Talking topics

Our last blog gave you an idea about how we found our first Forever Surrey live speaker, but how did we decide what he was going to talk about?

We approached Professor Alex Warleigh-Lack both for his abilities as a lecturer and the fortunate timing of Surrey’s Politics Month. With Alex on board, our next task was selecting a topic that ticked a number of boxes, including:

Relevance
Interest
Likelihood to generate questions
Appeal to a diverse audience
Professional value

We quickly dismissed the idea of a general discussion about politics at Surrey as being too broad an issue for an audience of MBA alumni. Likewise, focusing on macro political issues or party politics might be too niche for non-politics graduates.

Following an interesting discussion with Alex, we moved onto the idea of looking at the Euro crisis. Europe’s economy has affected all of us in one way or another and MBA graduates are quite likely to have a professional interest in the state of the continent’s finances.

The stumbling block was where to pitch the talk. Too low and it would hold little value; too high and it would go over the heads of the audience.

Our solution has been to ask every registrant to fill in a survey explaining their knowledge of the EU and the Euro crisis and to suggest any areas they are particularly interested in hearing about. Alex will use the results to shape his speech so that it appeals directly to as many of the audience as possible.

Our registration period is now open, so we’re looking forward to finding out how this approach has worked. We will, of course, share the results with you.

About these ads