Make Your Speaker Ready Room Command Central for Onsite Content

Meeting planners know the drill: On the day of an event, the person in charge of content winds up running from room to room with a USB stick, frantically trying to ensure that the most up-to-date slide decks land in the right place. And with in-person events facing added pressure to deliver outstanding experiences and hybrid add-ons, the challenge is that much greater.

The good news is that these onsite logistics no longer have to be managed manually. A tech-powered speaker ready room can ensure everything runs smoothly — without anyone having to break a record on their Fitbit’s daily step count.

Thanks to new advances, a speaker ready room can act as command central for an event’s entire show flow. Now you can send presentation files to AV equipment across the venue. The latest tools can even help with avoiding duplicate slide decks, identifying conflicts in the schedule, ensuring presentations are in the right format, and preparing content for on-demand access.

In this article, we’ll explain how to get the most from your speaker ready room — and the content that comes out of it.

1. For Presentations, Looks Are Everything

For the past two years, attending an event has involved a lot of screen time. All those hours paved the way to a new truth for today’s conference participants: They don’t have the patience to look at poorly-designed decks.

“One of the big issues we recognized throughout the pandemic is that people want television-quality production,” Allie Magyar, chief product officer at Notified, said. “And we’ve all been in sessions with presentations that feature slides that look like they were designed decades ago with bad formatting. For many attendees, the response to that is simple: They’re going to get up and leave.”

To keep those audience members in their seats, it’s important to ensure that presentation slides look as good as possible. Does each presentation deck have the right resolution and aspect ratio to look sharp on those high-definition screens you’ve invested in? There are some great resources online that detail the right specs for large-screen TVs and projectors, but most devices nowadays will have a 4K resolution with a 16:10 aspect ratio. Depending on the specific screen type, the optimal size for slides is usually either 1280 x 800 pixels or 3840 x 2160 pixels.

Of course, the last thing most event planners need is the hassle of double-checking every speaker’s slide deck to ensure it has the optimal specs. That’s why Notified’s speaker ready room technology automatically checks that every deck has a matching template and high-resolution slides. It’ll even ensure that the proper housekeeping information — QR codes linking to a session survey, for example — is included.

“If people are going to be staring at something for an extended period of time,” Magyar said. “They expect it to be high-quality.”

2. Last-Minute Changes Shouldn’t Create Big-Time Challenges

“We all know speakers never meet their timelines,” Magyar, a regular speaker who admits her own challenges with staying on schedule, said.

In some cases, it’s simply because speakers are pulled in a million different directions in their own lives. In others, as the author of “The Business of Expertise” David C. Baker recently pointed out in a LinkedIn post, it’s because the speaker does not want to feel like they are being babysat and should have the freedom to work on the deck on their own deadline.

Regardless of why a speaker hasn’t turned in a presentation in advance, those final updates the night before the event don’t have to create headaches. Notified’s technology automatically detects for multiple versions of the same file, and the company’s dedicated speaker room staff member focuses on connecting with speakers to ask if there have been any updates. Rather than having the in-room AV staff help a presenter find the latest version – which inevitably winds up with a mess of USBs, personal laptops, and different presentations on different templates – Notified’s speaker ready room is designed to streamline the flow of content.

“What our team does is actually scrub the desktops to identify another file and determine which one actually matches the video content and the audio talk track,” Magyar says. “And when there is confusion over what should be used, we confirm which version is accurate. When the speaker goes into the room, the presentation is there.”

3. Your Speakers Should Be Excited, Too

Every organizer is chasing the same magical ingredient: engagement. But successful events aren’t just thinking about the audience. They’re also aiming to inspire the voices who are leading the discussion to be engaged, too. With that in mind, the speaker ready room should do more than get them “ready”; it should make each speaker want to deliver an award-worthy performance.

“We’re all a little bit competitive,” Magyar says, “and that definitely includes those who are speaking at events.”

Notified aims to harness the power of that competitive spirit with a leaderboard feature that can rank the speakers with the highest ratings to help spur better performances from everyone in the program.

“When we talk about creating meaningful experiences at our events, it’s not just about the attendees,” Magyar says. “We also have to think about what this feels like for our speakers. They’re giving us the gift of time, or maybe they’re paid. Either way, we want them to be excited, and we want them to participate.”

In the end, the more energized your speakers are, the more engaged the audience will be.

4. Attendees Want Access to Presentation Content

When speaker materials are organized and fully prepped ahead of the session, organizers can be ready to spread their educational content beyond the four walls of the breakout room. Since many attendees want to review speaker slides or get a sneak peek of sessions they missed, Magyar points out that it’s key to have these materials ready to share as quickly as possible. If files are prepared in advance, these resources can be available as soon as the speaker leaves the stage.

“A lot of organizers don’t have the bandwidth to post the presentation materials,” Magyar says. “But think about those attendees who missed the session because they were in a different session. If they can flip through a deck and find one new takeaway or best practice, then we’ve done our job, which is to enable everyone to learn.”

The right speaker ready room – with the right person in charge of it – can make all the difference in the ability to upload those PDFs to continue that educational journey. And whether those attendees download the presentation on the flight home or when they get back to their desks at work, the educational tool will serve as a valuable reminder of why they went to the event in the first place.

The Complete Content Lifecycle: Rethinking Where You Should Invest Money and Time

Speaker ready rooms aren’t the only piece of the event puzzle that needs to be reexamined. In this new era of increasing competitiveness, event planners should reconsider every step of the content lifecycle to determine the best way to allocate limited resources.

“​​I think we have to start thinking about value differently,” Magyar says. “For example, if there’s not a lot of production with lights and movement on stage, is it really worth spending thousands of dollars for a static video of a talking head? Is it worth it to have a camera operator in every room? Or might it be a better decision to simply record audio that can sync to slides without being livestreamed for a much cheaper on-demand education experience?”

These kinds of questions have never been more important to answer. While there are optimistic forecasts for the event industry to fully recover by the end of 2023, the reality is that we are a long way from that kind of rosy scenario. With current attendance levels at 65 percent of pre-pandemic crowds, organizers must scrutinize every dollar and every decision to figure out what investments will matter for the attendee experience.

“As event organizers, we have to think about the fundamental question that will drive our success: What is going to create the impact that we’re looking for?” Magyar says. “That means that instead of figuring out what technology can do for you, determine what you need it to do and find technology that fits those needs.”

For more information about Notified, schedule a demo today.

This content was created collaboratively by Notified and Skift’s branded content studio, SkiftX.