Let Your After Dinner Speaker End On A High

Any type of event can be bettered if an after dinner speaker is invited to present. The after dinner speaker is the long time favourite of most event planners because of their wonderful ability to end events on high notes and ensure that attendees don’t forget the event.

Events at which an after dinner speaker often features vary in genre from charity fundraisers to sports dinners to corporate gatherings but in all of these cases the aim of the speaker is the same. The after dinner speaker always aims to make sure an audience goes away with a positive impression of an event. Some are better than others. There are some obvious marks of a good after dinner speaker which anyone hiring one should remember.

Even in circumstances where the event might have an informational or educational tone, the after dinner speaker will avoid lecturing their audience and making them bored. Instead, an experienced speaker will have a knack of informing an audience in a light-hearted, perhaps even humorous way. The speech might be motivational or thought-provoking, but never boring.

A good after dinner speaker should liaise with events organisers to get the most of the lay-out and acoustics of the room.The audience, for example, is more likely to feel as though they are a part of the presentation if they can see the speaker. Planners might consider using cabaret-style seating arrangements to this end.

Catching and keeping the audience’s attention and interest is vital to any good after dinner speaker. They may choose to use visual aids or humorous anecdotes to help with this. It is also important that the audience feels as though the presentation has been tailored to them. Therefore, a good after dinner speaker will keep their presentation current by relating their topic to recent issues and news.

Probably the most important skill that makes a good after dinner speaker is their ability to end always on a high note. Even if the subject matter has been serious, speeches should always find a positive note on which to end. An audience that leaves an event on a positive note will think highly of the event, making it a success.

After Dinner Speaker Skills

The skillset of any experienced and successful after dinner speaker will be varied. These skills are especially clear when an after dinner speaker is compared with an amateur or beginner. This is because inexperienced speakers may not have finely tuned all the skills which are so vital to great presentations.

Of course, given the massive variety of different messages an after dinner speaker might be asked to get across throughout their career, communication skills are a must. However, humour is a vital string to the speaker’s bow if he or she is to keep the audience from becoming bored. Because the after dinner speaker is expected to entertain the audience during what is a natural lull in proceedings, they must be humorous to prevent any after dinner lull. As well as humour, brevity is a very important skill. Conveying messages without spending hours doing it always makes for a good speaker.

In-depth knowledge is also vital to the after dinner speaker. It is also very important that the after dinner speaker can demonstrate good, solid knowledge of the topic about which they are speaking. The audience is unlikely to take a speaker, or their message, seriously if they appear to be lacking fundamental knowledge of the topic. In this regard, the person responsible for hiring the after dinner speaker has a role to play. Hiring a former Big Brother housemate to speak at a conference on sales techniques would obviously be foolish. Still, even a knowledgeable speaker will need to be given some information about the company and the audience.

Understanding an audience and what it is that they will require is a nother major part of the skills of an after dinner speaker. Of course, this does not mean that audiences should neglect to provide background information. Failure to understand the needs of an audience has caused many an after dinner speaker to make gaffes in the past, with inappropriate jokes at the top of the list.