Part of our mission is to help everyone become a better speaker and storyteller. Berkun is a bestselling author and popular speaker on creativity, philosophy, culture, business and many other subjects.
He is the founding speaker coach for Ignite Seattle and a former MC for the event. Join us at Town Hall Seattle on February Doors open at for pre-show activities and social experiments, and the show starts at In I started the speaker coaching program here at Ignite Seattle. Before I joined the team, I was a speaker many times, including an Ignite talk on how to give good Ignite talks.
I know first hand how challenging public speaking can be, especially in our format, which requires slides that auto-advance. We do this to keep our talks exciting and fast paced, but it does add some extra challenges. This post is a behind the scenes view of what our coaches, myself, Beth Jusino and Andrew Spink, and our entire organizing team, do for our speakers. To help our speakers before they get on stage, we want an audience that feels like they are already part of something fun.
We think of the event as a show, where the MC, the organizing team and each of the speakers have a role to play. We have pre-show activities in the lobby, so when guests arrive they can get a drink and do something fun related to the show, or just chill out and observe. We try to keep the experience going all the way through to the last call at our after-party open to all attendees. From the moment we send out acceptance emails to speakers, our entire team is committed to treating speakers like stars.
We see them as the talent, and our role is to be their support team. We know that if we take the event seriously, speakers will put in the work and do a great job on our stage. We typically get 50 submissions for each event and only have 12 or fewer speaking slots.
