event Organiser if they admit to hiring bad speakers?

With this in mind, half of her statements start to make a little more sense....

But, it still doesn't account for the last statement because if she doesn't put in her little black book 'bad' and then says she only puts in the 'good', it implies that there must be another group of speakers who she's identified but unwilling to openly acknowledge as either good or bad.  In a polite way, the lack of a name for this category says it all as this is the 'nameless' category - those speakers who were 'mediocre, boring, forgetful, uninteresting, dull, samey, nothing new etc'.

Now things begin to make sense:  You can't admit to having bad speakers because no one hires an Organiser who hires bad speakers. 

So what happens when there is a bad speaker? Here's the kicker: it seems if the speaker messed up, it's somehow always ends up being the organiser's fault as they are not able to admit the speaker they hired was bad!  This attitude  perpetuates the cognitive dissonance many organisers experience at some point in their career which results in self blame rather than apportioning it back to the true source - the speaker was bad on that day. 

So I started playing around with the opening question to see if if something else was going on...

Results were reviling.

When I asked; 'Have you ever had a bad speaker?', I usually got the response: 'No'.  


But  if rephrased the question to: 'Have you ever had bad experiences working with speakers?' that's when I got a quizzical look and after a brief pause, 'Oh you mean like: them being late, or not turning up, or not sending their slides ahead, or or or or'. Suddenly the floodgates opened with war stories of the experiences they'd had.

Therefore there is a transference almost acceptance that bad experience is not the signs of a bad speaker and that it's this bad experience that is somehow always the fault of the event organiser because they must have failed to have done something even when it was beyond their control!
Cindy-Michelle Waterfield

So here's my question to you: Why keep quiet and accept a Speaker's unprofessional conduct when your client wouldn't accept you doing this to them and neither would you accept it if your supplier did this to you?  My next question: What are you going to do about it from now on?

Co-Founder of iwantaspeaker.com

Can I sue a speaker?

Technically you can, but reality is that it's time consuming and could be cost prohibitive.

After talking to an insurance company about the usual yearly policy update of professional indemnity, I was horrified to learn that many speakers are actually leaving themselves open to not being professionally covered with an adequate insurance policy when they give a presentation.

This means that should they say something that you or a member of your audience then acts upon and it is advice that is detrimental, the speaker is not covered should they be sued.

What does this mean to you?  As an event organiser, you probably think that it's all down to the speaker and nothing to do with you.  But you'd be wrong.  If you have no proper contract in place with them, a clever legal bod could construe that they are a part of your team and as such, you would be libel for their mistake.

But we all rely on that one tough question of "proving the fact" as being the main reason why things don't go too much further as usually this is cost prohibitive.   However, what if it could be proved?  If it could be proved that what they said on your stage was the result of someone suffering from their bad advice, could your organisation be picking up the cost especially if you haven't done the basics?

And it's not just their advice that could be putting you at risk but also their behaviour and attitude.

Take the case of the speaker I mentioned in my earlier blog - the one who was chatting up members of the audience to go home with him.  Because there was no contract in place and the speaker was there as a 'promotion' for the event rather than being a paid professional, he was acting as one of the company's ambassadors - on their behalf.  And because he was there on their behalf, his behaviour of chatting up and making sexual references towards the guests could have landed the company in trouble should one of the guests taken offence and issued a formal complaint.  Had things taken a turn for the worse, the company could do very little towards the speaker as there was no contract, no clear definition of the working relationship and therefore trying to counter sue him would be again, cost prohibitive.

In today's audience experience, I recently listened to someone muttering behind me that they wanted to sue the organiser for having speakers who were not providing the content they were led to believe. Words like 'mis-reperesentation', 'taking money under false pretences' and 'false advertising' were being quietly bounced between her and her colleague.  Whether she will or not, I have no idea, but she did raise an interesting point: who was at fault - the speaker or the organiser?  And who would she sue for poor content / poor experience of the ticketed event - the speaker or the organiser?

After all, if  Paul 'Gazza' Gascoigne, can be sued after an audience member complained about his inappropriate comment towards someone else, then the floodgates could start to be opened for more actions to be brought against comedians, after dinner speakers, professional speakers and the friend of a friend of the CEO who's just graced your stage as a favour.....

Most professional speakers have professional indemnity insurance and issue you with terms and conditions.  If you are working with people who are not professional, by that I mean they have a day job and speak because of a passion, or it's related to their job role or they've been asked by the friend of the friend of the CEO, they probably won't have terms and conditions and it's also likely to follow that their insurance might not be adequately covering them when they give information from the stage.

Your process must include a means to guard yourself and your organisation against that 1 speaker in every 100 who will bring your organisation into disrepute - you know the one I mean that traditionally makes the event organiser being put into the position to take the fall and find a new job.

We think it's unfair and unjust and why there needs to be a standard way of working with speakers to guard against this and raise the level of professionalism - that's why we built iwantaspeaker.com.  If you have your own process already - fantastic and I'd love to hear more.  Please do send me an email or comment below and let me know how you've headed off potential issues before they arisen too.   Thank you and l look forward to reading them.

And we paid you how much?

You’ve hired a motivational speaker for your event and it’s a name everyone recognises.  You chose this speaker because they said they could impart invaluable knowledge and a winning method to your audience. 

You also chose this speaker because you didn’t have to try and ‘sell’ them to your colleagues as they’d heard their name too.

You’ve done your background checks and they seem to have been booked many times before without issues.

Come the big day and the company’s management team are in the auditorium, all primed and ready to hear the famed speaker.  Mics have been arranged around the room to help create an ‘interactive’ feel to the session.  The speaker is on for a period and then opens the floor up to the room to ask questions about the information they’ve just presented. 

You’re pleased as punch when one of the managers asks for the mic. And then they ask a question: ‘We’ve paid you how much for this rubbish?’

Feeling a tad embarrassed, you politely grab the mic and go to the next enthusiastically hand waving in the air.  It’s one of the other managers from another department; ‘And we’ve booked you to do this for 3 of our others areas too?  Why?’

At this precise moment in time, you’ll probably find yourself going through all the process of how you went about finding, selecting and negotiating a speaker the moment you realise the audience has started to heckle the speaker.  You will now be trying to work out what went wrong in the process and at what point you might have missed something because you just know questions will be asked about who wasted the company budget on this!

The sad truth is, you probably haven’t done anything wrong.  Even if you have a strong process, you still have to rely on a speaker understanding their own strength and level of content needed for the audience in front on them and then to say openly if they can or cannot meet your audience requirements.

And because there isn’t a standard process for working with speakers, you have no way to validate the level of audience and content they gave for the previous engagements they’ve received testimonials for.  In fact, each speaker, bureau and organiser has their own way of working, their own process and their own standards – all which increases the chances of someone getting through your process who shouldn’t be getting through being able to be standing on your stage, disappointing your audience and letting you down.

To avoid being put in this position, check:

1. Have they presented to your level of audience before and if yes could they provide you with a Review
2. Are they willing to have a conference call with key people of the audience beforehand to give a presentation outline
3. If they are insisting on being paid upfront, will their Terms & Conditions refund 100% immediately should the audience deem them unsuitable.
4. If it involves more than one area, would they be happy to treat each area as an independent booking.
5. Would they be happy for you to publish a Review of their presentation on Social Media afterwards.

If a speaker is in any doubt about their own abilities and delivery, you will find they would prefer to find a method to steer you towards their process of working which is in their favour only.  If they are confident in their own value of delivery they will be happy to work with you and your process and flexibly enough to accommodate your process.

iwantaspeaker.com is based on the same process as used by the professional bureaus to engage their speakers on behalf of their clients.  This process is open to anyone who books and works with speakers, providing them a professional standard when working with  speakers.  

The iwantaspeaker.com process ensures the speakers will have the experience needed for the audience as it quickly highlights those that do not have the experience required or are unwilling to be Reviewed afterwards.  Giving a perfect process for contracting and working together. 

‘It’s the Celebrity speaker here, can you get me some of the White stuff?’

What would you do? 

I’m not going to beat around the bush.  Without you even realising it, your event organiser has probably just saved your company from an embarrassing, bad press, client losing situation and you probably won’t even know. 

Many organisers are faced with situations that can either bring the company or themselves into bad press.  But more worryingly is the lack of support or understanding they get from their own company and the business world at large and instead of sharing information, they are left to deal with this as best they can and hope it ‘doesn’t come out on their watch’. 

Don’t believe me?  Imagine: You have just spent the best part of a year, organising and overseeing the task of arranging your company’s largest annual event.  All Key personnel have arrived. All helpers and crew are ready to sprint into action. All equipment, AV and everything else is set up for the event to begin in the morning.  The Celebrity has arrived, spoken to the CEO, joined the team for evening dinner and now retired to their room to get ready to do the keynote in the morning.  With the last checks done, it’s now your turn to turn in, leaving some of the team members at the hotel bar enjoying the last of the night before the big day tomorrow.  And then you get a call.  It’s from the Celebrity.  Last minute changes to the speech? An issue that’s arisen and they’ve got to go? Just wanting to thank you and find out if there is anything else they could do for you?  No.  It’s them asking you to get them some drugs!  And I don’t mean the over the counter type either.

Your heart races.  What to do? Who to call? It’s the middle of the night….!

What would you do?

We all know what should happen.  But the truth is scarier – the organiser is left to deal with it and often won’t mention it to anyone apart from a select few they trust.

By this, I mean they deal with it as in they either do or don’t find the drugs – I’ve heard of organisers doing both and sadly for the same reason – because they felt it was their job that’s on the line and the event outcome being ruined. 

And they had to make this tough decision on their own, with seconds or only a few minutes to think. 

Media is littered with Celebrities having indiscretions, but hardly at a conference or at a named business event.  Have you ever stopped to ask why this is?  With over 1.29 million events running each year in the UK alone, the only drugs that hit the media headlines are those mentioned in Pharma events or a Celebrity indiscretion going to, leaving a party or in a hotel!  

To me, I think the answer is simple: instead of being allowed to name and shame, the celebrity will use their high status and, often being good manipulators, will use their social status and dominant personality to intimidate and belittle to get what they want.  A great article by Jenny McCartney on 5^th November 2012 published in The Telegraph highlights this and why people won’t say anything.

But then you have to ask, what would have happened if others had blown the whistle?  To answer this, you don’t have to look too far: in the case of Oisin Tymon and his Celeb run in with them asking for something that was impossible under the circumstances as highlighted in the wonderful article in The Telegraph, by Victoria Ward, 12^th March 2015,  the brand suffered and the Celeb was sacked because of it going so very public.  The public backlash didn’t focus on the behaviour of the Celeb, instead it focused on the messenger.  And no messenger wants to be put under that type of public pressure, especially when we have a bad habit of demonising those who do stand up and call these Celebrity’s behaviour into question.

Recently, I heard yet again of another organiser who received, ‘The Phone Call’.  For guidance, they naturally turned to the person who they booked the Celebrity through.  It was then they found out they were not the agent but a bureau, an intermediary. The intermediary didn’t know about there being ‘a problem’ beforehand either….

I’d like to tell you how it was resolved in this instance, but, seeing as the true agent didn’t tell the booker about the Celeb’s little habit, and the booker won’t ever divulge who it is and neither will the Organiser tell anyone else out of fear of backlash, I’m sorry to say the next Celeb that you book might be them as this collaborative silence allows this behaviour to go on.

And because this silence goes on, the next organiser who books might well be faced with the same phone call and are forced into a position to make that instant decision which could jeopardise your brand.  It only takes one person to successfully inform the public in a way they don’t get a backlash and like a house of cards, it’ll all come out. 

We are not that far away from that moment.

There has long been a need for openness and accountability when it comes to booking speakers and personalities for events and it’s why we put on our site. Iwantaspeaker.com, the opportunity for organisers to give Reviews about their experience after working with the speakers.  At first, we thought we did the wrong thing when a few speakers who tried to register with our site said they didn’t like the Review section, but, after a bit of research - it’s the being ‘Open and Accountable and a fear of Reviews’ that’s keeping them away and more importantly a fear of receiving Bad Reviews because usually it’s been justified!

 

Good. 

It means we are doing what we set out to do and those who do sign up to our site will not be one of those Celebrities who will be making ‘that phone call’, and putting your brand at risk.  What are you doing to make sure you are hiring Speakers that won’t behave badly and more importantly, have you an action plan and a support system in place for your event organiser should they be put in this position? At least those speakers who have signed up with us are happy to be Reviewed which means your organiser will not have to face one of those dreaded late night phone calls….

  

Cindy-Michelle Waterfield

iwantaspeaker.com

trust –convenience – peace of mind