Meeting Technology
Spring 2010

Wikis for speaker management

Carla Pendergraft, CMP is Director of Sales & Internet Development for the Waco CVB.  She also has a freelance web design, consulting, and meeting business called Carla Pendergraft Associates.

THERE IS A FREE TOOL available for meeting planners that can be incredibly useful in managing your speakers. It’s called a wiki and it can make your job easier once you master it.

What is a wiki? It’s a free webpage that you can set up without programming skills. The term wiki comes from the Hawaiian phrase for fast –“wiki wiki.”

Setting up a wiki is relatively straightforward. You create an account, choose a name and a theme, and create a separate page in the wiki for each speaker. Once it’s ready, you’ll invite the speaker to upload his/her presentation to the page. You’ll also include the speaker’s biography, photo, requested A/V equipment, and other important information relative to that speaker. Visualize having all of your speaker information summarized on this website for a single event! Since wikis are free, you can set up a separate wiki for each event you manage.

There are several advantages to using a wiki for speaker management. Have you ever had speakers cover the same material by mistake? Putting everything on a wiki has the benefit of allowing speakers to view each others’ presentations in advance to avoid duplication of content. It will also be very clear which speakers have not provided their materials to you.

Another advantage is that you can use this wiki to communicate details to the speakers that many of them inevitably forget. While it doesn’t take the place of personal emails with details on their travel arrangements, duplicating that information on the wiki allows the speaker to consult the page when emails are lost or forgotten. The wiki is available at anytime there is an internet connection.

So where’s the catch? If you use the free version of a wiki, ads will appear. If these are a problem, you can pay $5 a month to make them disappear.

Should you allow your meeting attendees to view the speaker wiki in advance? It’s a good question. Many planners will choose to keep this information under wraps so that potential attendees don’t simply download the information in lieu of attending. However, there is a good argument for sharing it with attendees, allowing them to make more informed choices about which sessions are most important for them to attend.

Getting started is easy. There are many free wiki tools out there for you to try. Start out by going to www.wikispaces.com. Create an account, choose a name for the wiki, a theme, and begin creating those speaker pages. Invite your speakers to “join” the wiki and tell them what you want.

Start with the speaker management wiki and allow yourself some time to master the tool. You’ll find it’s intuitive, easy to use, and your speakers will love it.

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