Planning on hiring a keynote speaker for a corporate event, conference, or summit? If you’ve never booked a keynote speaker before, or you feel like you could use some event planning hacks, here are some keynote event planning tips to help you plan a stellar keynote event for your organization.

• Scheduling mistakes

If you’re scheduling a keynote presentation, avoid making it around a meal. Keynotes during breakfast, lunch, or dinner — or right after lunch and dinner– distract the audience from the keynote speaker and their message. And people tend to fall into food comas after finishing their meal.

• Tech and AV requirements

Don’t insist that a keynote speaker modify their graphics to fit a particular event template for all slides. Keynote speakers’ brands should be respected — that’s part of what you hire them for.

• Let the keynote speaker do their thing

Don’t demanding to see the keynote speakers’ presentation slides ahead of time (the best speakers are tweaking them on the plane until final touchdown) and please never distribute a keynote speaker’s slides to audiences beforehand. Maintain some suspense! Instead, get your keynote speakers to send a 30 – 60 second video clip beforehand of their speaking at a previous event. This helps with internal and external promotion.

• Break it up

If it’s a lengthy program, add an emcee or host to help break up the long day and create opportunities for interaction. (Note: this is someone other than the keynote speaker, and can sometimes be pulled from your own organization). Also Build in some breaks. Conferences try to pack too much in, if you add in breaks and the keynote speaker’s message will sink in better and the audience will come back refreshed and ready to hear more of the keynote speaker’s message.