Meetups: Organizing Expert Talks 🎙
Talks are the most common type of meetup. It may look easy to pull off but it can easily be messed up too! Let's see the key ingredients to organize such event.
Setting up such event is mostly about logistics. But first things first, you need two super important ingredients without which it is unnecessary to start on any other tasks: 1/ have a good speaker and 2/ have a good venue.
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Finding A Good Venue
That’s often the more difficult part if you’re new to the city where you want to run the event. It takes time to scout places, contact the manager, and go in-person to visit the place and meet the manager.
Some common tricks to find good venues: look at where other similar event happen (on meetup, eventbrite, etc), reach out to friends who work in companies that may want to host such event, do the same with you student friends and their universities.
You venue should have this equipment:
Projector - must be strong if used in day time
Sound System
Microphone - very necessary in 90% of cases, especially if you have a good turn up at your event (exactly when you don’t want to mess things up)
Finding A Good Speaker
No, people won’t be ok with an average speaker. They may be fooled and join your event, but if the speaker is not good enough they will do one or a combination of this things: (i) leave during the event, (ii) complain either directly to you or in your back, (iii) never come back to your events.
A good speaker is someone who is an expert in the field she/he talks about. Someone adding a lot of value to your audience’s crave for top quality information.
Ideally, your speaker works for a project that’s getting strong traction and/or is already well respected by his peers (check his/her online reputation).
Event Format
So you’re closing in on your speaker and your venue. You’re wondering “what should I do now?”… well, now you should ‘design’ your event and figure out how it will run.
My advice is following a principle devs now too well: KISS, which stands for Keep It Simple Stupid.
Below I explain the event format that I developed over the years. It works very well, every.single.time.
How Many Speakers
One and one only. You do NOT need several speakers.
One speaker already takes a lot of the audience’s attention. Having several talks will make them fall asleep of boredom and make your life complicated too.
If you doubt whether your speaker can “attract enough people” then you may have the wrong speaker.
Don’t bother. One speaker, that’s it. KISS.
How Many Organizers
One and one only. You do NOT need several organizers aka event planner.
You’re organizing a meetup of what… 30 people… maybe 60 people? so why in the world would you have several organizers?
Unless you’re in a corporate environment where you may have no other choice, I would always recommend to have “only one cook in the kitchen”. You’ll save yourself a lot of time and the rewards (reputation gains and others) will get to the right person.
Don’t bother. One organizer, that’s it. KISS.
p.s. tried to co-organized meetups with others, often it feels totally unnecessary. Again, it’s a small event, no need for many organizers. Team up when you grow bigger & have a strong track record.
How Long For The Speech
Always below 20min. Never more.
I’ve ran 50+ meetups and can confidently tell you that unless a talk is exceptional, the audience will NEVER want longer than 20min. But don’t trust, verify: go on YouTube, search “TedX” and see for yourself all talks last 10-20min.
Run a Q&A and Debate
The more interactive the better. After the talk, you want your audience to wake up… ahem, to engage!
The best thing for that is to organize a debate that’s mixed with the Q&A. Meaning that the speaker still is open to answer questions but that if people want to interact with one another and share personal experiences/opinions on the topic discussed then it’s more than welcome.
You can break out the “crowd vs speaker” layout and make a big circle to make this part more friendly for anyone, even the most introverts. More on this in another post ;)
Be The MC
The event lead should be the MC. Whoever puts the event together should be visible to the audience for obvious reasons such as: reputation gain, potential collaborators will come talk to that person.
The event lead not only plan the event, but also makes sure everything falls nicely into place during the event: equipment is ready, event schedule is respected, venue manager is happy, and so on.
So it only makes sense that the same person holds the microphone when needed to tell everyone when a debate must end coz of the clock… or give a shoutout to the speaker, to the venue for hosting, and whoever helped.
As an MC, here are your typical times to speak with the microphone:
Before the talk: you give a waem welcome to everyone, quickly introduce the awesome speaker, maybe make a joke to relax the oh-so-serious atmosphere that can be present before a talk.
After the talk: help out the speaker when he’s done by breaking out the crowd into a big circle so the debate and Q&A can happen.
After the debate: you can have a slide ready so you don’t forget anything important, put it up on the projector and say your thanks to everyone who made this event happen (speaker, host, etc) and leave some actionable (links/QR).
Food And Drinks After The Event
What I always recommend: go to a restaurant afterwards.
This way (i) you don’t bother with organizing, (ii) you don’t need to pay for the food yourself and (iii) you leave the venue as early as possible. Just make sure the restaurant you go to is very close to the venue where you ran the talk.
Otherwise you can order food on one of these food delivery apps. Same for drinks. Or bring drinks from a supermarket earlier if you want to save on budget.
More on “organizing food and drinks for a meetup” in another article ;)
Triple Check The Event Timeline
You must have a precise plan on the event timeline to be able to estimate as close as possible the entire length of the event. For instance:
19:00 doors open
19:15 talk starts
19:35 open debate and q&a
20:00 closing remarks
20:20 doors close
That’s it. Add to it 20% buffer (adds to doors closing at 20:35) and you have a decent idea on the maximum closing time you will reach.
Make sure this plan sticks to what you agreed with the venue manager.
Gratitude 🙏 Thanks for reading! If you feel extra helpful, feel free to say "thank you too" by following me on twitter 🐦 twitter.com/AdrienBe_
Articles Of The Series
Meetups: Organizing Expert Talks 🎙 YOU ARE HERE 📍
More to follow in the coming months ⚡️
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