Writing a keynote speech can seem overwhelming. Here's a quick checklist of what to do:
1) Get on the phone.
Talk to the event organizer to double-check each of those questions. Find out everything you can. If they've ever videotaped last year's conference or dinner, or put it on their website, watch the film. See how they run it and what the last keynote speaker said.
2) Talk to your client.
Ask your client or boss what they'd like to say, and walk through and outline with them. Spitball ideas and a rough structure. Make sure to ask what they'd like the audience to do, after they hear the speech.
3) Get the OK early.
Run the rough draft by them and make sure they understand it's a rough draft. You could spend two weeks writing a beautiful speech, every paragraph a literary masterpiece, and have the speech blown up by the fact that the speaker has an opposing political or philosophical view of the issue.
4) Make it readable.
Format the speech. Double-space the text and center it. Bump up the text to 16 or 20 point. Do hard returns at natural pauses.
5) Practice the speech yourself.
Read it out loud. You'll find that long sentences are murder, and that you hate paragraphs that don't seem to end. Chop those up into smaller sentences and paragraph, and watch out for anything that seems odd or hard to say. There are beautiful phrases on the page that just don't work when you speak.
6) Listen to the speaker practice.
Even an experienced speaker should get familiar with the text, and this will help finalize any changes.
7) Put the speech to work.
Set things up so you can put the speech to work after it happens. Make sure somebody is filming and getting audio of the speech itself, so you can (a) post the video on the web, (b) send audio clips to radio stations and (c) share the text of the speech, plus links, to stakeholders and any interested members of the press.