What are the best ways to research and gather anecdotes for your tribute speech?

A tribute speech can be deep and profound, funny or just plain boring. It depends upon the consumers i.e the audience. As a speaker, you need to remember that your content is about celebrating a person and not about YOU but you can't ignore the consumer lest they lose interest faster than the dew on hot sunny day. Relevant anecdotes broken down to simplify add personal charm to the speech.

A tribute speech must be foremost respectful. The audience who listen to it must feel that from the very beginning. Tailoring the whole speech to honour the person and include the audience as actively as possible is not an easy thing to do. In order to do that, connections between the person and audience must be created for the speech to be well received.

Yes, Organize and integrate! I found by personal experience that when met with any obstacle, reach out to others with similar challenges to my own really helped me with finding the right help, resolution, interventions, and even closure. It also opened doors for helping others that had similar issues, but not the same challenge. Example in healthcare: same symptoms but entirely different diagnoses such as migraine headaches.

Adicional a lo indicado de previo: 1) Es relevante mantener un concepto genuino, decir la verdad siempre. 2) Lograr un aumento de la sensibilidad de la persona, va a traducirse en un alto impacto en el auditorio. Buscando, aquel concepto que caracteriza al individuo y mostrándolo mediante un recuento de una anécdota real y agregando alguien del público (testigo presencial, del hecho) lo cual, debimos coordinar de previo. 3) La cereza del pastel, entregar un artículo iconico qué genere un fuerte, impacto de las palabras más el artículo de obsequio.

When writing tribute speeches, including birthday speeches, speak with relatives and close friends to get anecdotes and stories. If the person has a high profile, use media sources to find relevant stories. When I write eulogies (a form of tribute speech), I email a list of questions to the speaker to get the stories and anecdotes from the deceased person’s life. A few usually stand out and capture the person’s positive aspects. These can be short anecdotes. For example, “Family was the most important part of Dan's life. He spent as much time with his family as he could. I remember him watching me play basketball and Tony play football. He was always interested in what we were doing. We loved him for that.”