Speeches just another PR tool

by Paul Paquet APR

Nobody has ever left a speech complaining that it was just too darn short. Abraham Lincoln, for example, was so succinct when he gave the Gettysburg Address that he was up and down before the official photographer had time to snap his picture.

In April 1999, about 40 people at a CPRS Ottawa workshop cast themselves as Abe Lincoln's PR department and came up with a strategy to help the speech succeed. Most people think of the Gettysburg Address as a work of political poetry, but it also met the key PR requirements of any great speech:

· it was short,

· it was carefully crafted to be "on message" and

· it used language to create memorable images.

This last point is particularly important. Many speeches are crammed full of details that hardly anyone will remember 20 minutes after the speech is given. Worse still, those details often get in the way of the key messages themselves. Speeches are, after all, a visual medium. The longer a speech goes, the harder it is to keep an audience engaged. Long lists of numbers, or twisted sentence structures, or tangential information all encourage an audience to drift away.

This being said, many of us work for clients who do not appreciate good PR strategy or effective writing techniques. They want every nuance, every number and &ldots; oh yes &ldots; 60 minutes of it, please. You can either fight, scream and generally make life miserable, or you can use guile.

I prefer guile. When a speech is going off the rails, I try to assert some control over the re-editing. Often, I can get at the substance of what people want, without necessarily using somebody's specific words.

For example, say the client wants to add, "The new program, for which $1,885,000 has been set aside in fiscal 1999/00, is estimated to attract 411,000 new participants." You can already hear the audience snoozing. But change this to "We have set aside nearly two million dollars for the new program next year, and we expect more than 400,000 new participants." It's the same idea, expressed in a format that suits the spoken word.

Good writing, then, is only half the battle. Most of us are used to speaking forums as opportunities that come to us, unbidden. Sometimes they can even seem a nuisance. As such, we forget that the same PR rules should apply to speeches that apply to anything else, namely the dreaded RACE formula. If you research your situation and audience, analyze the results, communicate well and evaluate for success, you're on the way to preparing speeches that make a real difference!

Cornerstone is a writing and editing firm that uses marketing and PR principles to create "words you can build your business on."

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