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  • 1.  Staff to Speaker Ratios

    User Group Member
    Posted 05-25-2022 16:43
    Hi Cvent BrainTrust!

    When planning an event do you think through the number of staff needed to suport number of speakers?
    Our experience has shown that events staff spend a big chunk of time on speaker-related tasks -- getting headshots, bios, powerpoints, hotels, invoicing, adding co-authors and more! -- our speakers are community members and often require accompaniment and support. So we are trying to figure out how many speakers our two person event team can reasonably support for a three day conference -- 50? 75? 100? -- these are the same two folks responsible for all event set-up and management etc.

    Thanks for your benchmarks and rules of thumb!
    Elissa
    #Flex-Creating/ManagingEvents

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    Elissa Adair
    Program Evaluator
    Lines for LifeUnited States
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  • 2.  RE: Staff to Speaker Ratios
    Best Answer

    Posted 05-26-2022 08:20
    We don't think of ours in quite those terms - our effort is based more wholistically for all event related efforts. We have 2 full-time people and some admin support here and there as well as onsite staff. We have a mobile app that helps some in this regard, and often our speakers are similar across events, which helps since we store all bios and headshots on a central drive so we can pull them again for later events. We send a survey to all speakers to collect information on bio, headshot, logistics such as mic preference, technology needs, etc. but there is always a lot of follow up needed for sure. Our team works on multiple events at one time so it is tough to say but usually each of those events has around 40-50 speakers and it is challenging but not too overwhelming. Hope that helps.

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    Jennifer Blumig
    Owner
    EventfullyyourzUnited States
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  • 3.  RE: Staff to Speaker Ratios

    User Group Member
    Posted 05-31-2022 16:10
    Thank you sooo much! This is super helpful! I love the idea of using a survey to gather additional speaker information that you can't collect in the abstract portal! That works! Any other helpful hints?

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    Elissa Adair
    Program Evaluator
    Lines for LifeUnited States
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