JUST ASK AND WE CAN FIND YOU A SPEAKER
OUR CONCIERGE SERVICE IS BUSY BUT WE CAN HELP YOU
Dear Innovation Women Community,
Looking for a speaker on a specific topic? We can help you! And by “we”, there is a certain collective “we”involved. Yes, our IW Concierge service can help you find speakers and we include the opportunities in our exclusive speaker newsletter but our Innovation Women speakers help out too. In speaking with an event manager last week we heard that when one of our speakers couldn’t do a requested event she was able to suggest an appropriate (female) colleague.
And the key here is appropriate speaker. We’ve talked before about being the token woman. No one wants to be invited to fill a quota or to help gender balance anevent. But we know that speaking engagements are a highly “referral” based thing. Event managers ask around and get recommendations. Event managers see a speaker at another event and invite them to speak on the same or a similar topic. Event managers turn to their personal contact list and invite the same (successful) speakers back. All of this conspires to keep new voices off the stage. A speaker needs to be top of mind and this is hard to do if they and the event manager don’t run in the same circles.
Event managers tell us that they use Innovation Women to discover new speakers all the time (meet some of our new speakers below) but they also find it can help them discover new aspects of speakers they already know.
