Are Famous Speakers Worth The Investment?
We have reached the point where celebrity speakers are akin to team sports specialists like "closers" in baseball. Eight innings of the game are finished. Now they're brought in to face those last three batters. At the end of the season, they'll be demanding a big payday. The difference is that with speakers, payday is at the end of the night.
There's so much money in this now that providing celebrity speakers for various kinds of gathering has become a kind of business unto itself. Visit their sites and they'll have photos and mini-biographies of dozens of them. Generally, the speakers will be arranged by type for your convenience.
The fees might surprise you. A cast member from a popular TV series could cost $10,000 to $15,000. That price might get you a veteran tight end so long as he's not All-Pro, or an astronaut. An astronaut who was an alcoholic till he got religion, however, might run $30,000. Few things add to one's value as a celebrity speaker like overcoming an addiction. People make money merely from being relatives of people who overcame addiction, so long as they're somewhat famous.
Your organization might need to spend between $30,000 and $50,000 for a famous industrialist, or for the star of an old, long-syndicated iconic TV series. At the high end of the price scale comes a certain ex-President of the United States, with a fee of $500,000 or more to grace your event and reminisce.
One must wonder whether it's worth such expense. This is easier o determine if the event is expected to turn a profit. Having spent $20,000 on the daughter of a Vice Presidential candidate, your fundraiser will know at the end of the night whether it yielded $20,000 more than it might otherwise have expected.
There are numerous situations like this, where the gathering itself is for-profit. If the event is a baseball card convention, you can measure whether it profited you to pay a six figures to a Hall of Famer, when you might have gotten the outfielder who led the local ball club in hitting for five figures. It becomes difficult to measure if there isn't a purpose to the gathering that can be measured in dollars and cents, because it's in dollars and cents that you'll be paying your speaker.
A college or university graduation, for example, always features a celebrity speech. One of the staples of these speeches is that in six months no one will remember the speech about to be given. Maybe it's time to takes that to heart, relieve the students of some small amount of their debt, and simply have a successful alumnus from years gone by give the speech. It might in fact mean more to the students.
A conference of businessmen might reconsider the expensive pharmaceuticals CEO whose face graces magazine covers. The mid-level R & D scientist who led the team that designed the breakthrough vaccine might be more inspirational even if he doesn't speak as well. The time might have come to cut down on costs by broadening the field of celebrity speakers.
There's so much money in this now that providing celebrity speakers for various kinds of gathering has become a kind of business unto itself. Visit their sites and they'll have photos and mini-biographies of dozens of them. Generally, the speakers will be arranged by type for your convenience.
The fees might surprise you. A cast member from a popular TV series could cost $10,000 to $15,000. That price might get you a veteran tight end so long as he's not All-Pro, or an astronaut. An astronaut who was an alcoholic till he got religion, however, might run $30,000. Few things add to one's value as a celebrity speaker like overcoming an addiction. People make money merely from being relatives of people who overcame addiction, so long as they're somewhat famous.
Your organization might need to spend between $30,000 and $50,000 for a famous industrialist, or for the star of an old, long-syndicated iconic TV series. At the high end of the price scale comes a certain ex-President of the United States, with a fee of $500,000 or more to grace your event and reminisce.
One must wonder whether it's worth such expense. This is easier o determine if the event is expected to turn a profit. Having spent $20,000 on the daughter of a Vice Presidential candidate, your fundraiser will know at the end of the night whether it yielded $20,000 more than it might otherwise have expected.
There are numerous situations like this, where the gathering itself is for-profit. If the event is a baseball card convention, you can measure whether it profited you to pay a six figures to a Hall of Famer, when you might have gotten the outfielder who led the local ball club in hitting for five figures. It becomes difficult to measure if there isn't a purpose to the gathering that can be measured in dollars and cents, because it's in dollars and cents that you'll be paying your speaker.
A college or university graduation, for example, always features a celebrity speech. One of the staples of these speeches is that in six months no one will remember the speech about to be given. Maybe it's time to takes that to heart, relieve the students of some small amount of their debt, and simply have a successful alumnus from years gone by give the speech. It might in fact mean more to the students.
A conference of businessmen might reconsider the expensive pharmaceuticals CEO whose face graces magazine covers. The mid-level R & D scientist who led the team that designed the breakthrough vaccine might be more inspirational even if he doesn't speak as well. The time might have come to cut down on costs by broadening the field of celebrity speakers.
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