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What belongs in a speaker media kit, and what does not · Speaker Hub
What belongs in a speaker media kit, and what does not
A media kit is not a brochure about you. It is the seven assets an organizer needs to promote you without emailing you four times.
•6 min read
Two things get confused. A one sheet convinces someone to book you. A media kit serves the person who already did.
Different jobs, different contents, and speakers usually build one document that does neither well.
Who actually uses it
Not the programme chair. By the time the media kit matters, the booking is done.
The user is a marketing coordinator with fifteen speakers to promote and a website to fill by Friday. They need your headshot, your bio at the right length, and your session title spelled the way you want it. If they cannot find those in two minutes, they email you, and you answer four emails over a week that a properly built page would have prevented.
That is the whole design brief. Reduce the emails.
The seven things
Bios at three lengths. One line, roughly 50 words, and roughly 200. As selectable text, not inside an image. Give the exact spelling of your name and any credentials you want used. Your speaker bio covers writing them.
A headshot at high resolution. At least 2000 pixels on the long side, because it may end up in print. Provide two crops, one square for social and one landscape or portrait for a programme. A cropped social avatar is the most common failure here.
Session titles and descriptions. Each talk, with its title exactly as you want it printed, a short description for a programme, and a longer one for a website. If you have three talks, all three.
Video. One clip of you speaking, ideally under three minutes, on a platform that can be embedded. See speaker demo reel.
Past events. A plain list, name and year. This is what a marketing team quotes when they introduce you.
Testimonials with attribution. Name, role, organisation. Anonymous quotes are unusable, because a marketing team cannot publish a claim from nobody. Speaker testimonials covers getting them.
Contact and social handles. A real email address, and the exact handles you want tagged. Getting tagged wrong on the event's launch post is avoidable and irritating.
The technical rider
Optional and worth including if you have any real requirements.
Microphone preference, whether you use your own laptop, which connector you need, whether you need a confidence monitor, how much stage you would like, whether you take questions.
One short paragraph. It gets forwarded to the AV team and prevents the fifteen minutes of improvising before you go on.
Format
Page first, downloads from it.
The page is what you send, what search engines can read, and what you can update in a minute when a session title changes. All the reasons in why a one sheet should be a web page apply here too.
The downloads are the files: headshots at both crops, and a PDF version of the bios and session descriptions for anyone who insists. Put them as direct links, not behind a form. A form on a media kit is a barrier between somebody trying to promote you and the file they need to do it.
What to leave out
Your full CV. Nobody promoting a session needs your employment history.
Testimonials without names. They occupy space and prove nothing.
A logo wall of every organisation you have ever spoken to, presented as an image. If those names matter, list them as text so they are readable and indexable.
Design flourishes that make files hard to extract. Text over a photograph cannot be copied, and a coordinator will retype it, which is where misspellings of your name come from.
Fees. A media kit is for someone who has already booked you. Fees belong in the enquiry conversation, covered in how much do speakers charge.
Keep one thing current
The list rots in a predictable order.
Headshot first. If yours is more than three years old and you have visibly changed, replace it, because an audience noticing you do not match your photo is a small credibility cost at the exact wrong moment.
Then past events, which is the easiest to keep current and the most often neglected. Add each one the week you speak, not in an annual sweep you will never do.
Session descriptions drift last but they do drift, because talks evolve and the description written two years ago describes a version that no longer exists.
The test
Send the link to somebody and ask them to write a 100 word promotional blurb for one of your talks, plus find a headshot for a programme, without asking you anything.
If they can do it in five minutes, the kit works. If they come back with a question, that question is the thing to add.
A collection of the assets an event needs to promote you: bios at several lengths, a high resolution headshot, session titles and descriptions, video, past events, and contact details. Its purpose is operational rather than persuasive, since by the time it is used you have usually already been booked.
How is a media kit different from a one sheet?
A one sheet persuades somebody to book you. A media kit equips somebody who already has. They overlap, and the difference shows in what each contains, since a media kit needs downloadable files and precise details while a one sheet needs a clear claim and proof.
Should a media kit be a PDF?
Make the page the primary version and offer downloads from it. The marketing coordinator who needs your headshot at 4pm wants to find and download one file, not request a PDF and then extract an image out of it at the wrong resolution.
Most speakers spend their editing time on the headline and headshot and never look at the form underneath. Here is what that form actually does, and the four choices on the page that decide whether it works.
The one-sheet score splits 100 points across five categories, and design is not the biggest one. Here is what a planner is actually deciding when they read your page, and which category to fix first.
Published fee ranges are mostly marketing. What matters more is the four questions that move a number, and what to say the first time somebody asks yours.
