In so many articles and videos about speaking, I hear so much advice about how to craft and market your talk. But rarely does anyone ever give tangible advice on where you can actually apply to speak as a speaker.
So, I did my own research to find the answers and this is what I came up with.
I have tried some of these suggestions, and others have simply been recommended. Let me know which ones you find most effective.
I have broken down the categories of places to speak into these nine areas:
Industry-specific Conferences
Follow The Path of Speakers You Respect
Industry-specific Associations
Colleges
High Schools
Speaker Bureaus
Social Audio Apps
Podcasts
Online Communities
Please note: I will not be covering places like Toastmasters and Rotary Clubs because many articles have already explored those settings.
Apply directly to conferences in the industry you are interested in.
Identify the industry and audience you want to be a part of, and then find every conference for that industry that piques your interest.
I’ve spoken at many Tech, Human Resources/Talent Development, and Non-Profit conferences, so I created a list of all the conferences I’ve applied to or encouraged my friends and coaching clients to apply to.
Here’s the comprehensive list that shares top conferences around the world: Women’s Conferences, HR Conferences, Parks and Recreation Conferences, Event Planning, as well as SHRM and ATD Chapters.
Speaker Opportunities 2024
This list is constantly updated.
I either searched for the speaker application on the conference page or emailed the conference organizers to see if they were taking new speakers.
The easiest way to contact the conference organizers is by looking them up on LinkedIn and DMing them, or you can find their email using Clearbit Connect.
Another great way to find a call for speakers is to type #callforspeakers on LinkedIn’s search bar and sort by latest posts. You can do the same on Twitter and Instagram. Do this every quarter as you will see new call-for-speaker opportunities that weren’t available a few months ago.
Other places to find speaking opportunities are Sessionize, Conference Monkey, and Intel Engine.
Have A Conference Lead Generation Follow-up Plan
Most conferences do not pay, so you are speaking to display your work to specific companies so that they can hire you directly. Ensure you have a clear follow-up strategy to maximize gathering leads during and after your talk.
I have seen speakers provide some value-add at the end and ask attendees to either leave their business cards on the seat to be collected or have someone collect them at the door as people exit. Both are smart strategies to ensure you can follow up with the people who attended your talk.
Local Events
TEDx Stages: People talk about how becoming a TEDx speaker is a big deal, but it isn’t that difficult to get booked as there are hundreds of TEDx events worldwide. You can find TEDx events here. Find out the theme of the TEDx talk and submit it to a few, and you’ll eventually get picked. The Humor Engineer, Andrew Tarvin, wrote a great article on how to prep for a TEDx talk and the process of doing it.
Apply to speak at CreativeMornings. Founded by Tina Roth Eisenberg, it’s a monthly breakfast-lecture series for creatives, with over 106 chapters worldwide.
You can find speaker applications simply by doing a basic Google search: Apply To Be A Speaker
Virtual Conferences and Summits
One of the best virtual conferences I have spoken at on four separate occasions is the HR Virtual Summit run by Bamboo HR. They provide you with the emails of every attendee, even tracking the time that attendee stayed to watch your talk. Last year, they gave speakers a complimentary Yeti microphone and a quality computer camera to ensure their talk was excellent.
Also, due to the pandemic, there have been many more virtual summits that have popped up. Many people and organizations use summits as lead generators, needing speakers to bring in more attendees.
Look up summits based on your interest. Find the creator/coordinators of the summit and ask if you can speak or if you know of other similar summits to speak at.
Here are some examples of summits: The Hivery Summit, The Big Ready, and Soul Camp.
Find speakers you admire most and see where they have spoken and apply.
The phenomenal speaker Denise Jacobs, who once filled in for Brené Brown, gave me this advice.
Denise shows her entire list of speaking engagements, and probably other speakers do this as well, so you can find venues and conferences that resonate with you.
If any of your speaker friends have spoken at venues/conferences that you want to speak at, it’s time to call in some favors and ask them if they can do an introduction for you.
Event Management Associations
Event management companies are valued in their industry by having access to the latest and most talented rosters to provide value to their clients.
Get on their radars by attending their chapter association happy hours or presenting at quarterly gatherings. Each association listed below has both in-person and virtual events:
Each association has a local chapter for each major city, such as MPI Wisconsin or PCMA Greater Midwest Chapter.
Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM)
If you want to connect with HR teams, your best bet is to contact SHRM chapters. There are over 575 SHRM chapters in existence, and many of them are looking for monthly speakers. You can find one near you here.
Some SHRM chapters have a budget for speakers. Others have an honorarium and some have no budget but are potentially open to an exchange of service (e.g., sharing the attendees list or being included in their newsletter) with you.
Association for Talent Development (ATD)
Talent development is a subset of Human Resources comprised of learning and development staff, facilitators, curriculum designers, and talent development executives. The ATD has over 100 chapters in the US — you can find local ones here.
There are many types of associations depending on your industry, from the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP) to manufacturing associations.
If you want to find a specific association, check out the Directory of Associations here. It’s the most comprehensive list of associations.
Each has its national conferences as well as chapter events that you can speak at. It’s your job to hustle to find the ones that fit your work and outreach to them. Expect a 5–7% success rate, so be ready to reach out to many organizations to see progress.
Source: https://speakerflow.com/how-do-i-become-a-public-speaker-at-colleges-and-universities/Colleges have departments devoted to finding speakers to bring value to the campus. Simply because you don’t have a PhD doesn’t mean you aren’t qualified to speak in colleges. College campus activities departments are constantly looking for unique talent that can open their eyes to worlds that college kids might not have access to.
I remember attending a talk once by a well-known graffiti artist in New York. No college professor could have shared this street artist's experience with us, especially about avoiding the cops when tagging a specific building.
Here are the organizations and associations you may need to go through to get to the colleges. You can also contact college campus activities departments directly, but these associations usually are the gatekeepers that identify quality talent.
You can apply to be on their roster if they are a speaker bureau or agency. If they are an association, they typically have in-person conferences that you can apply to speak at to showcase your talent.
The HBO show, Crashing, features an episode where comedians performed at NACA. It’s an excellent episode for understanding what that vibe is like.
Michael Ayalon of Greek University was generous enough to share his wisdom on how to get onto campus through the fraternity route. It’s worth reaching out to him as he has a vast knowledge of how to speak on college campuses — he has been doing it for over 15 years. He recommends applying to the call for speakers for these five conferences:
Association of Fraternity/Sorority Advisors (AFA): July Call For Speakers
Northeast Greek Leadership Association (NGLA): Sept. Call For Programs
Southeast Greek Leadership Association (SGLA): TBA Call For Speakers
Association of Fraternity Leadership Values (AFLV) Central: Sept. Call
Association of Fraternity Leadership Values (AFLV) West: Sept. Call
Many speakers don’t know that there is a whole high school speaking world on which you could make an entire living. High school speakers can get paid between $1,000 and $8,000 a talk, depending on how good and how long they have been doing this work.
You can apply directly to high school to speak, but usually, the gatekeepers are these conferences, where you can present to show your work. Doing well at one of these conferences/conventions can set you up with many speaking engagements just for junior high and high schools in that state.
High School Conference/Convention & Month
Here are some of the Junior High/High School speakers I came across who are doing great work right now. They are worth checking out to get pointers from:
There are many opinions about the benefits of joining a speaker’s bureau: when to join and if it is beneficial to have someone representing you. I am not familiar with this world, so I gathered a bunch of resources where you could find out everything you need to know about speaker bureaus and come up with your conclusion on this avenue.
Speaker Bureau Resources
Speaker Bureaus to Consider
A friend of mine who is part of a speaker’s bureau says that she still has to look for work while also being part of a bureau. It depends on your speaker agent and how much they are willing to work for you while also managing an entire list of other clients.
If your work is trending (i.e., DEI during the BLM resurgence or toxic masculinity during #MeToo), speaker agents may be more likely to pitch your work as that is what their clients are looking for.
Speaker bureaus aren’t the end-all for speakers, but they can provide an additional revenue stream where you utilize the connections and relationships these bureaus have built to get into venues you might not be able to access directly.
If you aren’t ready to join a speaker bureau but want to connect with other speakers, join a local speaker’s association. The largest one in the US is the National Speakers Association (NSA), which has local chapters all over the country. It offers monthly online trainings throughout the year and even hosts a monthly virtual networking event for speakers called Mic Swap, hosted by the phenomenal speaker Robbie Samuels.
Speaker Bureaus want to know if they can make money off of you. Whether you are working with a Speaker Bureau or Speaker Agent, they are charging 10 - 15% commission on top of your speaker fees. So, if you are charging $5000/gig, a $500 - $750 commission fee might not be enough to make it worth their while. Even if you charge $20,000/gig, that might not be worth it if other speakers are on their roster are charging $40,000 - $50,000. They may add you to their roster, but they won't actively prioritize you if they have other clients with whom they can make more money.
So, can a speaker's bureau help you get more speaking gigs?
Only if you are already quite successful at speaking. For someone just starting off, you'll still need to do most of the legwork yourself, as it won't provide a shortcut to getting more speaking gigs.
I’m putting Clubhouse and Twitter’s Spaces as separate spaces to speak because I consider these apps 24-hour conferences/summits. At any time of the day, you can find a stage to speak on simply using this app. You can hop on stages of rooms next to other speakers, ask to be a guest moderator for a clubhouse room to show your work, or create your rooms and speak as a moderator. The craziest part is the strong likelihood of getting an audience, even if small.
The hype for these apps has died down, so they aren’t as popular, like a club that people don’t go to anymore. But if you are looking for a stage, if even a small one, you have one 24 hours a day to go to. Never in the history of social media do we have access to people and networks like this round-the-clock and in real-time.
Also, there are many rooms run by professional speakers and people who work for speaker bureaus, so you can learn a great deal about the industry and build relationships with these speakers. The more you show up in their rooms and contact them via Instagram/Twitter DM, the more they might be willing to check out your speaking work.
These apps provide you a venue to practice your talking points and do it in real-time with audience reaction, so you can see what does and doesn’t resonate.
Clubhouse has fallen off in the past few years, but it’s still a platform there for practice, even if you are speaking to a few people. It’s also worth checking out Twitter Spaces, Stereo, and Spoon.
In addition, consider all the main social media apps where you can go live as more stages you can practice on. You can go live on TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and Facebook. Even if you have a few people watching, it gives you more reps and makes you a better speaker.
Ten years ago, speakers didn’t have all these opportunities to practice in front of live audiences, so why not take advantage of the abundance of possibilities with these social media stages?
If you want to practice your talking points or strengthen certain parts of your talk, podcasts are a great venue to do this while displaying your work. There are 850,000 active podcasts worldwide, and a decent percentage are consistently looking for guests.
In my article, How I Got On Over 100 Podcasts In 9 Months, I share the benefits of being on podcasts and the steps to get on them. This isn’t a paid opportunity, but it introduces your work to people you wouldn’t otherwise have access to. You also get to practice working on your talks.
I created six new talks based on the talking points I honed, being on over 150 podcasts in 2020.
We underestimate the number of strong online communities of people who have never met but look out for one another. Clubhouse is just one example of this, but we need to explore all the other online community gathering spaces below:
Slack groups: Top 14 Ways To Find Open Slack Communities.
Facebook groups: Search specific topics under FB Groups — Speaker & Coaches Network Society, International Speakers, The Women/Womxn, BIPOC, Inclusivity Speaker Initiative, Black Speakers Collective, and more.
LinkedIn groups: Search for specific subjects such as LinkedIn groups for the speaker community.
Hobby/interest groups: Search for specific subjects such as travel groups (i.e., The Nomadic Network, Location Indie, Ultimate List of Travel Groups) or speaker communities like Heroic Public Speaking.
Books on Getting Paid To Speak:
Videos on Getting Paid To Speak:
We sometimes forget to tell the people closest to us what we actually want to do. In my article about marketing yourself through play, I encourage people to build a list of all the people they know (friends, former colleagues, FB/LinkedIn/Instagram connections, and more) and anyone they feel comfortable emailing. Put them all on a spreadsheet with their contact info, and when you are ready, figure out what you’d like to ask of them.
Easiest ask: Would they be willing to share a link with their network or community of you speaking?
Medium ask: Can they introduce you to someone or to an organization that you want to speak at? (Find out who they are connected with on LinkedIn.)
Big ask: Would they be open to hiring you to speak, or would they vouch for you to someone who could use your speaking services?
If you simply did this one step with your entire network, you could start booking paid speaking gigs right now.
We are usually scared to ask for help, so we avoid this. You will most likely get your first speaking gig from someone you know. Embrace this and see where this adventure takes you.
Whatever you do, whatever suggestion you pursue, the essential step is to keep trying, consistently show up even if you are getting rejected, and choose not to give up.
If you truly have an important message you want to share with the world, put in the work to make this a reality. Don’t simply do it for yourself. Do it for the person who needs to hear your words to pursue their purpose. I expand on this in this Good Will Hunting snippet based on the construction scene part of the movie.
In 1999, Brené Brown said she wanted to have a global conversation on vulnerability and shame. Her Netflix special came out in 2019, 20 years after she committed to doing this work.
Do the work for the sake of doing the work, let go of the results, and see the magic that unfolds.
Here are some additional speaking tips when just starting:
#1. Figure out the rules with your company regarding your speaking (if you work for another organization)
Are there talks where you can represent your company on their behalf?
Can you do talks where you are not affiliated with your organization?
HR and your supervisor typically know the answers to these questions.
#2. Put together a draft workshop write-up based on topics that you'd love to talk about
Title
Workshop Description (75 - 150 words)
Provide three learning objectives
Here are examples of what that looks like
#3. Find stages: Review potential speaking opportunities from this list
Identify the audience that most would resonate with your message
This link above provides speaking opportunities in various industries
Searching Call For Speakers on Google or #callforspeakers, #speakers, # on LinkedIn, Twitter, and IG will provide you with more potential speaking opportunities
#4. Once you get selected to speak, start putting together the talk
Many new speakers think they must have their entire talk down before applying to speak, but you don't.
Like stand-up comedy, your talk is a work in progress that is constantly evolving, so there is no need to be fully prepared before beginning to apply.
When you are ready to put together your talk, I recommend doing these exercises to help provide clarity:
4 Questions To Ask For Your Talk: Marsha Shandur
Who is the audience for this talk?
What do you want them to do differently as a result of the talk?
What is one small action they can do right now that'll make a difference in their lives (around this topic)?
What would you say about your workshop if you only had 30 seconds/one run-on sentence?
4 Ps Workshop Development Tool: Angie Cole
This tool helps you craft a deeper dive into your workshop, making it much more impactful.
Addressing Pain Points Sales Page: Marsha Shandur
This is important in how you present your talks to potential clients, focused on addressing their main pain points.
Learn the essential facilitation needed to solve unexpected problems and run a smooth, stress-free workshop.
#5. Figure Out How Much To Charge For Your Talks
Here's what I've charged organizations throughout the years.
This is more of a mindset shift than a specific protocol. A business coach of mine, Stephen Warley, recommended doing the mirror test
Say a number in the mirror, and when you start giggling, that is a number worth quoting as it challenges you.
About the author:
Jeff Harry combines positive psychology and play to heal workplaces, help teams build psychological safety, and assist individuals in addressing their biggest challenges by embracing a play-oriented approach to work.
Jeff was selected by BambooHR & Engagedly as one of the Top 100 HR Influencers and has been featured in the NY Times, Mashable, Upworthy, Huffpost, Shondaland, Wired, NPR, NatGeo, and Forbes. Jeff has also worked with Google, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, Adobe, the NFL, Amazon, and Facebook, helping their staff to infuse more play into the day-to-day.
Over the past 15 years of facilitation and speaking, Jeff’s main goal has been to help work suck less by assisting leaders in building a playground workplace atmosphere that motivates their staff to do their most vibrant work.
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