Being a speaker, one of my primary markets is the association management world, as they often hire speaker for their meetings. As I’ve mentioned previously, there is this guy named Jeff Hurt who works in that world and blogs about it extensively, so I learn a lot reading his blog.
Anyway, I was reading this one blog post of his the other day . . . and it was all about holding speakers to minimum standards of performance and tying speaker fees to audience evaluations. (see his point#6) I confess, when I read things like that it just amazes me. Given the amount of competition that exists out there in this business I just don’t get how quality can be an issue. I come from a world of professional orchestral music, and this whole idea of getting paid for anything less than a five-star knock-'em-dead performances just downright foreign to me. But I guess it goes on.
Anyway, when Jeff mentioned those “audience evaluations,” I remembered that one of my past association meeting clients had given me a stack of audience evaluation sheets from my presentations. When they handed them to me, they were kind of chuckling and said, “we thought you would get a kick out of these.”
Well, there’s always a little bit of trepidation when you open up the report card from a bunch of strangers, but I was awfully glad to discover that I had gotten rated as “great” by 58 of the 59 people who had bothered to fill out the form. (I can think we can treat the one person who said I was just “good” as a statistical outlier.
So anyway, for all you association managers out there who are serious about bringing in a five star performer, here is the stack of evaluations of one of my appearances, verbatim, no changes, no edits, as is. I sometimes think I should reorder them because some of the best comments are towards the end of the pile. But well, that’s for another day.
–jl
