This morning I presented at the morning session of TED University. Lots of people asked if I could mail them the presentation. So I decided to upload it and make it available for download. A little transscript is below the slides.
Transcript: 8 ways to create a succesful TEDx
When you’re part of this community that strongly believes in “ideas worth spreading” and you give them this wonderful format of TEDx, no wonder these TEDx-organizers also want to share their ideas about what makes these local events so special. So, in the next couple of minutes I would like to present to you the 8 most important learnings that we as a TEDx-community have discovered this last year.
1. Don’t do it on your own
First of all: Don’t do it on your own. Form a team. You need people who are better than you on so many subjects. Don Levy said: “… we
are making this as much of a
community effort as we can.”
2. Try harder on the location
This is a picture of the European Parliament. Who would have thought that you could organize a TEDx Brussels over there? Or this one. A TEDx-event at Nasa. Space for Ideas. And it’s not that bigger is automatically better.
As Jason Johnson put it: Find a place that’s worthy of inspiring and spreading ideas.”
3. Start with the guestlist
One of the first things that you run into is The Guestlist. With TEDxAmsterdam we chose for an Invite Only format. This led to many very interesting people coming to us, instead of the other way around. Among them were journalists, some of the speakers and even our host of the day.
Patrick Newel said: “We decided that we would hand pick our community based on clear criteria that ensured quality and diversity.”.
4. Help your speakers
The one tip that nearly all TEDx-organizers emphasize has to do with speakers.
Allthough most of them are professionals and have experience, you need to help them. Prep them, brief them, get them to rehearse. Maurice from TEDx Paris said: “Rehearsing is the secret. We saw each speaker minimum 3 times.”
5. Emphasize your Local Character
In Amsterdam we had the mayor to do the opening word. Welcoming the TED-community to Amsterdam: city of ideas. Or look at this great photo. The folks from TEDx Kibera. It’s encredibly powerful to use the TED brand to draw attention and then show off the local talent.
6. Dare to ask
It’s amazing what people will do if you just ask them. TEDx is a great podium for them to show their talent. This is a picture of our iPhone App. But people also made videos’, did webdesigns, produced an awesome program book.
7. Use the power of new media
How will you connect with the outside during your event? Get a Twitter backchannel, stream your event live for free. This will cause exponential growth to the spreading of the ideas:
“We ended up having more than 100,000 people who tuned to our live stream from 45 countries around the world, and it generated close to 12 million social media impression on and around the event.”
If you don’t have a clue what social media impression are, you can ask Ron Gutman. He is in the audience somewhere.
And… most important. Have fun along the way!
Organizing a TEDx will be an unforgettable experience where you will meet new, exciting people. You will be loved by your local community for doing something important: bringing the TED-experience to them. They may have seen the videos, but now they know the importance important it is to share ideas with remarkable people and talk to these same people about them.
Thank you TED for this wonderful program, and thank YOU for visiting a TEDx in or around your city!
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