Yes, asking who has experience of cancer is an obvious question to start with. But anybody can see that it begins the evening on a negative note. It’s a constant problem with any speech. To engage the audience you must pose a problem – and then a solution. You always have keep looking for the positives. A positive message. A positive word. A positive question.
Speakers focus on highly emotional subjects, such as what your parents and grandparents died of, when they want to stir the audience into taking action. If you want to ask a member of the audience for a million pounds, or you want to offer him free pills, you might make such an appeal. But if you merely want to show a slide and get kudos, it's a bit unfair to ruin somebody's day but evoking sad memories.
Another mantra or saying is make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait. You do not want the audience crying all the way through. Although I have seen that done at fundraising events, I don't like it.
It’s much easier to deal with the distant past. For example, We all had eight grandparents and we don't always know for certain their health history and diet. How many of you know one of more of those eight grandparents … Survival rates are much higher today. How many people remember that cancer was more of a taboo (twenty) years ago? (Depending on age of audience.)
We come back to the speech title. What is the message? Possible cures for cancer? Conquering Cancer?
I won a ribbon at Toastmasters for a talk on cancer and started with just such a question. I think I asked how many people knew somebody who had had treatment for cancer and survived five years or more. I then went on to talk about the most survivable forms of cancer and where you can get more statistical information. To my amazement afterwards close friends and acquaintances afterwards came up and confided, ‘I had cancer ….’
But my relative was still alive at the begining of treatment. You have to make a question which does not focus on the words death and family member. Perhaps ask about acquaintances or focus on larger groups.
Even with a small group and a happy topic and a young audience you run this risk that somebody in the audience has a recent bad experience. I was a young student teacher and asked my class of schoolgirls to write about their mother. One girl’s mother had been murdered by the stepfather the previous week. So what is the solution? Look for a positive words? Happy memories of my mother?
