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The MC and the Owner

Recently I was part of a team that conducted two events. In one of the events, the "owners" of the event took charge of the stage. They wrote everything that described every guest, every word was thought about and rehearsed and delivered and timed. The event started on time and ended exactly on time even though there were some (as usual) mid point glitches (nobody knew them - but the owners had planned enough Plan B's in the system). The result was a fabulous stage management with the event appearing professional.

For the second event, we had invited someone else to compere. The compere, especially professional comperes are specialists. They are highly skilled, they know how to connect with audiences, how to engage and bring out the best in an audience. They have a great voice, good selection of phrases, but if you have noticed, some of them don't prepare enough because of the confidence of their skill. Which is why you notice that in company offsites, they often mis-pronounce the name of the leader or get a few things wrong. Mostly, it never gets noticed, because they do the rest of their jobs well. 

[Aside, if you ever find yourself at an event where the only job of the MC is to say "put your hands together", "clap louder" - you know the script is empty or something is breaking apart somewhere]

But if you ever want perfect compering, ensure that the compere is an owner. Or get someone to write out the full script of everything that has to be said. Sure, you can ad-lib a few lines here and there, but if you ad-lib the entire program, rest assured your audience will have an empty feeling. And this may be ok for certain types of engagement events, but if your event is a serious event (or a team building event) where people are expected to go back with a "call to action", write that script out properly. 

Recently, for a company, we realised that they did not have a consistent recruitment story at colleges. This might seem funny, but every speaker was making whatever story they felt - with the result that there was dissonance. And we fixed it with a simple deck and a simple script - and anyone was free to ad-lib or add their story or view on top of the script. This one tweak has resulted in a greater engagement with potential candidates 

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