Get Mileage from Your Speech

Get Mileage from Your Speech

When you give a speech, you've likely put in weeks of prep work. You've written an outline, decided which stories and illustrations to include, rehearsed your stage presence and speech delivery, and learned about your audience.

It makes sense to utilize that work beyond just the speech.

I'm all about getting as much mileage as possible from the work we do. Since you'll be pouring many hours into your speech, find ways to reuse and repurpose your work. I've detailed a few ideas for you here.

Enlist a friend to take hundreds of photos of you during the speech. Yes, hundreds. You'll need that many because most of them will end up being unusable. Photographing someone whose mouth and body are in motion is not an easy task. Once you have a few photos that turn out well, though, you can use them for other projects.

Those photos can easily be turned into social media quote cards. Use Canva or some other software to add your quotes to the photo using your font of choice. Your speech is full of quotes you can use. Keep them short- just a few sentences- and add them to the photos.

Those photos from your speech can also be used as action shots on your website, email newsletters, or blog posts. Edit them to appropriate size, and post them wherever you can. 

Take it one step further and ask that same friend to videotape portions of your speech. Once you're home, you can edit those videos into very short clips to post on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. They can also be added to your website or used in promo reels.

If you write a post-speech blog, use those photos and videos in that blog. The blog topic can be similar to your speech topic so that you can reuse your speech outline. That way you're getting even more mileage out of your work.

You could also easily run an online workshop with the same topic as your speech. You've already researched and written an outline, so with a few tweaks you could easily be workshop-ready. 

There are countless ways to reuse and repurpose your work from your speech. Give it some thought, brainstorm, and ask colleagues for ideas. That way you can get the most mileage possible from the work you've done.

 

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