Building a business case for inclusive speaking

In recent posts, we’ve talked about the impact of disabilities and exclusion on our bottom line as professional communicators.

We’ve started looking at how much of a driver the inclusion of people with disabilities and seniors can be to our businesses.

We’ve looked at the largely untapped and underserved market of people with disabilities.

We’ve measured how they collectively own hundreds of billions of dollars of disposable income annually, a market more than ready for the taking. One that we can – and should – be opening up to.

And we’ve peeked at the tip of the inclusive speaking iceberg, by considering some of the situations people might find themselves facing, that will inevitably impact how they experience and perceive the content we share from the stage and beyond.

We’ve already covered a lot of ground.

By considering the many ways in which communication can break down between the communicator and those on the receiving end of that communication, we’ve explored some of the ways in which we can proactively tip the scales for our audience members, and ourselves, all at the same time.

Through this process, we’ve also defined just how much money our businesses may be leaving on the table, and one thing for sure, that picture isn’t a pretty one. Based on these recent conversations, I’d like to offer you what might be three of the most important takeaways. This post will summarize them.

The untapped market of people with disabilities

It may be tempting to discard your audience members who have disabilities by assuming that they will be part of an underprivileged group of people who are simply not worth marketing to. That may have been true, to some extent, in the past. But in the hyper-connected 21st century economy, this is simply no longer the case. Research and data from credible sources, such as the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and the Ontarian Chamber of Commerce (OCC) suggest otherwise. So do the many lawsuits filed annually against organizations that dismiss people with disabilities as edge cases.

With an annual after-tax disposable income of $504 billion in the United States and $55 billion in Canada, working-age adults with disabilities represent an untapped and largely overlooked market that is today ripe for the picking. Furthermore, with people with disabilities being more and more empowered to play an active part in leadership and influential roles in the workplace, thanks to equal employment opportunity programs and equity laws, this group finds itself to be increasingly prominent on the world stage. It is not uncommon these days to find that even people who don’t have disabilities but are close to those who do, also become very sensitive to inclusion and diversity.

Picture yourself becoming that all-inclusive speaker or trainer who knows how to skillfully appeal to an audience nobody else even knows they should be paying attention to. What kind of an impact would that have on your message? What kind of an impact could that have on your business? What kind of an impact would that have on your bottom line?

Disabilities don’t fuel communication breakdowns – lack of inclusion does

There’s a hell of a lot more to communication breakdowns than a famous Led Zeppelin song from the late 1960s! When we think of all the ways in which communication could go wrong, because of various situations that are outside of our control, it’s easy to feel intimidated by the impact these barriers can have on the way our message is perceived and received out there. Not to mention that social media being what it is, getting a bad reputation for being clueless about inclusion can spread like wildfire and cause considerable harm to your brand.

Year in, year out, businesses are losing billions of dollars to communication barriers that get in the way of productivity. According to Holmes PR, a Toronto-based leader of the Global Public Relations industry, poor communication in the workplace was costing businesses an estimated $37 billion annually back in 2011. There are so many things that can go wrong from the moment a thought forms in our head, to when it comes out of our mouths (or fingers!), to when it is received by the audience, to when it finally finds its way into our audience’s brains.

Typical barriers aside, disabilities bring in an entirely new level of complexity because the issues faced by people with disabilities are oftentimes hard to even fathom for those who have ideas worth sharing. Keep in mind that barriers are not so much caused by a person’s disabilities as they are the byproduct of poor communication methods. Internalizing this will go a long way towards helping you understand the mindset you need to adopt to fully embrace the idea of inclusive communication.

The 40/50/x rule of inclusive speaking is greatly costing your business

What if your biggest loss of potential revenue came from the audience members you never even knew about? In the last post, we broke down a formula to measure the percentage of your business that you might typically lose to unconscious exclusion. We’ve established that about 40% of any given audience will deal with challenges that make it harder for them to consume our content and will find themselves at very significant risk of disengaging from us due to a disability.

Knowing that about only half of those will manage to overcome the barriers we set in their way, that still means about 20%, or one out of every five members in our audience, will likely give up due to a lack of inclusion, therefore losing any chance of eventually getting their business. This leads to our businesses potentially leaving about 20% of their revenue on the table on any given day.

As an example, speaking in front of 10,000 people with a 10% conversion rate on prospects and an average service offering value of about $1,000 per client, one would be looking at a business that generates roughly $1,000,000 a year. Losing potential clients to disability considerations can easily cut down potential revenue stream by 20%, therefore resulting in a $200,000 loss. Wouldn’t you rather secure some of these sums, just by being a more inclusive speaker?

But enough with the numbers and financial incentives for now. In the next few posts, we’ll dive deeper into some of the most common considerations related to inclusive speaking. We’ll look into some of the ways in which our presentations can go wrong. We’ll also roleplay a few real-life experiences from the perspectives of different audience members, who are typical representatives of people that make up all of our audiences regularly.

Hopefully, these future posts will lead to a broader understanding of how the particular needs and expectations of audience members with disabilities should impact our delivery as professional speakers, which, in turn, will contribute to helping us understand where we all collectively fit on the inclusive speaking spectrum. Stay tuned.