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The communication moral is clear. If you are given ten minutes to speak, plan to do eight with a two-minute cushion. Don’t try to cram twenty-five minutes of statistics, charts, and graphs into an already crowded agenda. Talking faster won’t help, either. Your audience can handle only so much information at one time. Great communication is not about telling your audience about how much research you’ve done. It’s about sharing information that the audience cares about and can use. This highly credentialed researcher, who had spent years mastering this complex subject of drug addiction, had spent no time trying to master the art of connecting with her audience in a meaningful way. For that, she gets an F. Chapter 18 PLANNING A CONFERENCE? NO DETAIL IS TOO SMALL You’ve heard them before—those incredibly long, overly detailed, and frankly boring presentations that cause otherwise dynamic events to grind to a halt. Follow these steps to run a dynamic, interactive, goal-oriented event: • Establish exactly what you want to accomplish in the event. What are your two or three main goals? What are the “takeaways ”you want participants to leave with? Once you have answered these questions, you are ready to move forward. • Keep things interactive and dynamic.You can’t allow speakers to come in one after the other to provide their own “unique” expert perspective to the audience. Inevitably, after the second or third speaker, the audience begins to lose it. • Make sure all speakers understand that they are part of a larger conversation. Their perspective is important, but it is not the only one. Let them know up front exactly how much time they have. Further, discourage them from making a 40 MAKE THE CONNECTION “canned presentation” and limit the number of PowerPoint presentations. • Bring in a professional moderator who is an expert at drawing out your speakers as well as your audience. Even if the staff of your organization is competent in many areas, the ability to effectively facilitate and lead a conference is rare. Invest a few dollars in doing this. It will be worth it. • Once you have the facilitator in place, use him or her. Make it clear to your invited speakers that they will be part of a “facilitated conversation.” Tell them that they will have the opportunity to share their perspective, but it is essential that they do it in an interactive and dynamic fashion.You can have as many as a dozen or more speakers at one conference, but none should seem isolated from the others. • All speakers should be pressed to share their views. However, they should be pushed by the facilitator to keep their comments relevant to the conference’s larger goals. If not, the conference will be all over the place, and it will be impossible to tie things together at the end. • Never end any event without having the moderator publicly state what has been agreed to by event participants. It is essential that people can point to exactly what has been accomplished through their participation. One of the worst feelings comes from spending an entire day at a conference and then walking away exhausted without a clear sense of what had been accomplished. How do you handle speakers who are resistant to your approach? Level with them. It’s worth making the effort up front and communicating in a direct fashion about what you are trying to accomplish. No matter how important these people may be, no conference organizer should turn over an event to a single speaker. If a speaker resists, you should seriously consider withdrawing your invitation. Dynamic presentations don’t happen by accident. They take planning , preparation, and persistence. Yet, the payoff is more than worth it in satisfied customers who are likely to return the next time you invite them to another event. The Power of Passion and Connecting with Others 41 ...

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