After Dinner Speaker Strengths
Wednesday, July 28th, 2010An after dinner speaker with plenty of experienced will be highly skilled in his or her art. Their previous experience will always shine through when their presentation is compared to that of a newly emerging after dinner speaker. This is because inexperienced speakers may not have finely tuned all the skills which are so vital to great presentations.
Because the type of message an after dinner speaker might be trying to get across can vary so widely from one event to another, it is obviously important that he or she has strong communication skills. However, humour is also vital if the speaker is to prevent boredom amongst audience members. Because the after dinner speaker is expected to entertain the audience during what is a natural lull in proceedings, they must be humorous to prevent any after dinner lull. Aside from humour, brevity is another string to the after dinner speaker’s bow. Conveying messages without spending hours doing it always makes for a good speaker.
Furthermore, good, solid knowledge is very important for an after dinner speaker. They must have a good grounding in their subject matter or else the audience is unlikely to take them seriously and will probably disregard their message. In this regard, the person responsible for hiring the after dinner speaker has a role to play. Hiring a former Big Brother housemate to speak at a conference on sales techniques would obviously be foolish. Still, even a knowledgeable speaker will need to be given some information about the company and the audience.
Another major skill that any good after dinner speaker will be able to demonstrate is their ability to understand an audience and its needs. Of course, this does not mean that audiences should neglect to provide background information. Failure to consider the specific needs and position of an audience has caused many an after dinner speaker to put their foot in it, with inappropriate jokes proving common.