Planning after Black History Month? Four formats, a brief checklist, GBP fee bands and three ways to judge a year-round diversity and inclusion speaker plan.
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It's 2 October. If your Black History Month session is booked, good. If it isn't, the realistic move now is a smaller October moment and a plan for the other eleven months.
A year-round diversity and inclusion speaker programme is a set of three or four sessions, spread across the year, each with its own audience and purpose, that together serve one inclusion goal. Black History Month is a strong place to start that calendar.
This guide covers what one October session can do, four formats that carry the work through the year, how to brief a speaker, what it costs and how you'll know it worked.
Black History Month runs through October in the UK. It was first marked in London in October 1987, developed by Akyaaba Addai-Sebo, then a special projects officer at the Greater London Council (UCU).
The 2026 theme is "Honouring Our Communities" (Black History Month UK). A theme gives you a shared starting point for the brief, which matters more than it sounds when several teams are planning sessions in parallel: marketing, the employee network and the executive office often draft separately unless one document anchors all three.
A single session can do three things well.
It gives people a common language for conversations that often stall. It shows leadership attention, especially when senior leaders stay for the whole session. And it surfaces questions from employees that you can build the rest of the year around.
It has limits too. One session reaches the people who could attend that hour. Shift workers, client-facing teams and regional offices often miss it. Line managers, who shape most of the day-to-day experience of inclusion, rarely get anything they can use on Monday.
So treat October as the listening exercise. Write down the three questions that came up most in the Q&A. They become the brief for the next session.
Format | Month | Audience | What it's for | Lead time |
Keynote or conversation | October | Whole organisation, live and recorded | Shared language, visible leadership attention | 8-12 weeks |
Panel or fireside chat | February (Race Equality Week) | Employee network, senior sponsors | Questions raised in October, answered in public | 8 weeks |
Line-manager workshop | April-May | Line managers, in cohorts | Practical skills: difficult conversations, fair allocation of work | 10-12 weeks |
Review session | September | Leadership team, D&I lead | What changed, what the next October should cover | 6 weeks |
You don't need all four in the first year. Two sessions with a clear link between them, October and one follow-up, already turns a date in the calendar into a sequence.
Each format also calls for a different kind of speaker. A keynote needs someone who can hold a large room and set a tone; a workshop needs someone who can run an exercise and manage disagreement in real time. We compared keynote, workshop, panel and moderated formats in more detail in Four Formats, Four Different Outcomes.
Brief in writing, then confirm on a 20-minute call. Six points cover most of it:
1. Audience. Function, seniority and how much D&I work they've already seen.
2. One objective. What should people think or do differently a week later?
3. Format and time. Minutes on stage, minutes for questions, recorded or not.
4. Language. Terms your organisation uses, and terms it has moved away from.
5. Boundaries. Live internal situations the speaker shouldn't be drawn into.
6. The October questions. What employees asked last time, so the session starts where the conversation stopped.
Be clear about the role you're asking for. A speaker can inform, challenge and facilitate. They can't represent a whole community, and it's unfair to ask them to.
If you're choosing between speakers, the data you already hold usually narrows the list faster than a showreel.
The choice of speaker often comes down to a single question the brief doesn't always answer: is this session about lived experience, or about the mechanics of a fairer process? Both matter, and a year-round plan usually needs both across its four sessions, but naming which one a given session is for keeps the brief sharp and the speaker search faster.
Behavioural economics is one route into the mechanics side: it treats bias as something a process can be redesigned around, not only something a person overcomes through willpower. Professor Iris Bohnet's research applies that lens to workplace design, from how shortlists are built to how meetings are run.
Watch: What Works: Gender Equality by Design
Speaker fees in the UK fall into broad bands. These are ours:
Band | Fee range | Typical profile |
A | £1,000-3,000 | Rising name, regional specialist |
B | £3,000-7,500 | Established subject expert |
C | £7,500-15,000 | Recognised authority, author |
D | £15,000-30,000 | National profile, broadcast visibility |
E | £30,000+ | Global name |
A year-round plan usually mixes bands. The October keynote carries the largest fee. Workshops can sit a band or two lower, because the value there comes from repetition across cohorts rather than a single high-impact hour.
On timing, the useful rule is to book the October session before the summer and the follow-ups before the new financial year. If your 2027 budget is being set this quarter, include the whole sequence in one line rather than four separate requests. One line is easier to approve and harder to cut halfway through the year.
Before you sign with any agency, our list of questions to ask a speaker bureau covers fees, cancellation and what's included.
Decide before October what you'll look at in September. Three levels are enough:
A speaker programme is one input alongside policy, hiring practice and management training. Measure it on those terms, and the September review becomes the brief for next October, closing the loop the four-format calendar opened in the first place.
For named speakers across all four formats, start with our diversity speakers page.
Black History Month runs through October in the UK. It was first marked in London in October 1987. The 2026 theme is "Honouring Our Communities".
Availability in October is tight, because demand concentrates in one month. A shorter session, a recorded conversation or a follow-up event later in the year are practical options if your preferred date has gone.
Four formats cover most needs: an October keynote or conversation, a panel during Race Equality Week in February, line-manager workshops in spring and a review session in September. Two linked sessions are a good first year.
Fees follow broad bands, from £1,000-3,000 for a rising name to £30,000 and above for a global name. A year-round plan usually mixes a higher-band keynote with lower-band workshops.
Agree three levels before the first session: reach, reaction and one behaviour indicator you already track. Review them together in September and use the result to brief the next October session.
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