How do you find diverse event speakers?

This is such an important exercise and one all conference organizers must do. The key is to engage organizations that focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, and ensure your conference committee also includes these critical voices. It is not enough to just have speakers. You must ensure the entire program focuses on it.

In my experience, planning teams for events often lack diverse representation themselves. Begin there and infuse the assemblage with a mandate to be inclusive on speakers as well as in thought in insuring that provocative and lively sessions that inspire authentic discussions, solutions and actions occur.

Excellent points. Selecting speakers as well as the platform are crucial. First, ask your self, if this speaker were to reach the audience, they would do what? Then, design clears metrics using mixed methods to narrow down your files. Second, evaluations should be tailored to evaluate and should not simply be smile sheets. Be sure that you know both the audience and the speaker well enough so that you end up with robust and realistic outcomes and impact. Work with the speaker to design the presentation. It must be specific and tailored to meet your needs. Also, be sure that the speaker doesn’t read from slides but engages the participants. Take specific and particular notes that capture the experience.

It starts with community, and your ability/commitment to identifying your own! Ask those within or without your community what they are lacking within their own professional development, or things that they are interested in expanding their knowledge of (with the caveat that "we don't know what we don't know", so it may be your job to identify those topics that your audience doesn't quite know yet that they need to hear). Ensure there are multiple voices around the table in idea generation, and bring in external folks when needed to have well-rounded and holistic discussions.

Consider consulting with a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) expert to help you define your goals for finding diverse speakers for your event. There are many layers to diversity that go far beyond race and gender - such as age, socioeconomic income, disability, and educational background, as well as a plethora of other factors.

LinkedIn is mainly used for expanding my network of diverse leaders who may be interested in speaking at our events. Here are the 5 steps to find speakers relevant to your event. - Search position titles, companies and background - Identify their location (for in person event) - Check how actively they use Linkedin, as well as the last time they used it - Send a direct message, informing them about the event, date, location, and target audience to see if they are interested in learning more - Follow up with more details once they respond back. If no response, wait a couple more days and message again. - Get engaged into their posts to expand your relationship and gain access to their network - Ask them for a referral and intro

One way to expand your network of diverse speakers is to connect through speaker bureaus such as SpeakerHub and SpeakerMatch. These bureaus highlight the diverse subjects these speakers address.

Companies should look at local nonprofits that can link them with relevant speaker. It’s also a great opportunity to put their money where their goals are by then building relationships with these nonprofits. The worst thing that happens is companies use nonprofit resources and then forget to reciprocate the favors.

Do the research here! I leverage LinkedIn for this as well- search hashtags, follow specific individuals engagement on LinkedIn and IG. You can also use a marketing automation platform like Apollo to search tittles and contact information as well

I really appreciated this article! So many times we've heard the phrase think outside of the box well this definitely requires you to go beyond your comfort zone and maybe into areas where you don't feel as comfortable topics you don't feel that comfortable speaking about however you do that in an effort to continue to promote diversity within your own company as a part of the work culture.

Budget transparency is one of the main criterias when you evaluate speaker candidates. Prioritize discussing budget expectations with speakers in advance. If you have a limited budget and can't cover expenses for a speaking engagement, inform them about it and ask if they are willing to join pro bono. Meanwhile offer speakers the benefits of joining your event: access to your community, free marketing of their business and services, increasing public visibility, and more.

Bullet points; 1) Know and understand the event you are planning. 2) Get notable speakers with stellar profiles and accomplishments to speak at the event. 3) Never underestimate the power of influencers (both those in line with the topic of the event and those of different but relatable niches), they pull in numbers and grab the audience's attention. 4) Build/Advertise yourself well prior to this. People reply positively to those with stellar profiles faster than those without one as substance with evidence outweighs desire most times. 5) Flatter your event to the desired speaker (this sparks interest) while describing fully the importance of their presence and input in the event (ego boost helps with a higher possibility of acceptance).

Understand that diversity is not a box you check off. When you commit to diversity, you are committing to inclusion and accessibility. As you plan your programs, be sure that your team is thinking through each step as it relates to outreach, onboarding, prep, event support and follow-through. If your team does not represent the diversity you are representing in your speaker lineup, consider getting outside help to ensure that your process is meeting people where they are every step of the way.

Build a marketing plan to support your speakers. - Create a blurb about their bio - Post their bios together with their professional headshot or a nice flyer on your socials and tag those speakers to inform their audience about it - Share blurbs with other speakers asking them to re-share and support each other on social media - Comment on their post and publicly appreciate them for joining the event and share your feelings on how you are excited about it - Include their stories in your newsletter - Share their quotes after the event and tell how their involvement and support helped your event to be successful - Refer them for other event engagements when possible

Feedback is vital in measuring the effectiveness of the events. There are a few ways to gather feedback after the event: - Email anonymous survey asking event guests to participate - Offer some initiatives like gift cards or free access to the next event to encourage them to participate in the survey - Talk with speakers separately to ask for their recommendations on what could be done better the next time - Meet with your team and volunteers to ask for their experience - Check with sponsors to see if the event helped to meet their KPIs and goals, if yes ask for their testimonials. If not, ask for their feedback for future events - Gather and compare all feedback to avoid mistakes and gain better experience at future events

One thing I have found useful is using online surveys when I need to get feedback. This will assist you and guide you on where you need to improve.

Feedback and surveys are most likely completed before conferences ends. Giving QR code links and some time incorporated into the speaking time will go a long way.

Consider that make of speakers should include more dimensions of diversity than is typically or widely prioritized. Ensure, we appropriate to the event or conversation, that you are including diversity in terms of lived experience, background, race, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, level, tenure, socioeconomic background, disability and neurodivergence, and beyond. Reminder though, ensuring diverse representation should be thoughtful, intentional, and authentic to the event or conversation, and tokenism through adding representation of speakers that are not organic additions and only being used for their identities, can do more harm than good.

Building an Event Team could help you increase your brand awareness and release your workload. The number of people involved in the event team depends on your audience. Around 5-7 volunteers or team members are needed for events with 50-80 guests. If you target 100-150 guests, consider having 8-10+ team members involved in the event preparation. Event team roles could be assigned based on below needs - Guests check-in (2-4 team members) - Community managers working with: ? Sponsors/partners/donors ? Speakers ? Guests (VIP, etc) - Social Media Marketing - Content Creation - Catering - Photo - Video Having a Team Lead is also a great addition to the team to manage day-to-day administrative work so you can focus on the big vision.