Conference Speaker Brief: What to Send, What to Ask For and When

TL;DR

• A conference speaker brief says who is in the room, what the session has to do, how long they have, and what the stage will hand them.
• Audience and outcome go first. Logistics without context gets you a stock talk.
• Ask for the deck, title, biography, photograph and access needs, each with its own date.
• Set the slide deadline a fortnight out with a technical reason, or it will not be met.
• Plan for the speaker who sends nothing. Most are not difficult, just busy.

A conference speaker brief is the most useful document an organiser writes, and most are sent too late and contain the wrong things. I have hosted more than 800 events, and the pattern holds: the sessions that land were briefed properly, and the ones that sprawl were briefed in a chain of forwarded emails.

This is the organiser’s side. What goes in the document, what you ask for back, when, how to brief somebody who has given the same talk fifty times, and what to do when it is ignored.

What is a conference speaker brief?

A conference speaker brief is one written document that tells a speaker everything they need to prepare the right talk for your room. It is not a confirmation email and it is not the contract.

It is three things stapled together: context (who is listening and why), constraints (how long, what format, what questions) and logistics (where, when, what to send). Most briefs are all logistics.

Professional bodies publish theirs. The British Thoracic Society’s briefing notes for its 2021 Summer Meeting run to three pages: upload deadlines, file naming, slide format, rehearsal calls and who to email.

What should a conference speaker brief contain?

A conference speaker brief should contain nine things, in this order. Order matters, because speakers read the top and skim the rest.

1. The audience. Numbers, roles, seniority, what they know and what they are tired of hearing.
2. The outcome. One sentence: after this session, delegates should think, feel or do something.
3. Where the session sits. What runs before and after. Cold room, fed room, or flagging room.
4. The slot. Exact start and finish, and whether questions sit inside that time.
5. The format. Talk, talk with Q&A, fireside or panel, and who runs the questions.
6. The stage. Microphone, screen ratio, clicker, confidence monitor, whose laptop.
7. What to send and by when. Each with its own date.
8. Access and recording. Captioning, slide legibility, whether it is filmed and how it is used.
9. Who to contact. One named person, with a phone number for the day.

Be blunt about timings. The British Mass Spectrometry Society tells speakers their slots include questions and that chairs enforce those time limits strictly. A speaker who knows that in week one plans a different talk.

A conference speaker brief template you can copy

Copy this skeleton. One page if you can, two at most.

• Event, date, venue, session. Title, room, start and finish.
• Your audience. Three lines: who, how many, what they already know.
• What this session needs to do. One sentence, written by you.
• Your slot. “25 minutes of talk, 10 of questions run by the host, hard stop at 11:15.”
• The room and the kit. Screen ratio, microphone, clicker, whose laptop.
• Questions. How they are collected and who chooses them.
• What we need from you. A dated list.
• Access. What the event provides, and what you need to provide it.
• Recording. Whether it is filmed, where it appears, how long it stays up.
• Contacts. Name, email, mobile number for the day.

Keep the agenda template and the brief consistent. If the agenda says 25 minutes and the brief says 30, the speaker believes whichever suits them.

What should you ask the speaker for in return?

Ask for six things, and give each its own deadline rather than one date at the end.

That last row matters. Under UK guidance on the first owner of copyright, when you commission a work the creator owns it unless you agree otherwise in writing. Settle recording rights before the camera is hired.

Access requests cannot wait either. The W3C tells organisers to ask speakers about their accessibility requirements and to give captioners and interpreters material in advance, with acronyms and names explained. The duty to make reasonable adjustments sits in the Equality Act 2010. It is not something you arrange on the morning.

When should the speaker brief deadline be?

Set the slide deadline about two weeks out, and send the brief itself six to eight weeks out. Real conferences land there. The British Thoracic Society required all content by 23:59 a fortnight ahead of its June meeting, and the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy’s presenter guidelines set a midday deadline nineteen days before the 2024 conference.

Two weeks is not arbitrary. It gives you time to open every file, check fonts, find the video that does not play, and build a backup. Both events ran presentations from the production team’s machines, which only works if files arrive early.

A deadline needs a reason attached, because work expands to fill the time available. People are bad at this: in one study of the planning fallacy, students estimated their theses would take 33.9 days and actually took 55.5. Your speaker is not lying when they say the deck is nearly done.

So write “uploaded by midday on Friday 14th, because files are loaded and tested on the Monday”, not “a couple of weeks before, ideally”.

How do you brief a speaker who has given the talk fifty times?

Brief them on the room, not the content. Somebody with a polished talk does not need help structuring it and will quietly ignore any attempt. What they cannot know is your audience.

Give them three things only you have:

• Three specifics. A phrase your sector uses, a change that has just hit your people, a result from this year. Veterans are good at threading new material through an existing structure.
• One thing to leave out. Usually the bit that will not land, or the story another speaker is already telling.
• The hand-off. What the previous session covered, so the talk connects rather than restarts.

The curse of knowledge describes how well-informed people cannot imagine not knowing a thing. In Elizabeth Newton’s 1990 experiment, people tapping out famous songs badly overestimated how many listeners would recognise the tune. A speaker on their fiftieth delivery is tapping.

A fifteen-minute call two weeks out beats any document. Ask how they plan to open, and you learn at once whether they read what you sent.

What do you do when the brief is ignored?

Assume busyness, not rudeness, and escalate on a schedule you set in advance. Chasing works when it is calm and specific.

• At the deadline. A short email naming the one thing missing and the new date.
• Two days after. Phone. Email has failed, and the call usually takes four minutes.
• One week out. Say what happens if nothing arrives: a title-only slide, or no visuals.
• The day before. Stop chasing and prepare for no deck. Brief the host, load a holding slide, keep the timings.

Hold the line on timings. An overrun takes its minutes from somebody else’s slot, and from the breaks that let delegates hold attention through the afternoon.

The parts of the brief the host carries

Some of the brief never reaches the speaker, because it is the host’s job. Pronunciation belongs in the brief; the wording of the introduction belongs to the host, and the method is in the guide on how to introduce a speaker.

The host also owns the questions and the recovery when something slips, so the run of show and the brief should be read together. Spotting drift early is its own skill, covered in reading the room.

One line belongs in every brief: slides are read from the back of a hall. The Chartered Society of Physiotherapy asks for sans serif titles at a minimum of 32 point and body text at 24. Cabinet Office guidance on accessible formats, updated 17 June 2026, suggests 14 point where the audience includes people with sight loss, and RNIB estimates one in five people in the UK will live with sight loss in their lifetime. Give the screen ratio too: 16:9 widescreen is the default for new PowerPoint files, but older decks are not.

Engagement starts in the brief. If questions will come from phones rather than from the three confident people near the front, say so. I use RoomReader, my own live Q&A software, for exactly that.

If you want one person to write the briefs, run the room and handle every hand-over, send the agenda or check availability at hello@conferencehost.uk.