7 Ways Professional Emcees Can Enhance Your Next Event

I’ll never forget one of my first professional speaking engagements. I felt honored to be included and worked hard to prepare a super valuable presentation.

Imagine my horror at what happened before my session.

Standing by the A/V table I overheard the event organizer grab a volunteer in the hallway and say, “Would you go read this introduction for our next speaker?”

I then watched this poor lady stumble to the front of the room as she sheepishly read the card and totally butchered my name.

I felt awful for her and wished they had just let me introduce myself.

She's not alone...

But before I just throw all the helpless volunteers under the bus, let me confess that I’ve done it too. In the first six years of Social Media Marketing World I was the main stage emcee. I worked overtime with Tim Washer who coached me on my humorous anecdotes. I had great stories, but I rarely practiced the speaker introductions for anyone except Michael (Mike) Stelzner and Gary Vaynerchuk . I remember stumbling through the bio for Jay Baer and vowing I would never do that again.

That might have been the year we realized that it’s not realistic for the event director to also be the emcee. I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to own that role the way it deserves. We soon realized we needed a professional emcee.

Over the years we’ve moved from merely recruiting potential speakers to be emcees and have sought out people who see event emcee work as a role they enjoy and seek to do regularly.

7 Ways a Professional Emcee Can Enhance Your Events

In my experience, I’ve seen at least seven ways that well-prepared and skilled emcees enhance an event.

“The power an emcee possesses is to bring good, high energy to any event that makes attendees feel excited and ready to learn and grow!" -- Renée Marino International Speaker/Connection Expert & Best-Selling Author

#1: Energy: Professional emcees are adept at keeping an audience energized through humor, interactive activities, and their own personal energy. Leslie Samuel calls this "energy transfer." Every speaker loves coming on stage to applause and great energy. Emcees also monitor the energy in the room and make pivots when they sense the energy is lagging and are prepared for the natural ebbs and flows due to circadian rhythms.

#2: Engagement: Related to energy, an audience that is highly motivated and prepared to learn and participate creates a better experience for the speaker and audience. Great emcees help attendees feel welcome and part of the community by letting them see they aren’t alone. This might include talking to people around them or just participating in activities that bring the audience together.

#3: Emotion: Just like great speakers know how to tap into a vast array of emotions, good emcees do the same. Through short stories they can evoke hope, excitement, empathy, connection, and passion. This introduces a different level of personal engagement when an audience feels emotionally invested.

#4: Educational: Truly great emcees don’t just entertain, they also educate the audience with factoids that can help in life. Whether it’s Lizzie Williamson doing short two-minute movement exercises that can be taken to the home office or David T. Stevens?, PMED explaining how physical exercise increases blood flow to the brain making it easier to learn and stay engaged. I recently saw David offer a different tip at every session–short little soundbytes that can serve people at work and at conferences.

#5: Entwined: Okay, I’m admittedly sticking to an E acrostic here. A better word would be interweave. Great emcees know how to weave the parts of an event together to make it a holistic experience. They understand the difference between “bricks” (the content) and “mortar” (the stuff that holds an event together). Emcees know their role is not to provide bricks, but to support the speakers with all the interstitial material that makes the whole more than the sum of the individual parts.

“It’s all about the audience, the speakers, and the event staff! As the emcee your purpose is to unselfishly serve and create amazing experiences. Great emcees know it’s not about them.” -- George B. Thomas

#6: Emergency: In live events we all know that something will go wrong or at least not according to plan. A trained emcee is like a highly trained pilot. Pilots spend 98% of their time smoothly flying planes around the globe, but 2% of the time their training kicks in as they face highly turbulent skies or mechanical challenges. You need a trained emcee who knows how to handle a 7-minute delay while the A/V team figures out why the video feed is no longer working.

#7: Effortless: A professional emcee will make it look easy, but in fact they spend a lot of time preparing. They keep the show moving, dealing with disruptions, and handling the personalities and requirements of each speaker. Like Coach JIMMY HAYS NELSON they come dressed for success and prepared for whatever might happen.

BONUS: Empowering: Truly great emcees understand the power of asking the right questions to open the room to possibilities. Appreciative Inquiry, as taught by Jon Berghoff , shows emcees how to choreograph questions that help move people from strangers to community, from outsiders to insiders, from fearful to bold, from cautious to curious. It's all in the questions we ask that can unlock the collective wisdom of a room in unrivaled fashion.

There is not a one-size fits all approach to emceeing. Most emcees have high levels of verbal and physical energy, but that doesn’t mean they need to be a “Hype Man” like Ramon Ray . It might mean they bring music into the role like Renee Marino or humor like Tim Washer. It might mean they write original rap songs to introduce a speaker like Leslie Samuel or tell personal stories about each speaker like Chad Petersen .

One of the last lessons I’ll share is that great emcees will seek to understand the goals of the event and define success based on the event’s needs. When you have a trained emcee who understands your event goals, they will make the event better than you planned.

I’ll never forget watching Jeff Hurt emcee an event for CEMA-Corporate Event Marketing Association . He used humor, stories, and engagement throughout the event. But the best service he provided was by ending the event with a session on the neuroscience of event learning. He didn’t just teach us about neuroscience–which he actually did very little of—he helped us experience the power of memory building exercises. Over the course of an hour he led us through three activities that helped us remember the most important lessons we learned at that event. I remember those lessons to this day after over 8 years.

Your Turn

I’d love to hear from you. How have professional emcees made a difference at your events?