This is an area that I have gotten killed in throughout my entire life. I have sat through some great presentations and I have sat through some shit presentations in my life. The kind of presentation I am reffereing to here is one that requires some considerable building of a concept with a lot of details that would be very boring if an audience was not properly conditioned. My failure has always been loosing the audience as soon as I open my mouth.
I will always have a very small percentage that do seem to grasp what I was talking about and followed intently all the way through.
My question is; Is there a protocal for types of demonstrations that will best capture the interest of an audience. This would also apply to written presentations.
There are protocol’s for making presentations more clear, succinct, and organized. But to make a presentation more interesting, there is no short cut for knowing your audience.
The best way to find out what’s interesting for any audience is to practice making presentations in front of them and getting feedback afterwards. If the presentation is very important, then practice beforehand in front of a few people preferably from the same field as the audience you’ll be presenting to.
I’ve found that people won’t give you good feedback unless you give them permission to be critical. I would take the initiative when asking for advice.
May I ask what kind of presentations are you making, and why do you think you’re losing the audience once you start talking? Is this your own assessment or has someone from your audience told you that they became bored with you very quickly?
I think the curse of knowledge figures into this. Presenters often don’t realize that their audience doesn’t possess the same education/training/experience that they do. Sometimes the audience is at the same level as the presenter, but they simply lack familiarity with the specific issue the presenter is presenting. In order to not completely lose your audience, you need to think about what your presentation looks like from their perspective. For every concept you present, you need to consider whether your audience has the necessary background to understand it. If they don’t, then you’ll need to either dumb down your concept, or provide enough basic background so that they can understand it. For every detail you describe about a past project or event, remember that your audience wasn’t there when it actually happened; you’ll need to provide context for those things.
I think presentations are generally more interesting if your slides have more pictures and less words. The words are already coming out of your mouth, so you don’t need redundant lines/blocks of text on the slides. Annotated illustrations, plots, photos (and occasionally video) all engage their eyes while your voice engages their ears.
Two suggestions:
[ul]
[li] Toastmasters[/li][li] The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience[/li][/ul]
The former will teach you techniques of how to offer a quality presentation and engage your audience. The latter offers advice on how Steve Jobs made his presentations sing.
I spent four years in Toastmasters, and that was after being a professional speaker for a decade. I wish I had the Toastmasters experience beforehand. And you don’t have to like Apple, or even Jobs, to appreciate his skills and techniques at presentations. If anything Jobs was a master at proving PowerPoint presentations suck and his approach is/was much, much better.
I get feedback on my presentations at my conference, since we collect paper ratings and I get to see them. I can also say with a modest cough that people come into the room for my talks and leave after them.
There are two parts of presentations - what are on the slides and how you present them. We have a slide template and some rules which are enforced by program committee members. Powerpoint as opposed to 35 mm slides has really helped in conference wide presentation scores. The rules involve short bullet points, lots of pictures, and not too much content on a slide.
You can’t cram all the information from a 10 page paper into a 20 minute presentation. So the first thing to do is to cut down the amount of material you are presenting. Mentioning that the audience can read the details is perfectly appropriate. So, find the most interesting thread and focus on that.
Presentation skills are a lot tougher, since there is a vast disparity in how well you come across. It is why theatrical agents can sort those who might be actors from those who will never be actors with about a sentence worth of reading. Actors “turn on” when the cameras start to roll - good presenters turn on when they get introduced. Presentations, done well, are show business.
I understand that Toastmasters helps, but a lot is just inborn.
The best rated presentation I ever did - perfect verbal scores on over 30 cards - was on a debug story that I was able to cast as a mystery, which I solved by the last slide. You can’t make every presentation into a story, but if you can people won’t fall asleep.
Hope this helps. Of course tape yourself if possible and try to judge your energy level. Boring speakers mean bored audiences. Ramp it up.
May I ask what kind of presentations are you making, and why do you think you’re losing the audience once you start talking? Is this your own assessment or has someone from your audience told you that they became bored with you very quickly?
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As soon as I saw this question the same panic set in as it always does when I attempt to write a presentation. I have this dreaded fear that if I say the wrong thing in the wrong order I will loose the listener or reader.
Give me a few hours and I will try to answer that without writing a book in the process.
Good advice came in when I was typing. Some obvious suggestions not mentioned:
Don’t read your slides. Number one mistake. Your audience has read them before you, and while you repeat what they know, they snooze. Prove you know your material by using a bullet point as a trigger to what you say.
Ordering. When making your presentation, try to say the material on a slide without looking at it. You may find that you want to say the fourth bullet before the first. You may also find yourself naturally saying stuff on a later slide in this one. If this happens you are telling yourself that your flow is off, and you should believe yourself and reorder the material.
If you are comfortable enough to do it, riff on the material. Don’t put it in the slide, but it is an extra that if people hear you do they’ll listen for the next one.
Humor - don’t unless you are good at it. Don’t ever just tell a joke to tell a joke - most of your audience will have heard it already, and it may bomb. My counterexample is a joke I wrote myself which was absolutely relevant to my material and which made an important point. And I only used that in the big presentation because I had done this presentation to customers and the joke always worked. But if you are not sure about the joke, don’t use it.
As soon as I saw this question the same panic set in as it always does when I attempt to write a presentation. I have this dreaded fear that if I say the wrong thing in the wrong order I will loose the listener or reader.
Give me a few hours and I will try to answer that without writing a book in the process.
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Based on this response, perhaps you are including too many details? Before details, you need to hook the audience. Stilted and nervous comes across as stilted and nervous.
For your presentation to be interesting, YOU have to appear to be interesting before you delve into the real purpose of the presentation. Unless you have good instincts for this it can be hard, but can be overcome with some work on your part.
When I came to my current company I discovered that the biggest sin they committed in the papers they submitted was assuming that everyone in the industry did things the way we did them. They wrote using our terminology and processes while never explaining them.
On the other hand, when presenting to a technical conference you don’t want to start by defining basic terms that everyone knows.
Great sugestions, appreciate all of them. One more detail. When I can hold an object in my hand or use slides I don’t do too badly. I fail miserably when I am trying to convey a concept which may seem abstract to someone until you actually get their attention and at which point it starts to make more sense.
I watch quite a few online presentations and no doubt the personality of the speaker is a major factor. Just starting this thread made me realize I am just not a presenter. My best strategy is going to be finding someone else to do my presentations. I actually going into some kind of panic mode just thinking about presenting an idea.
^This. The worst presentations are where someone is reading the slides. The audience can do that on their own. The slides should be more tlike talking points as opposed to information. They are there to hear you and your ideas.
I try to use humor to lighten the mood and get engagement with the audience, and when that fails, you can make fun of yourself with that. Once everyone is relaxed and engaged, you can get going.
There is no way to keep everyone 100% engaged the whole time; instead of focusing on the guy in the back nodding-off, find someone, or a few people, who are paying attention and talk to them.
There is no subsititute for being organized and knowing your stuff.
I have no doubt you know your stuff, which is the most important thing. You’re just wanting to make it more interesting so they’ll "hear " it, so here are some of my thoughts:
Hook them…something that immediately piques their interest about the subject. (Who would have thought that you could make a ____ out of a ____?)
Feed them some line…the how. Concept, background, details. (What we have here shows that…)
Reel them in—the why. “Application of…” and “how this makes for a better…”
If you change the idea of “speech” to “speak”, you can loosen up and talk more naturally, with inflection and natural gestures. You won’t feel as stiff because you’re more caught up in just conveying your information like you would one-on-one. You’re excited about it (:dubious::p) and want them to be excited, too.
Unbutton your jacket. Look out at the group from time to time (it’s easier to look at their foreheads. You seem engaging but don’t have to make actual eye contact which can make you nervous.) Move around a little. Stuff like that.
Guy Kawasaki rule on text: Average age of audience / 2 = SMALLEST font size allowed.
My rules:
Practice.
I do big images, no text, and talk to it.
Never forget the 3 step rule:
Tell what you are going to tell them.
Tell them.
Tell them what you told them.
Every 5th slide I do a list of what we just covered. That slide becomes the one that everyone prints out / downloads when they get home, or it becomes the meat of a follow-up email.
Close with a to-do list or summary list. Same issue - remind them what they learned. They then walk out with a strong memory of the value of your presentation.
This is based on my experience in academia and tech, on the marketing side.
Watch a recording of yourself. That will reveal everything. People generally don’t realize what shitty presenters they are until they are forced to watch themselves fidget around and say “um” every other word.
Good advice above for the most part. What you’re up against here is what I do for a living. I train groups of between 10-50 in a classroom setting, and then sometimes groups of up to 250 on webinars. Content ranges from soft skills, which are easy to keep audiences engaged in, to product and engineering sessions, which are less engaging by nature.
To what has been shared above, I will add this.
Format:
Every session of your presentation should have an introductory part that outlines for your audience what is being covered (an agenda), but most importantly tells your audience WHY they should listen, this is the “what you will get out of it” that gives them a reason to listen. Something like this: *Today, we will be talking about blah blah and blah (bulleted list of items). * What you will take away from this part of the presentation is wadda, wadda, wadda. With this knowledge you will be better equipped to yadda yadda yadda.
Then, you will end each session by reviewing the waddas and the yadas from above.
Other than that, here is the main thing. Be prepared. Know your shit. I was a Speech/Communication major in college, and every speech class basically said the same mantra. Know your content, that will give you confidence. Confidence equals a better speech. Audiences want to listen to confident speakers, they don’t want to listen to someone who isn’t prepared.
One caveat. If you are doing a presentation, and required to meet federal accessibility requirements, you not only have to read the slides but make sure you announce each slider number, title, etc., as well. What it boils down to is slides should onld be used to support your presentation, and not carry it.
Sadly, most presenters with slides, fail at presenting.
Start with a joke. Warm up the audience before you get into your presentation. Bring a hammer and a piece of wood and pound it whenever the audience drifts off. Ok, you can use a wooden gavel, but a big gnarly claw hammer has a better effect when you pull it out of your briefcase/bag/pocket/whatever. During the presentation make direct eye contact with individuals in the audience. If you can’t take your eyes off your notes while presenting then you’re not ready to be making that presentation yet. Sprinkle more jokes into the presentation, plan them out, keep them simple, stupid puns work well. If you get a couple of people to chuckle the others will pay more attention. Gesticulate as you speak, this makes the audience pay attention to you instead of thinking they’ll just hear what you say which leads them to pay no attention at all. Don’t allow interruptions for questions, schedule stopping points along the way for questions.
Also, smile, if you don’t look like you’re enjoying the presentation it’s reasonable for the audience to think they won’t enjoy it either. Bring some food, get them to like you from the git go.
Lightening things up is always good advice. However some people do humor better than others, and if a person does not do it well, don’t do it in front of an audience. (I don’t think it would work well for our OP). I like self-deprecating humor, but for it to work you need to be someone the audience knows. I can do it now, but if a grad student making his or her first presentation tries it, the reaction would be “who is that schmuck?”
Excellent advice on addressing the audience. I ran a panel once where one of the panel members, a very famous professor, did an informal poll of the audience about their opinion on the issue. That worked great, and once in a while I’ve polled the audience about something. It engages them a lot.