“How to Save Money on Youth Speakers: Insider Tips and Strategies”

[00:00:05] Jake White: What’s up and welcome to another episode of Party Talk, where we empower leaders in youth job prevention. Today, I want to share some secrets on how you can save money on speakers. That’s right, I am a speaker telling you how to save money on speakers. What you need to know about saving money on speakers is it’s not that they’re going to cut their prices for you for no difference. Or for no reason. What you’re going to offer is value. So I’m going to get you inside the mind of a youth speaker, a drug prevention speaker, someone who covers substance use and misuse because we’re all on a mission to save lives. And if someone is a speaker, and they’re doing this thing, right, they’re viewing you as a partner. And together, you can make an impact that none of us can do alone. So without further ado, I want to dive into this episode, and share some tools and strategies and tips on how you can either get more funding for speakers, or save money on speakers so that you can have more throughout the year, or you can save that money for different programming for your students. So let’s dive right in. To start out, I just need to add a little disclaimer which is, “This won’t always work, but you don’t know if you don’t ask.” So there are tips that I’m going to give you right now it just something to try. And depending on the person you’re working with, you might be able to add value to their business with one of these strategies and therefore have a little bit of negotiation power or things they could justify lowering their price because you’re going to actually give them more business. And in my view, that is the only reason why you should be asking someone to lower their fee is if you can help them realize that when you are asking the speaker to negotiate. Here is what’s gonna be going on in their mind and here’s what to take into account.

Number one, they’re not thinking, I’m coming for a speaking engagement, realize they’re thinking, I’m taking three days away from home to go impact a community. So I have a day of travel, I have the day of work, and I have a day of travel home. On top of that, I’m working with you to make sure the event is accessible as possible, and you’re using me to the best of my abilities. So maybe I’m facilitating games and activities and icebreakers, maybe I’m seeing, maybe I’m doing staff professional development, or talking with your leaders. But all these things, I want to make sure that we use our time to the best so you get the most impact out of our time together. So there’s maybe some prep things. On top of that, I’m going to be practicing our content, maybe 10-50 hours before the event as well, to make sure that you get the best product possible. Apart from that, you’re realize you’re actually paying for the 10+ years, that person has been developing their craft, and becoming the person who could step on a stage and engage an audience of hundreds of people. Keep them involved, make it a fun experience, and impart their education and call to action to create a certain outcome. So realize that that’s what’s going into it. So when you start, make sure you let them know that you understand all the things that they’re doing. And when you asked for a negotiation or lowering of price, it’s because you’re about to save them money, or make them more money and make them more impact. Because here’s the deal, being a speaker, the hardest or the most time consuming part is actually finding new people to work with. Because you’re running mostly a marketing company to let people know you exist. And then you live for these moments where you actually get to show up in a community, impact an audience and change lives. If you can give people the opportunity to change lives more of their time, and spend less time marketing, that’s what’s valuable to them. So let’s get started with strategy number one, “Show them off”.

Strategy # 01 (Show them off):

This means that you are going to bring potential clients that could hire this person to their speaking engagement. So if you’re a school counselor, or principal or a prevention specialist, or someone who’s in a coalition, and you’re bringing in a speaker, if you know other people in those fields, invite them to the speaking engagement, introduce them to the speaker. So if you can let them know you’re going to do that, that could be grounds to say, are you willing to you know, help me out with a little bit of a discount? Ask them what is that worth to you if I could bring you maybe five people that could book you? What would that be worth to you? That’s enough to ask what you can do for me in return.

Strategy # 02 (Split the line items):

What I mean by this is that your budget is probably broken up into categories. Maybe you have budget for events, for speakers, for educational materials for promotion items. And if your speaker has more than one offering, what you could do is say, Hey, listen, I can’t afford your $5,000 speaking fee with my current budget and what’s left, but maybe I have 3000 that’s available for from speaking. And then I have 2000 that’s available for educational materials. So can you buy $2,000 worth of books, courses, programs, promotional materials from the speaker so that they still get their fee, they still get their profit, and so they can feed their family but you’ve got it from two different areas? Most speakers I know would welcome a deal like that. Because either way, they’re doing the same amount of work. But the course that they created, now you’re leveraging it to get more out of it, and your audience is getting more too. So it’s a win-win, you both get what you want. The third one isn’t so much of a strategy, as it is just being organized. Because it can save you money by being organized.

Strategy # 03 (Book someone early):

The fact is if you booked someone late, you’re going to leave money on the table because the price is going to go up because travel costs go up. Whenever you buy last minute flights, car rentals, hotels, the price is higher. So I know for me is, I do mine is all inclusive pricing, meaning I charge you this much and then I pay for all my own travel expenses. But if you book within two months of the engagement, I automatically know I’m going to be paying more for travel. So I actually have to compensate for that cost. So I have to charge more. So my all inclusive fee is higher if you book within two months. Many speakers have things like this going on oh or they might pass the travel costs on to you. Because you booked on pretty late. And now the higher price has to be paid. So easy way to save money is to let your speaker know early that you’re interested in them. See if they can hold the date for you while you get your funding set, and then booked them early. So they can get the best price on travel and pass those savings on to you or you can keep the price as what they quoted you.

Strategy # 04 (Collaborate):

And this is when you can split the cost between multiple organizations. And if you’re at a school, this could mean that there are clubs with budget, different departments with budget, maybe your school has some and your school district has some funds. Maybe there’s a Health and Human Services Department that is in your county, and they have budgets set aside for things like this too. So you can look at different organizations to partner up with and see if they have similarities in their mission, or they have funds set aside. Because oftentimes, you can find more than one people that want to bring in this speaker and then you can both benefit from the message, the outcomes and from pushing your budgets together so you can each spend less. That tactic actually works really great if you’re on a college campus too, because there are hundreds of different clubs and departments on campus. And they all share resources, or they all have set aside resources, but they usually share a mission or have some commonalities between them.

Strategy # 05 (To save money on your speaker is to press record):

And here’s why this works is because speakers have to pay for marketing materials to be built. Which means like there might be paying graphic designers, they might be paying photographers and videographers. So if you have access to someone with those skills, then you might be able to say, “Friend, can you come record this presentation and get some footage for the speaker that’s coming in?” They might think that’s actually really cool. And that’s a cool opportunity for them. And then in return, you can tell the speaker, hey, how much would you usually pay for a videographer? That’s, you know, recording your presentation to help out with your next demo video or some promotional materials? If I were to give you that, how much would that be worth? Would you be able to work with me on the price a little bit?

Strategy # 06 (Catch some headlines):

This is where you can help get publicity for your incoming speaker. Oftentimes, we’re looking for press opportunities, looking for ways to showcase our expertise and our message to people. So it’s just like anyone else any business that gets promotion through advertisement or promotion is oftentimes news and media outlets are like free promotion for us. So you have a connection with someone from the local media, maybe even national media or a magazine or podcast, whatever it might be anyone you could introduce them to expand their message. This could be worth something to the speaker. I love this seventh one, because it’s the bucket list.

Strategy # 07 (Bucket List Items):

This is when if you have some information about your incoming speaker and trainer, and what they’re into, and you might have an opportunity to help them cross off some of their bucket list items. We worked with some schools down in the Florida Keys, and normally wouldn’t get the vacation there. But because the schools were in that area, they basically said, we can put you up in a resort, you can bring your families and stay for a week and have this cool experience. And because of that, they were able to negotiate our fee a little bit lower because then we didn’t have to pay for a family vacation that year. And that’s worth a lot to us because we really value that time with our families and getting out of town and trying new stuff. So these are all different areas that if you can figure out what your speaker is into what they like, what their hobbies are, you might have a race in town, or an event in town, or somebody that they can meet. That’s really, really valuable, and it helps them check off new things on their bucket list.

Strategy # 08 (To get a sponsor or a donor):

And I know this isn’t really lowering the price of a speaker per se, but it is helping you afford them without your budget. So it’s super helpful. And just like you see all these strategies are really about bringing value. So it works the same way because you’re still offering the full value of the speaker just by bringing in funds from outside sources. So if you have a local business that’s passionate about your topic, maybe about youth about drug prevention, Red Ribbon Week, maybe they have a personal connection or A story to this topic, and they’re willing to support you. There might be local organizations like rotary or Kiwanis or Elks clubs that they love giving to local things. Maybe you have a community foundation that wants to support the youth in the schools. Whatever that is, letting them know what you’re doing. So they can sponsor or donate to your cause to bring that speaker in that can do the same thing as well.

Strategy # 9 (Grant Funding):

Some of you will cringe at this, because that sometimes grants come with a lot of reporting and data and extra work. Sometimes they’re so defined that they won’t allow you to do certain things. But depending on the program and the grant, it could just be that somebody wants to give to a certain cause. And it could come with no strings attached. So usually, you can look up through your local municipality, or different county organizations or foundations in your area, find out which grants are available, because it could align to the great work that you’re doing, and the way that you partner up with this speaker that’s going to be coming to your town.

There you have it. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Party Talk podcast where we empower leaders in youth drug prevention. As always, if you enjoy this content, if you appreciate the podcast, the way to say thank you is to leave us a review and to share with the venues and a friend who’s in the prevention field or who works with youth, because that helps more people see this, gets more eyes on our program and there’s more students that get their lives changed. So thank you for the work that you’re doing in your community. We’ll talk to you soon.