Finding the right audience for your presentation

Not for the first time, a reader has contacted me with a query (and if anyone else wants to use me as a 'public speaking agony uncle' then please feel free to do so. I'll help if I can - but it may sometimes take a while, depending upon my commitments!).

Sarah Rourke, The Audio Pod Artist, is a former BBC journalist and producer and is therefore not nervous about public speaking but wants suggestions for finding the right organisations to speak to in order to promote her podcasting, audio resources production and training business.

First of all, here are the more obvious suggestions. Let's start with business networking clubs. Now Sarah could certainly join some and get to speak at their meetings, ranging from one minute per week to say what sort of business referrals she'd like from other members at some clubs, to a six-minute presentation about her business at others. Some will cost hundreds of pounds a year in membership fees, others just the cost of a meal.

But with her BBC background and type of business, I feel that she really should be the guest speaker at business clubs. Her local library or free business paper should have details of all the business groups in her area and, if it's anything like here in Bournemouth, a very large proportion of these will be solely for businesswomen. It will then be up to her to decide whether she wants to widen her net and obtain details of similar clubs further afield.

Meetings can be at any time from breakfast to evening and from weekly to bi-monthly. Some organisations pay (very well), others may just pay her travel and for the meal but, whatever the arrangement, her presentation will have to be informative and entertaining, not simply a sales pitch, and she will need to take some interesting recordings along with her to play - using her own equipment.

A good organisation for Sarah to contact might be Businesslink. In my area, they run a number of rural business clubs and I have delivered 40-minute presentations as a guest speaker at a couple of these and obtained some coaching and other work as a result but they also run much larger training events in urban districts.

So these are some of the business clubs.There are also the service organisations whose members are business people who raise funds for charity: Rotary and their wives and partners in the Inner Wheel, 41 Clubs (ex-Round Tablers) and their female offshoot Tangent, Lions clubs, etc. They certainly all book - and pay for - speakers but the age range is pretty wide, from 40s to 90s, with many of them obviously being retired and although there are certainly older people who are very enthusiastic users of the internet (sometimes rather patronisingly described by the media as 'silver surfers'), many others have no interest in it at all.  The same, I think, applies to BPW (Business and Professional Women UK Ltd) as a market. But perhaps Rotary's 'youth arm' Rotaract (18 upwards) might be a better bet, although these clubs tend to be very small.

Here are some less obvious suggestions. Podcasting is, like blogging, a form of self-publishing - so how about writers' groups? The audio aspect could be of interest to film-making and AV (audio visual) clubs, too (despite so much of my work being in radio, I have spoken to both a film-making and an AV club - and they approached me!) The logical progression from these might be carefully selected arts festivals. And how about contacting libraries where events are often held?

Sarah offers training so she could also consider becoming a lecturer for other educators. This would probably not bring in any extra business for her company but it would give her additional income as a speaker and increase awareness. She could be a guest lecturer on a university media studies course (as I was on the MA in Radio Production at Bournemouth University) or teach adult education classes (although she would be required to study for a basic lifelong learning teacher's qualification if she doesn't already have one).

She could also find out if there are any agencies representing subject-specific speakers for training days who would take her on their books.

Public Speaking Tip #182: Sometimes the market for a particular presentation is wider than you think so don't just look for the obvious speaking opportunities; instead, consider all aspects of your topic and think who else it might possibly appeal to.