What I’ve learned about online speaking in the last 6 months

Since March, I’ve been trying to figure out this new world of virtual speaking. Part talkshow host, part tech wrangler, part group therapist, the job of delivering an amazing talk to a remote audience is daunting for many of us.

I'm both a public speaker and a conference organizer. To be perfectly candid, since COVID hit, event organizers have shifted a huge part of the burden onto speakers:

• At physical events, speakers just had to wear a decent shirt and know their content. Organizers took care of the lighting, mic, camera, introduction, slides—pretty much everything else.
• Today, organizers expect a virtual speaker to handle most of these themselves. Nearly all of the events I've spoken at in the last 6 months give their speakers little more than a URL and a calendar invite.

This, of course, backfires horribly. The audience is subjected to a stream of poorly-lit, badly-connected, disengaging monologues. As organizers, we're hoping to do better than that, so we're in the middle of a series of trainings for our speakers for FWD50, the digital government conference we've been running since 2017.

Our trainings are based on research into tech, content, TV production, and behavioural psychology. There's a 90 minute long hands-on training, as well as plenty of tests, checklists, and a series of emails and calendar events.

Quick edit, since this post kinda blew up: FWD50 is the world’s biggest Digital Government event. We’re making a pair of tickets free to every municipality, territory, state, and province. If you found this post useful, please tell any public servants who might find this useful.

Here's a bit of what we're teaching our speakers to do—skills that they tell us are invaluable in their day-to-day meetings and other engagements.

A hierarchy of needs

Borrowing from Maslow, we structure our training according to a hierarchy of needs. You should prepare your tech and platform first; then interaction; then content; and finally polish.

Here's a bit more about each one.

Technology: Connect all the things

Metal conducts better than air. Everything from your network connection (don't use wifi!) to your mic and headphones follows this rule. I'm a nerd, so I ran a test: Here's how "stable" the network is when I reboot the modem, and when I plug into Ethernet directly (the flat part on the right.)

Just go buy a $20 Ethernet-to-USB adapter and run a cable to your router. Your life will be vastly better. Then get a plugged in headset with a mic, or better yet, a desktop mic and headset.

Tools: Know Thy Platform

Half of the time we spend training people is on two seemingly simple things: Screensharing, and presenting in a window.

How to share your screen

You can share the whole screen, an app, a browser tab, a screen region, a video, audio... the list goes on, and it's different from tool to tool. Know this basic skill on the platform you'll be using. Zoom and Microsoft Teams have many options (because they're downloaded applications) but Google Meet and Streamyard have better browser sharing support.

How to make your slide deck a window

Most of the time when you click "present," your slides expand to cover everything, including the videoconferencing tool you're in. You can fix this!

• In Powerpoint, go to Slide Show > Set Up Slideshow, and choose "Browsed by an individual (window)". Now, when you start your slides, you'll just have them in a window. Unfortunately, you'll also have the title bar of your slides, so you may want to share just an area of your screen to crop this.
• In Keynote, go to Play > Play Slideshow In A Window. Keynote will pop up a window for your slides—and unlike Powerpoint, it will hide the window's title bar when your mouse isn't over it.
• In Google Slides, click the down-arrow next to Present and choose Presenter View. Now you'll have one browser tab with your slides, and another with your slide navigator, timer, and speaker notes. This is amazing and because you can upload Powerpoint or Keynote to Slides pretty easily, it's become a go-to tool for me.
• Zoom has a new beta feature where you can upload a (relatively small) Powerpoint or Keynote deck and use it as your background, superimposing your face in the bottom corner. This works well enough, but you lose all animations and it's harder to navigate your slides. You also need to adjust your slide layout so your head isn't over part of the slide.

I should also note that transcription and translation is built into Powerpoint, and closed captioning is built into Google Slides. There's no excuse not to make your talk accessible by enabling this. Go to Slide Show > Captions & Subtitles, and check Always Use Subtitles. You can choose the spoken language (what it listens for) and the displayed language. It's surprisingly accurate, and will help the widest audience possible hear your message.

Interaction: Rules of engagement

Once your connection and platform are under control—and to be clear, those are the things a speaker can control, so do them first—you need to think about your talk. You aren't speaking, you're entertaining, which means you're the host of an experience. A lot of our work is around this, but here are a few takeaways:

• Plan a run of show, minute by minute, for your speaking slot.
• Appeal to all the senses: Auditory, visual, and tactile.
• Audiences want to consume (learning content); connect (meeting other people); and collaborate (accomplishing a shared task.) Can you include all of these in your session?
• Be surprising. Can you bring in surprise guests (videoconferencing is a teleporter)? Do something unexpected? They'll remember you for it.
• Engage the audience as it arrives, calling it out by name. Make people do things in chat, turn on their camera and microphone, or whatever you can to make them part of the show.
• Know and enforce the code of conduct. People can be jerks in person—even more so when they're hiding behind a screen. Making an event safe for all starts with you as the speaker.

Content: It’s different online

Fireside chats and interactions with good moderators are the norm online. Just like a late-night talkshow host provides a common thread through an event, so they can provide consistency and flow for a virtual one. If you are doing a talk, here are some quick rules:

• No long narratives. Don't talk for more than 5 minutes at a time.
• Use big fonts, with one point per slide, so people don't read ahead.
• More improv, less standup: You're not delivering a monologue—people may question, or augment, what you're saying in real time. You'll have to respond to what's happening.
• Plan your candour. Have a couple of “unscripted” anecdotes you can share when asked. Audiences love to feel they've got the inside scoop on something.
• Practice your talk a lot. Have a Zoom Party where your friends listen to you giving it.
• Have a +1 in your session to wrangle difficult chat comments, field the best Q&A questions, and ask questions of their own if the audience is recalcitrant.

Polish: Like choosing a good suit

Figuring out lighting and framing makes you look professional, but it's no substitute for boring content or a disengaged speaker. Worry about this last.

• Get good lighting. If you're speaking at a certain time of day, practice at the same time so the sun is in the same place.
• Frame your shot. Will the moderator be upper-torso or talking head? Can you match that? Is there room below your face for a lower third or title?
• Learn to look just below the camera when speaking, with occasional glances at notes nearby.
• Don't wear fine-lined clothing that might produce a Moiré pattern.

You can get creative with this, too. By placing screens in a different place from cameras, you can simulate a face-to-face conversation; here's me testing that out with Emily Ross.

The bottom line is that you're now in charge of the stage, and you can try out new things that surprise and delight an otherwise jaded audience!

A final checklist

Here's the pre-event and on-the-day checklist we share with our speakers.

Before the event

• Air is a lousy conductor. Get plugged in everywhere you can!
• Use a window. Learn to get your presentation tool (Keynote, PPT, Slides) in windowed mode.
• Try out the video tool yourself and get comfortable with it. We're using Streamyard, which is amazing and has a free trial.
• Talk incessantly about your session to everyone. The more you flesh out the ideas in conversation, the more comfortable you'll be going "off script" and reacting to chat.
• Think about psychology and surprise in the new format. Have you planned a change or surprise every 5 minutes, even if that's just a check-in with the audience?
• Test microphones, cameras, and lights. Use Photobooth or some other recording tool to record yourself with different gear and see what works best, then lock in your ideal rig.
• Organize a trial run of your talk with friends. We can all turn on a stage with a single click these days, so take advantage of that.
• Use the platform. If the event has a conference platform (we're using Grip Events, but have also tried out Bizzabo and Swapcard) log in, set up your profile, check the schedule, and reach out to people. The more engaged you are on the platform, the more you'll get out of participating.

On the day

• Reboot everything: Your router, your modem, and your computer. Close all background apps you don't need, particularly stuff like Dropbox, Box, or Drive that can sync in the background and use up precious bandwidth.
• Do a last-minute “Photobooth checkup” of yourself by recording audio and video and listening to it. This is the virtual equivalent of checking for food in your teeth in the mirror.
• Log in well beforehand. The backstage banter often makes things more comfortable, and lets you meet other participants and the audience.
• Get on your backchannel. Having an alternate way for producers to communicate with speakers (via WhatsApp, SMS, etc.) is essential—and frankly, if the event doesn't do this, it's a big red flag for speakers.
• Test your backups. I've done an hour-long talk on batteries and LTE because there was a gas leak in the neighborhood seconds before we started:

• Turn off notifications. That ding in the background really tells the audience you weren't ready.

The right mindset

Years ago, an NLP trainer told me he helps people get over their fear of public speaking by reminding themselves of the following three things, which I encourage speakers to reflect on before taking the stage. It might sound hokey, but it works.

1. “I'm happy to be here.” Think of a time you'd finally arrived at a place you love, and how that made you feel. How did it smell? What was the temperature like? What sounds were there? Take that feeling, and carry it with you as you enter the stage.
2. “You're happy I'm here.” When was everyone happy to see you? Getting to a bar with long-lost friends? Returning home for the holidays? Recognize that people are turning up because they want to hear and learn from you. As you welcome them, and greet them by name, keep this in mind.
3. “I have valuable things to share.” Your ideas were good when you wrote your speech. You put in the work, chose a topic. You might not be an expert, but you've got a unique viewpoint, and probably know more about this than the audience. Your insights are important. Take your time and seek to be understood.

Most of all, have fun. Online experiences can be stressful—everyone knows that. Giving people a few minutes of well-produced entertainment is a gift, and a refreshing change from the mundane rectangles of webinars. If you do what I've listed here, you'll be in the top 1% of speakers I've seen online this year.