Before

1. Research, research, RESEARCH!!

Do everything you can to research the upcoming speaker. Great sources include: previous podcasts, youtube videos, TED talks, and speaking events. Often speakers will already have a short list of 2-3 videos they can send over for this. Learn how they talk, what questions they love to answer, and what they light up about.

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During

1. Kick-off the event.

Thank everyone for being there. Play some lo-fi music in the beginning (you can “screenshare” audio in zoom) as people trickle in to set the tone for the call.

Bonus: Highlight some great activity in the community! You can create a quick slide deck with screenshots from the community thanking specific members for being helpful and solving problems for others.

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2. Hit record!

This is going to turn into great content for your members & can sliced up into smaller educational videos if you ever need them. At Heartbeat, we like to use the Zoom-to-Vimeo integration to automatically move Zoom cloud recordings to Vimeo.

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3. Introduce the speaker.

Hype them up a TON! You want them to be be able to deliver their best to your community members — use your position as the leader of the community to give them more confidence as you kick off!

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4. Ask open questions that prompt stories.

Examples of great open questions:

• Tell me the story behind
• Walk us through X…
• What was your process for figuring out ABC?

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5. Zone in on emotions.

Emotions tend to create the most memorable moments in a speaker call. They help the audience empathize with the speaker and this brings speakers off the pedestal in a genuine & human way. Great questions to ask include:

• How did you feel during X?
• What was going through your head during Y?

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6. Leave room for the community to ask questions.

Ideally leave 20 min during a full 1 hr call. Use chat to queue up questions & you can choose the ones you want the speaker to answer. That way, if there are any questions that aren’t a good use of the speaker’s time, you can use your moderating power to skip them.

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7. In the last 10 minutes, solidify the learnings in chat.

“Can everyone drop one this in the chat that they learned or found insightful during this call?”

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8. Encourage people submit requests for the next Expert.

Paste the link to the suggestion form into the chat so people can easily add entries for the next speaker.

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After

1. Add content to the docs section.

Embed the recording into “Monthly Expert” doc for that month using “/embed”. If you’ve already used the first “Monthly Expert” doc, you can add it to another one in admin drafts or ‘duplicate’ your previous doc. Make sure to update the highlight section so people know what to expect if they watch the recording. This also helps to surface the document more easily in Heartbeat’s search!

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2. Post a recap thread.

This is for everyone that missed the event. Include a link to the doc you’ve just created with the recording using the “$” notation in Heartbeat threads. You want to create the habit for members to regularly check docs for any content/events they missed. At first you’ll be the one driving this traffic, but after a couple months of these types of posts, it’s going to become second nature for members.

Bonus: Add a “thank you” thread where members can drop in thank-you notes, learnings, and what they got out of the speaker call. Screenshot the thread & send it over to the Expert after 2-3 days as another “thank you” for leading the call within the community!

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