Invited to Speak? Here’s What You Should Know Before Accepting

The Hidden Economy of Being in Demand

Photo by Sticker it on Unsplash

If you are lucky enough to be regularly invited to do things, you will soon learn there are no uniform practices about how to invite and how to manage invitations. Because I am a few years into a high-invitation segment of my career, I’ve noticed that few people know how varied practices are in terms of invitations and expectations. This is an informational and best practices guide for people who are inviting and people who are being invited.

The Most Important Difference

The most important difference in invitations is between the kind that pay, and the kind that requires the invited person to pay.

Invitations that pay will cover your airfare, lodging, and provide you with some kind of honorarium or speaking/appearance fee. Different institutions may differ on what they can provide. Maybe some places pay a very low honorarium, or can’t pay for airfare but can pay for lodging. Some places pay for everything. What is important is that this kind of invitation has a budget for your visit.

Invitations that require the invited person to pay are things like being on a panel at a conference or being chair or commentator, or something like that, which does not include travel, lodging, and most definitely no honorarium. But there are other kinds of invitations like this. Perhaps they are more local or regional, like speaking to a high school or representing your institution in some kind of event or venue.

For people who have very little resources, or on the opposite end of the spectrum, for people who are invited to too many things and have to prioritize, this is one kind of information that is really important to know. It can be a real blow to someone after saying yes to what looks like a good opportunity to know that all of a sudden, they owe a $500 conference registration fee, two nights at a hotel that might run many hundreds of dollars, and airfare and transportation that runs in the hundreds. Maybe some people have a healthy research/travel budget they use for this stuff, but many of you don’t. It is amazing that people who do the inviting don’t realize this information is important; they simply assume people being invited know.

My most important best-practices advice is for inviting institutions to say up front in your invitation which one of these invitations it happens to be. For people on the invited side, please request this information as soon as you get an invitation, and know it before saying yes or no. You’d be surprised that something that sounds like it is clearly an invitation that pays is actually one requiring you to pay, or vice versa.

Amongst invitations that pay something, there are very different practices about how you get paid and reimbursed. Some institutions want you to book all travel and hotel yourself and submit receipts for reimbursement. Others want, even need, to do all of this stuff for you through the company travel agent, and do not want any receipts for reimbursement. Still others will do one of these for travel but not for lodging, or vice versa. Inviting institutions and individuals should recognize this wide variety of practices across the entire field and inform invitees as early as possible what their practices are. Invited people, ask this information as soon as you are clear that this is an invitation with a budget, so that you are not caught off guard and will be on the hook for any costs. Also, keep a filled out W9 all the time with you electronically (you can easily find this at the IRS website as a PDF). Print this out on your trip and hand it to the relevant administrative assistant in charge of your reimbursement (this is if you don’t want to send these over email for security reasons).

Big Shots and Speaking Fees

Some institutions take for granted that if you invite someone, you must pay them some kind of speaking/appearance fee. Other units, maybe centers, research groups, professional organizations, are absolutely shocked that people get paid for speaking. Still others know there are people who require speaking fees and would like to invite them, but have anxiety that their little budget wouldn’t be enough for some imagined exorbitant fee.

Yes, there are people who require speaking fees. There are also people who speak for nothing so long as you cover travel and lodging. There are also people who pay out of their own travel budget or pocket to go to something to speak to people. Sometimes the same person is in all three categories depending on the invitation. Sometimes a person will never do something if their speaking fee is not met. But you do not know ahead of time who is whom. So don’t make assumptions.

Some departments and universities have standard speaking fees, as may some conferences or corporate gigs. It might be a departmental policy, or a directive handed down by higher level administrators that, say, an assistant professor gets $1000, while a distinguished professor gets $2000, something like that. Still others have very loose rules about speaking fees. Maybe there is a high and low end in the budget for a particular speaker or speaker series, or just one budget for all speakers, and people negotiate to try and get who they want. Some centers are very well-endowed and can afford heftier speaking fees, but know very well that academics tend to require smaller ones while industry people demand higher ones. But, as a general rule, if you are an academic, you will tend to get smaller fees. If you plan to invite someone in industry, they may find your offer of academic-level fees to be laughable. Academics are typically on salary and find invitations to speak as career advancement. People in industry need to take days off from work which creeps into vacation time, and thus a grand does not make up for it.

On the other side of things, some academics have speaking agents, and set their speaking fees according to scales worked out between the agent and agency. This is the cost of getting this person to speak if you do it through the agent. Doing it through the agency means there is a formal contact number; you talk to the agent, not the speaker. The agent may try then and there to negotiate with you, and has the discretion never to take the offer to the speaker if they deem it not worth their time to consider. Probably they will take the offer to the speaker, even if it is under their usual price, but there is a chance they may not. Agents get a commission on speaking engagements, and so too low a fee and it isn’t worth their effort to pick up the phone and call their client.

If you are an inviting institution with a standard honorarium, please indicate that in your invitation. If you are an academic who needs to juggle all kinds of invitations, money is one way to prioritize, but not the only way. If you are being asked to travel across the country and stay two nights for a one hour talk that lands you $300, and you simply can’t justify leaving your family for childcare arrangements that far exceed that amount, you at least have a way to set your boundary. On the other end of the invitation, if you are not a wealthy institution but you really want big shot public intellectual so-and-so who lists a speaking agent, but you suspect some exorbitant speaking fee you can’t afford, it does not hurt to privately email the individual (not the agent) to see if they are willing to do your event at a discount. Some big shots hold firm on their speaking fees because they really need to prioritize all of their invitations, and that is how they have decided to do it. They will not respond, simply directing you to their agent. In that case, you pitch the agent, you tell them about the engagement, the fee you are able to pay, and have them work it out with their client. If you can’t afford them, then you can’t afford them.

But I will say that some big shots make exceptions for events and people. In fact they may make exceptions more often than you think. It is okay to ask. If you want to get big shot to do your conference, and their usual fee is $10,000, but you can only offer $2000, but you went to grad school with this big shot, they might just say yes, bypassing their agent (who then will not get 15% of the fee). Even if you have no special connection, some big shots are Rawlsian, they ask exorbitant amounts of Harvard but will do something for $1000 for your regional research center.

Asking is also okay for if you are invited, but hesitate at the low speaking fee. If you are invited and offered a $200 honorarium, but $500 would really help make the math work out for childcare back at home to allow you to do this, just ask. If the institution can do it, they will, and if they cannot, it is not insulting that you asked. Institutions are well aware that asking someone to travel across the country or the Atlantic ocean for three total days is a lot.

If you are some kind of corporate or otherwise well-endowed group outside of the university ecosystem, or are being invited by one, you should have an expectation that the speaking fee will be significantly higher than what you might expect from a little philosophy department at a Catholic liberal arts college. These kinds of places pay thousands and thousands for other kinds of speakers, and it is not a particularly good look for academic philosophers to accept significantly less to do the same work, nor is it a good look for such institutions to offer academic philosophers significantly less. Maybe you’re flattered that someone is offering you $2000 to give a talk at the Society of Swiss Entrepreneurs, and I wouldn’t judge anyone negatively for taking it, but if their standard speaking fee is $10,000, and that’s what they gave last week to that weirdo on Twitter that you really hate, and they would have gladly given you the $10,000 had you asked, you’d probably end up feeling kind of rotten about it all. Lowballing academics is a thing.

Finally, some invitations have rigorously scheduled events with someone picking you up at the airport, a breakfast with such-and-such group, a lunch with the graduate students, a talk, meeting with some donors, and so forth, while others just expect you to show up at a certain place at a certain time, where how you get there is your responsibility. More often than you would think, no one communicates ahead of time which one it is. Okay, that’s false. If you’re rigorously scheduled, you’re getting an itinerary in advance. This is really about the other kind of people, the kind who do the inviting and then you hear nothing from them. If you’re the kind of place that doesn’t have a practice of transportation and hosting, do let the person know that ahead of time, so they can be prepared to Uber or taxi or whatever.

I guess the big lesson I would draw for everyone is that it isn’t safe to take for granted that there is a norm for how things are done when it comes to invitations, and hosting, and payment, and reimbursement and everything surrounding travel to a location to do something. The way you do things at your institutions, the way your invitations have gone in the past just aren’t universal. But everyone seems to assume that their way of doing it is the norm, which is a cause of a lot of misunderstanding.

Advice on Saying Yes or No

Okay, so you are incredibly privileged and happen to enter a stage in your career where you are in high demand. You are getting invitations to do things that require travel to places and talking to people. But you also have a lot of responsibilities at home. There are classes to teach, committees to sit through, children to pick up and drop off, dinners you’re responsible for making for the family. Do I have any advice about how to prioritize?

I am the absolute worst person to ask about this, because I say yes to pretty much everything. But in my circles there are plenty of people who have very similar, very privileged problems, and these are some of the ways they have prioritized.

1. Money-Some people do a calculation based on their salary and workload and things like that and come up with a certain number that they have determined their time is worth, and if some invitation does not meet that threshold, they do not say yes.

2. Friends and Favors-Some people do things when asked by people they are close to or people in the profession they have collaborated with, people who have done favors for them, or people they expect they will need help from in the future. For example, if the President of the American Philosophical Association personally invites someone to be on some kind of panel, and this is the kind of event that the invitee has to pay, upwards of a thousand dollars, to do, they may say yes just because of the person who asked.

3. Moral Considerations-Some people have moral or ecological reasons against too much air travel, and will only do things within driving or train distance. Others will say yes to academia but no to corporate speaking gigs on moral grounds. Still others have a thing against certain funders or institutions, so they boycott. Someone once said to me online that, had they known some program I was running was funded by Princeton, they wouldn’t have applied because they didn’t want to give Princeton more prestige. If that is your stance, more power to you, I’m sure Princeton is really missing out.

4. Career Advancement-Some people are incredibly strategic about prioritizing. They will do events whereby the people who attend are the kind of people who might hire them, or help promote them (like write them a tenure or promotion letter), or advance their career in some other way (like invite them to contribute to a volume). They will turn down events if they think the people in attendance will not help them in their career (like an event talking to a bunch of high school students about the value of philosophy.)

5. Fixed numbers-Some people look at their schedule and decide they will do no more than one travel event a month, or one a semester, or three a year, or whatever. Within that range, they will then prioritize by the other methods.

Maybe it’s because I’m a first-gen college grad, but I didn’t really develop the habit of asking questions in advance about any of these things when I first started getting invitations. I just said yes and let everything play out. I just figured there’s this hidden world that works a certain way, and its my job to figure out on my own how it works. That’s why I’ve ended up at airports waiting for a host to pick me up but realized, I guess I’m on my own, or I’ve booked travel but it turns out I needed to go through some travel agent so I wasn’t given a reimbursement. Explicit instruction would have helped, so hopefully this will be helpful to the next generation of first-gen professionals, or anyone else, whose advisor or professors never told them about this side of the academic life.