Speakers need to know who is in the audience.

principle — attributed to Lauren Kotkin

Kotkin's required pre-conference webinar covers who is in the audience. The example she gives is precise. A speaker might use a two-million-dollar grant as an example, when the average grant size among Exponent Philanthropy members is thirty to forty thousand dollars. The two-million number does not land. It is hard to relate to that example when the listener's own resources are two percent of it. Speakers who do not know their audience misfire even when the content is excellent. The discipline of briefing speakers on the audience demographics, resources, and constraints is operationally small and qualitatively decisive. Programs that skip this step get expertise without relevance.

For conference programmers, association executives, and learning directors hosting external speakers. The principle is most useful as a corrective when speaker quality has been high but session evaluations have been low.

audience-knowledge, speaker-briefing, context, relevance