Check four things before you fall in love with a speaker: the total landed cost including travel and any agency margin, whether she can be onboarded as a vendor in the time you have, whether you have recording rights for internal reuse, and whether the room and the stream can be made accessible. Everything else on this list is important. Those four are the ones that kill a booking outright.
The most common failure is not the speaker. It is procurement. A March event booked in February dies in vendor onboarding, because a new supplier needs a W-9, an insurance certificate, a security or diversity questionnaire depending on your company, and a purchase order, and none of that moves at the speed of your enthusiasm.
Work the list in the order below. It is sequenced so the items that can end the conversation come first.
Confirming the fee structure: honorarium, travel, buyout and agency cut
A quoted fee is rarely the landed cost. Ask for the full picture in writing before you take anything to your budget owner.
- The speaking fee. Ask whether it differs for virtual, in person, keynote, or a fireside chat with moderated questions. A fireside format is often materially cheaper than a prepared keynote and works better for an ERG audience.
- Travel. Is it included, capped, or billed at actual cost? Ask specifically about airfare class, hotel nights, ground transport, and per diem. An uncapped travel clause is an open budget line.
- Agency commission. If you are booking through a bureau, ask whether the commission is inside the quoted fee or added to it. Both are normal. You need to know which.
- Recording buyout. Often quoted separately, sometimes as a percentage of fee, sometimes as a flat add on tied to a usage window.
- Books. If you want copies for attendees, that is a separate purchase, sometimes through a different entity, and it has its own lead time.
A worked example so the arithmetic is visible. Assume a quoted fee of $12,000, a 15 percent bureau commission added on top at $1,800, capped travel of $2,500, a $2,000 recording buyout for twelve months of internal use, and 150 books at $18 for $2,700. The landed cost is $21,000, not $12,000. These figures are illustrative assumptions, but the structure of the stack is what you should expect to see.
Take the landed number to your budget owner. Bringing the headline fee and returning three weeks later with the real one costs you credibility you will need in the next budget cycle.
Keep reading: Why does our ERG membership number look great while attendance keeps falling every quarter?
Vendor onboarding and purchase order lead times
Ask procurement one question early: how long does a new supplier take from first submission to an approved PO at this company? Then plan backward from that answer, not from the event date.
A workable sequence:
- Get the speaker's legal entity name, tax classification and W-9. Individuals often invoice through a single member LLC. The name on the contract must match the name on the W-9.
- Submit the supplier record. Expect requests for banking details, a certificate of insurance, and any supplier diversity or security questionnaire your company runs.
- Get the requisition approved and the PO issued before the contract is signed if your policy requires it. Many do.
- Confirm payment terms and whether a deposit is due. Speakers commonly ask for 50 percent on signing. Net 30 or net 45 after the event is common on the company side. That mismatch needs resolving in the contract, not in an email the week of the event.
- Tell the speaker's team what invoice reference number to use. Invoices without a PO number sit in a queue for weeks and you will be the one chasing them.
If your event is inside the onboarding window, you have two options: use a speaker already in the supplier system, or ask whether an existing agency you already work with can contract the speaker as a subcontractor. Both are legitimate and both are faster.
The speaker agreement clauses that matter most
You are not the lawyer, but you are the person who knows what the event needs. Read for these and flag them:
| Clause | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Scope of engagement | Exact date, start and end time, format, length of talk versus Q and A, and any extras you assumed were included such as a small group session or a photo line |
| Exclusivity | Whether she may speak at a competitor in the same window; usually not worth fighting for, but know the answer |
| Approval of promotional materials | How many business days she needs to approve your invite copy and headshot use; this sets your communications calendar |
| Payment and deposit | Amounts, dates, and what happens if the PO is late |
| Indemnity and insurance | Standard, but confirm your company's required limits are met |
| Cancellation | Fee retained at each distance from the event, by her and by you |
Watch for a technical rider attached to the agreement. It can contain requirements you did not price: a specific microphone type, a confidence monitor, a dedicated green room, a particular staging arrangement.
Recording rights, internal reuse and posting to the intranet
Assume nothing here. The default in many speaker agreements is that you may not record at all.
Decide what you actually need before you negotiate, because each step up costs more:
- Live stream to employees only, no recording retained.
- Record and post internally for a fixed window, commonly twelve months.
- Record and retain internally in perpetuity.
- Clip and use externally, on a careers page or social channels.
Most ERG programs need the second. Ask for it explicitly, name the window, and name the platform in the agreement. If she declines a recording, plan for it: assign a notetaker, agree in advance what may be summarized in the follow up email, and tell attendees before the session that there will be no replay so the people who cannot attend live know to rearrange.
Also settle whether attendees may take photos, and whether her slides may be distributed. Slides are frequently withheld even when recording is permitted.
Keep reading: Where is US corporate DEI reporting heading, and what should our ERG be documenting now?
Accessibility: captioning, interpreters and room access
Handle this as a booking requirement, not an accommodation request you wait to receive. The Americans with Disabilities Act obliges employers to provide reasonable accommodations, and an internal event is a workplace activity.
Baseline for a hybrid ERG event:
- Live captioning for the stream. Automated captions are a starting point; a human captioner is markedly better with names, acronyms and accents. Book a captioner three to four weeks out.
- An ASL interpreter if requested, or proactively for a large all company session. Interpreters work in pairs for long sessions and book out further than you expect. Send them the speaker's bio, names and any acronyms in advance.
- Room check: step free access to the stage as well as the seating, reserved seating with clear sightlines to the interpreter, and an accessible restroom on the same floor.
- Ask on the registration form: what would make this event work well for you, with a free text field and a deadline that leaves you time to act.
- Confirm the speaker will use the microphone even in a small room, and that she will describe any visual material she shows.
Content review without turning it into censorship
You have a legitimate interest in knowing roughly what will be said. You do not have a right to edit an outside expert's argument, and trying to will end the relationship.
What works: send her a short brief covering the audience, the ERG's theme for the year, two or three things the group is genuinely working through, and any live context she should know about, such as a recent restructuring. Ask for a session outline and the titles of the sections, not a script.
Flag genuine constraints plainly rather than vaguely. If your company is in a quiet period, if there is active litigation, or if a specific product cannot be discussed, say so once, in writing, with the reason. Experienced speakers handle that easily. What they will not accept is a legal review that returns their keynote with sentences crossed out.
See how ERGCircle handles this for employee resource group programs
Hybrid logistics and the AV walkthrough
Book a thirty minute technical rehearsal with the speaker and your AV team, and hold it at least three days before the event, not the morning of. Three days gives you time to fix what you find.
Run through: her connection method and backup, screen share resolution, whether remote attendees can be heard in the room, how questions will reach her from both audiences, who is monitoring the chat, who reads questions aloud, and what happens if the stream drops. Name a person for each of those roles by name, not by team.
Two details that reliably go wrong: the room audio feeds the stream but the stream audio does not feed the room, so remote questions are inaudible in person. And nobody has decided who ends the session on time. Give your moderator a written closing line and a five minute warning signal.
Cancellation, force majeure and your backup plan
Read the cancellation ladder carefully, in both directions. A typical structure retains a rising share of the fee as the event approaches. Force majeure clauses became far more specific after 2020, so check whether the definition covers travel disruption, illness, and a company decision to close the office, and check whether a virtual substitution is permitted rather than an outright cancellation.
Then build the backup before you need it. Identify an internal executive who can hold a forty five minute moderated conversation on the same theme, and ask her in advance to hold the date as a contingency. It costs one conversation and it means a canceled flight does not cancel your event.
Keeping the record after the room clears
The work does not end when the speaker leaves. You will want registered versus attended counts, the post event pulse, the actual spend against the line you budgeted, and all of it again in November when you write the annual report.
ERGCircle keeps those together: attendance captured per event, budget tracked against your approved line so the landed cost and the quoted fee never diverge unnoticed, member survey pulses attached to the event that prompted them, and an annual impact report built from the year you already recorded. Book the speaker with the checklist, log the event as it happens, and the reporting is finished before anyone asks for it.
