We have argued elsewhere in these pages that organisations spend weeks choosing speakers and minutes briefing them. With MCs the imbalance runs deeper, because the assumption runs deeper — surely a professional host can just turn up and host. They can. They will hold the room, hit the timings, and deliver a perfectly competent day that could have belonged to any organisation in the country. The distance between competent and yours is the brief.
An MC brief is not a speaker brief with the talk removed. A speaker brief shapes forty minutes. An MC brief shapes the entire day — every transition, every introduction, every recovery from everything that goes sideways. It deserves treatment as its own discipline, and done properly it takes about thirty minutes. Those thirty minutes will decide more about your event than the next thirty hours of venue logistics.
What the brief must contain
Start with objectives — not the theme line from the website, but what has to be true when the room empties. A good MC will build the day's through-line out of this, so ask yourself the harder version of the question: if the event succeeds, what will people be saying at the taxi rank? Then the audience: who they are, what they already know, what they are sceptical about, and how the mood should differ between the 9am plenary and the awards dinner.
Tone comes next, and with it the negative space: banned words, sensitive subjects, the redundancy round nobody mentions on stage, the merger that is not yet public. An MC cannot avoid a landmine nobody marked on the map. Then the mechanical essentials that sink amateurs — phonetic spellings of every name the MC will say aloud, sponsor acknowledgements with the wording sponsors actually contracted for, and housekeeping, which in Australia includes the Acknowledgement of Country and whether your organisation has a preferred form of words for it. Finally, the full running order: who speaks, for how long, and what must happen between them.
The run sheet is the working document
Think of the run sheet as a corporate MC's bible — timings, cues, contingency plans, emergency filler, mic handovers rehearsed in advance. Treat it as a document co-owned by three parties: you, the MC and the AV lead. If those three are working from different versions at 8am on event day, you have already had your first incident. You just don't know it yet.
Two features distinguish a professional run sheet. First, it runs on cues rather than clock-times alone — "after the CEO's final slide" survives a fifteen-minute overrun, while "11.20am" does not. Second, it contains planned filler: two or three pieces of genuinely useful material the MC can deploy while a lapel mic is hunted down or a laptop renegotiates its relationship with the projector. The audience experiences a seamless interlude. The MC experiences page four of the run sheet, exactly as rehearsed.
Timing, channels and the professional's own checklist
Schedule the main briefing call about two weeks out — close enough that the agenda is real, far enough out that the MC can still do something with what they learn. After that, route every change through one channel, usually your bureau or a single named contact. One channel means one version of the truth. The fastest way to sabotage a good MC is to have three stakeholders emailing amendments independently across the final 48 hours, each unaware of the other two.
It also helps to know what the professionals check on their own account. The best MCs run their own checklist, and it reads like an incident controller's: evacuation procedures, first-aid arrangements, AV and venue contacts, name pronunciations, how speakers will receive their time signals, dress codes, VIP and sponsor acknowledgements, the Acknowledgement of Country, the event hashtag, the WiFi password, the survey link. If a prospective MC asks about none of these things, that silence is information. The difference between a professional and an enthusiastic amateur begins exactly here, in the quality of the questions.
None of this is glamorous, which is rather the point. The brief is where an event organiser's private knowledge — the politics, the pronunciations, the things that must not be said — becomes the MC's working material. Withhold it and you have hired a professional to improvise around gaps only you could see. Provide it and something quietly excellent happens.
Because there is a pleasing irony at the end of all this. The better your brief, the less anyone will notice your MC working. The introductions will sound spontaneous because they were researched. The recoveries will look like reflexes because they were planned on page four. Guests will leave saying the day just flowed, and only three people in the building will know why. An invisible MC is not an accident. It is the product of thirty well-spent minutes, a fortnight out, with the right questions asked — and properly answered.