The No-Fail Guide to Crafting Your Virtual Speaker Checklist
Being nervous when speaking to an audience is normal, and some nerves are good. The adrenaline rush also makes you more alert and ready to give your best performance.
According to the 10 Tips for Improving Your Public Speaking Skills guide from Harvard, the best way to overcome anxiety is to prepare. Speakers who prepare tend to be more relaxed, which means less stress in your shining moment.
That said, we understand those few minutes before going live can be nerve-wracking. With this in mind, we prepared some detailed speaker checklist suggestions to help you manage your time and define your action plan for the big day.
No-fail guide to craft your speaker checklist:
Know your audience
The more you know regarding who the message is intended for, the best you can determine your choice of words, topics to cover, level of information, informality, etc.
Define your objective
Ask yourself what your main goal is: are you aiming to educate, persuade, or entertain your attendees? With this in mind, you can define your route and key takeaways.
Spread the word
If the event isn’t private, you can raise the engagement by taking advantage of your network, LinkedIn groups, and social channels to share the subject regarding your presentation or the event you’ll be speaking at.
Focus on your content
Take the time to focus on preparing high-quality content. Practice and rehearse your talk. Think about how much material you can cover in the limited amount of time you have. That will help you avoid rushing through the material.
Check practicalities
Check with the event organization if they have any slide formatting requirements (an event logo or a slide template, for example.) Also, it’s important to know upfront how you or the event organizers will manage slides and questions from the audience during the presentation.
Get familiar with the platform
Take the time to access the platform you’ll use in advance. That will make you more comfortable with significant things like turning on and off the microphone and camera, how to share the slides, how to use live polling, etc. Furthermore, check if there’re any system requirements, such as a preferred browser, operational system, etc.
Have a backup plan
Coordinate with the organizers so you can share your presentation file with them before the event day. This way, someone else can share it for you in case you have any troubles. If possible, have an additional device prepared in case your sidekick leaves you empty-handed.
Being prepared is the best anecdote to “speaker’s nerves”
Accelevents is a platform that allows event planners to help you have the best speaker experience with interactive solutions that will keep the energy up and deliver exceptional value by engaging your attendees during any session.
You can take advantage of our engaging and interacting tools such as live chat, Q&A, and real-time polls to make the experience more memorable.
Are you going to be a speaker at an upcoming virtual event? Join us every Monday for an interactive speaker training on how to live stream using the Accelevents platform.
