Speakers and crew detail
Speakers are the input that changes the most about a drafted show, and a name plus a rating is all it takes to add one. A beta user running a real multi-day event told us, in her own words, that adding more speakers improved the timing she got back. That is the shortest argument for this article.
Where to add them
The Speakers card on the event’s Overview tab is the main place. “+ Add speaker” opens the fields, and each speaker on the list can be edited or removed from the same card.
There is a second way in that saves a trip. When you are building the run of show and attaching a speaker to a block, the block’s speaker picker has a “+ New speaker” option. Add the name and the energy rating there and the new speaker is selectable immediately, without leaving the block you were editing. You can fill in the rest later from the Overview card.
Adding and editing speakers is an editing job, so it’s open to admins and editors.
What the fields are for
Name is the only required one.
Energy is a 1 to 5 rating of how this person plays a room. The rubric is on the field: 5 is the room comes alive, 1 is data-dense monotone. It is not a judgement of how good they are, it is a description of what happens to the audience while they are on. New speakers start at 3.
Walk-up song is optional and it is there because a real crew asked for it. It rides along to the people running the show.
Crew notes is free text for what the crew needs when this person walks on: handheld or lapel, whether they leave the stage, staging, lighting, anything the booth would otherwise have to ask about. It’s the field that saves a conversation at 4pm on show day.
Energy ratings are private
Ratings and crew notes are visible to admins and editors only. A view-only seat never sees either one, and neither does the speaker. That is a deliberate rule rather than an accident of layout: rating someone a 2 is honest planning input, and it is not something to hand to the person it describes.
What FlowGenius does with them
FlowGenius reads your speakers by name and by energy rating, and it uses them to shape the arc: where the peaks go, what a low-energy stretch needs after it, and which blocks get a name attached in the draft. A show with five rated speakers gives it something to build with. A show with none leaves it spacing an anonymous programme.
Two of its standing rules lean directly on this. It flags two low-energy blocks running back to back, and it flags a single speaker talking for more than forty-five minutes without a beat. Neither check can do anything useful without speakers on the event.
Speakers and the readiness percent
Attaching a speaker to your talks, keynotes, panels, and testimonials is one of the steps the readiness percent counts. Blocks that nobody speaks in are not counted, so a show with no speaking blocks is never marked down for having no speakers.
Removing someone
Deleting a speaker asks you to confirm and tells you what happens: their blocks stay in the show, unassigned. Nothing you built disappears because a name changed.
Still stuck? Get in touch. During beta, questions go straight to the founder, and show-day email goes to the front of the queue.