What is a speaker brief?

A speaker brief is one page telling a speaker what they need. Most speaker problems at conferences are briefing problems rather than speaker problems.

In practice at an event

Send it twice. Once at confirmation, when the speaker is planning the talk and the things that shape it are the speaking time, the audience and the format. And once about a week out with the practical detail, with the materials deadline in the subject line rather than in paragraph four.

The most common failure is not stating the speaking time separately from the slot length. A 45-minute slot containing a five-minute introduction and ten minutes of Q&A is a 30-minute talk, and speakers plan for what they were told.

The second most common is not explaining how Q&A works. Three sentences — questions arrive through the app, the moderator hands over the top three near the end, please read each question aloud — and speakers do it well.

What to look for

One page. A two-page brief gets skimmed and a five-page one gets filed. Everything that is not needed to deliver the talk belongs in a separate document.

Include a name and a mobile number for the day. It is the most-used line on the page.

How event67 handles it

Speakers appear in the app with a photo, a bio and their sessions, entered by the organizer. Session feedback and the questions asked in each session are archived, which makes sending each speaker their own ratings and questions within a week a five-minute job that almost no conference does. event67 does not produce the brief itself; our speaker brief template is copyable.