As a freelance service designer, who runs their own business, public speaking is both a revenue stream and a marketing channel for me. I’ve been doing it fairly consistently now for the last two years and I wanted to be open and honest about my approach to charging. I also wanted to share a few things I’d like to see change in the industry to ensure speakers are appropriately compensated for their time and experience.
Asking for a fee for giving a talk is not something that came easily to me straight away. It’s definitely a muscle I needed to build and get comfortable using. I’ve spoken for free when I shouldn’t have, I’ve had awkward negotiations and I’ve been ghosted after asking to be paid.
Having said all this, I feel like I’ve got to the point now where I have a few things I do that work for me.
I have set fees for existing talks
Having a set fee for a talk makes it much easier to open the negotiation because you can put a figure forward that you are confident in. I have two existing talks, one I deliver in collaboration and the other solo. My set fee for my solo, ‘Let’s talk about sex’ talk is £300 for up to an hour delivered remotely. Lee and I charge £400 between us for our Designing inclusive healthcare services talk. I raise these fees every year.I’m happy to negotiate
Getting something is better than nothing. I appreciate the budget is not always there. Sometimes procurement can make it difficult to make these small one off payments. I appreciate when organisers look for ways around these barriers though. I once did an talk for an agency who couldn’t pay me so they asked what voucher I would like. I chose John Lewis and bought myself a new handbag.I weigh up other benefits beyond money
I don’t subscribe to the ‘you should do it for the exposure’ mentality - especially for freelancers who charge for their time. But sometimes there are other benefits. Perhaps the audience is in a sector you really want to work with or occasionally conferences offer other ‘perks’. I once got some free speaker training which was really helpful.I rarely design new talks
Delivering the same talks again and again is really helping my public speaking skills. They are also both covering a topic I’m really passionate about. Developing new talks takes a lot of time. I have only done this once in the last two years and that was when I was given free reign to talk about whatever I wanted. I designed a talk around something I was interested in discussing - designing your own career.I consider the audience
This is especially important for the subject matter I speak about a lot - designing for gender inclusion. I’ve come to realise I feel much more comfortable speaking to people within my own industry. It’s an industry I’ve been part of for over 10 years and have always felt welcome and at home within. I do recognise the need to reach beyond ‘the bubble’ though, again, especially for my subject matter. Unfortunately I’ve had some negative experiences with audiences outside my industry and that’s made me nervous about doing this.
The enduring question on everyone’s minds though is ‘when is it ok to speak for free’?
This is definitely a question I continue to wrestle with and I’ve certainly made some mistakes in this space. My current thinking is that I will speak for free if:
The event is a community event and the tickets are free
The organisation running the event is a charity/not for profit, the cause aligns with my values and they don’t have the budget to pay
It’s a public sector national/local government department that can’t pay because of procurement
It’s a new talk I want to test out
Having said all this there are times when I have broken these rules and, looking back, I’m disappointed that these people felt like it was ok. I’m not going to name organisations or conferences but I have spoken at more than one conference that didn’t pay speakers despite charging for tickets and being industry leading events.
However, the worst offenders, based on my experience, are privately owned design agencies. In the last two months alone I’ve been approached by three and when I mentioned payment, they all declined to respond to my emails. This is not ok, friends.
However one particular gentleman takes the crown for this. When I asked for payment, he told me ‘he’d tweet about it’. This was before the death of our beloved social platform of choice. Spoiler: He didn’t tweet!
All of this is bad behaviour and I’m disappointed in the people who think it’s ok to benefit from people’s time, experience and generosity without appropriately compensating them. However I’m also disappointed in myself for not putting boundaries in place around this sooner and having the confidence to say no. While I recognise this can be difficult for people just starting out with public speaking, we all need to do better for things to start to change.
Which leads me to the last point I want to make and that’s around the diversity of speakers and equity of payment. Anyone assessing public speaking opportunities should be ensuring they are joining conference lineups that are diverse. And that’s not just gender and racial diversity but ensuring people with disabilities are represented, that we see more trans and non-binary people speaking and that people with lower levels of experience are given these opportunities.
It’s always ok to say no, and in some instances, you should be saying no - especially if someone offers to pay you in tweets!
Have a good week folks.
Thank you for being so generous in sharing your experiences and disquiet. I have recently started on my own journey of getting into doing design talks, and I think I am at the point where the initial excitement of being asked for absolutely anyone has evaporated, and I now react with "Hang on. You're charging X amount for each ticket, I'm helping your team learn in 45 minutes something that took me years to figure out, and I'm supposed to be happy with my BFH [Nicked from Bullseye, lol = Bus Fare Home]".
Maybe its a combination of the British cultural squeamish to address money-talk, plus the wider denigration of The Arts that trickles down from government that anything Arts-adjacent is "not a proper career", and the annoyingly stubborn belief that it is reasonable for creative labour to be given away for free (compare fashion/music/publishing/any other type of creative internship), and the social immobility that engenders.
Your one new talk per year approach was really encouraging to read. I have settled on a similar approach more by accident than intention, because of my preference to really practice delivery, refine, practice again, and so on.