The initiative launches with a survey, which can be completed up until Monday, March 15. Complete the survey here.
Launching today (March 4), Turn the Talk is a new initiative led by Acceleration Partners and Connected Path. The mission? To empower people and broaden voices in Performance Marketing.
In the last year, many events in the performance marketing industry have received criticism for their lack of diversity, a shortfall of new voices on the stage or general failure to showcase a representative view of the people in the industry. This issue has often diverted attention from the quality of content and insight being presented. However, people from all parts of the industry are calling, sometimes quite vocally and publicly, for change. Turn the Talk is an initiative created to support this call for change, empowering more diverse and wide-ranging access to speaker opportunities.
Anjulie Blunden, Managing Partner of Connected Path says: “We want to address three key areas; empowering more people, raising awareness, and supporting event organisers.
“Every event organiser wants to create a diverse agenda that adapts and improves each year, but they often struggle to get nominations from people who have not participated in the past. As an industry, we need to empower more people to nominate themselves. This starts at an individual level by encouraging people to overcome whatever obstacles they may face.
“But we can’t focus only on the individuals, we also need to raise awareness with employers and companies in the industry. Businesses should be offering their staff speaker opportunities and nurturing those that wish to take on those opportunities, by providing time, resource and support. This also includes raising awareness with companies about how they go about selecting speakers for events.
“The final area Turn the Talk is focussing on is help for any event organiser in the industry, to ensure they offer their audience a broad range of speakers. For PI LIVE, this already includes participation on the Advisory Board.”
Helen Southgate, UK MD of Acceleration Partners comments: “Turn the Talk aims to widen the speaker submissions at industry events, driving more balance and diversity. We need to change the way we do this, and this starts with trying to understand why more people aren’t applying for speaker opportunities. The first step of this initiative is to launch a survey, inviting anonymous feedback on current perceptions of speaking at industry events. We plan to use this feedback to create an event that supports those who want free mentoring that helps them take to the stage.
Whilst speaking at events is the first hurdle, the initiative is a wide-reaching movement, with goals to ‘turn the talk’ to other areas as the project develops, including accessibility to senior positions in the performance marketing industry, coaching and career progression.
“This initiative isn’t just about two companies, it needs to be a collaborative effort by the industry and we want to invite partners and companies who believe in the same mission to get in touch. It’s time that we called out the lack of diversity, pushed for change and helped people of all experience levels feel included,” adds Southgate