Speak at your event? Two little questions before we discuss further.

What’s your diversity policy, and are you paying any of the speakers?

I’ve been asking these two questions for any requests for events, webinars and speaking for Leapers for the past few months.

Why?

1. Because any event without a diversity policy or no time spent thinking about how they’d approach diversity of speakers doesn’t fly. Not sure where to start? https://www.getdice.co.uk/dicecharter

2. If you’re paying one speaker, you should be paying them all. Time is valuable, you’re asking someone to create content, and speak, because you believe their experience is valuable. You should pay for this. Especially when your speakers are self-employed.

3. If you’re not able to pay, but you’re a commercial organisation, why are you not willing to pay for an event which is benefiting you? If your response is “it benefits our members, not us”, that is part of your value proposition, so it does benefit you.

4. If you’re not able to pay, but you are charging for tickets to ‘cover costs’, why are speakers not part of your costs? Why are you more willing to pay for a venue than people’s time? What’s more valuable? A building, or content?

5. If you’re not able to pay but are offering exposure and promotion, for the Leapers model, unfortunately, we run at a heavy loss, and more exposure directly means more costs, so we’re losing money three times … creating content for you, time to present the content, and increased people who use our platform subsequently. You can create exposure and promotion for us by signposting to our community — we aren’t looking for promotional opportunities, you came to us.

6. Yes, I know it’s a good way of helping more people find out about us, and it’s a great opportunity to tell people how to get support and raise awareness, and yes, I would love to be able to do it for free. I do, already, every day, for individuals.

If you genuinely believe in what Leapers does, want to support the future of self-employment or positive mental health, don’t be part of the problem.

Don’t ask for people to work for free. Ever.
They might offer to do it for free, and that’s fine.
But don’t ask for free work.

(ps. I have a different set of rules for community organisations, not-for-profits and partners).