As PAOs, we should either be helping our boss and the members of our organization prepare to talk or talking ourselves.
Preparation is key; normally, it is the audience who prepares to hear the speaker, they read bios and do some googling, maybe check the recent tweets of the speaker.
Last week we had a journalist-guest speaker. I learned a lot from her – not from what she said about journalism; I learned a lot from what she did to prepare.
We Were People: To prepare to talk with us, she read all of our bios. There was probably about 20 of us. When we introduced ourselves it was like we were meeting her for the second time. “Hi Dave, really good to meet you. I look forward to hearing about your time in Afghanistan. You’ve done some cool things,” she said.
Stories: Instead of giving us information; she told us stories that seemed to be tailor-made for us. We write enough about telling stories on MaxDis, suffice to say, if you’re not telling engaging stories, you’re putting your audience to sleep.
Audience Inclusion: Because she knew us, she planned her talk based on the audience. When she was talking about news deserts, she asked the girl from Salisbury about her local paper (which she was clearly prepared to talk about). She called out the kid who is running a tech startup when she was talking about technology and audience engagement.
I spend a decent amount of time planning what we are going to say. After this, I decided to spend more time thinking about WHO we are saying it to.
Photo by Lance Cpl. Sahara Luna
