Making Presentations

Great advice - if you do standup as a sideline. Otherwise, not so much. If you think a few people snoozing is bad, try telling a joke to dead silence. Which will happen.
Food doesn’t work well when you have an audience of 200. And the worst gig in the world is lunchtime speaker in a buffet environment where people are still getting food, eating it, and chatting to their table mates during the speech. If made presentations during lunch at small meetings and that was bad, but there people had to pretend to listen to me.

Never had to worry about that - though if you are presenting at a meeting that is an audio conference where listeners have a copy of the slides, saying where you are is a good idea.

One more thing my adviser taught me. If you are speaking in a session after other speakers, who are often speaking on the same subject, listen to them, and jot down something they said that is relevant. For instance “Fred told you that veebleforts are green in his talk, just like I found also, so you gotta believe it.”
Or, conversely, “John said they were blue, but I’ve got some good experimental results here showing they are actually green.” Don’t ignore contradictory information - you’ll get a question about it.

I appreciate all the sugestions and help. My primary interest at the moment is a written presentation. Using many of the suggestions above I went to work last night preparing it.

This particular project is a concept for developing a non profit model for a social medium targeting all types of creative individuals. Arts, crafts, inventions, theories etc. Very broad spectrum.

I see myself as taking a back seat to more qualified individuals if and when the concept garners enough support from the target audience. So my main purpose is to simply get the idea off the ground.

In a presentation that would be presented via social media I would hope to convey how this would work, the benefits, how it could grow and the impact that it could have on our personnal lives. This is where I am struggling. I feel like I need to effectively express in one paragraph enough information as to encourage the reader to click on a link with all the details. I plan to spend the next week or so on that one paragraph while at the same time refining the details that it would link to.

The number one cause of paralyzing doubt and dull verbosity is focusing on what you want to say, rather than what your audience needs to know.

The corollary is that if your knowledge of your audience is amorphous or nonexistent, you will have an incredibly hard time crafting an effective presentation.

Many presentations lack the hook that makes people interested. I always try to explain, in the first slide, why we are here and what problem we are going to solve. You need to be clear on the problem statement - illustrate the “pain point” if you will, to the audience. This will help them relate to the problem, and want to hear more of what you have to say.

If you go in with guns blaring about the solution, before the problem has been identified, people will be spending the whole time trying to figure out what the issue is, and probably making the wrong assumptions. Don’t let them do that - you need to control how the problem is defined, so that your solution will look like the best course of action. One way to do that is to identify the lack in the community of what you are proposing as the problem.

I will use this approach, I feel like I can identify with it.

The key is feedback. I use a standard survey form and always ask the same two questions:

What part did you like best?

What part did you like least?

I preface this survey by saying that this is so important to me, I’ll pay everyone to do it with as much detail as possible. Usually candy or cookies. As you get feedback, you make changes based on what people say. If you are not a good presenter, you should make changes only if more than 5 or so people agree on what your weakness is. For those things that people liked, figure out why they liked it and apply it to other parts of your presentation. I know a guy who always puts a nice photo between sections of his powerpoint and ties it in to what he’s talking about. For me, the strongest part of any presentation I have is the very beginning, also known as “an icebreaker.” This is simply a question that gets people to think about the topic, and then I call on a few people to tell me what their answer is before I launch into the main presentation.

For example, I recently did a report about accreditation. I briefly listed a few key ideas from the source material and asked everyone: which ones do we have at this company, and which ones are missing?

Another trick is group work. In the above example, after I got feedback on what is missing from this company, I put them into groups and asked them what obstacles are preventing them from having them. Lively discussion ensued.

In a nutshell: the only way to find out how to improve your presentations is to ask the audience. To be an effective presenter is not to have an attitude of “Why don’t they like what I’m doing?” and change it to “What should I be doing?”

Would you consider something like facebook a good place to get feedback?

I got the hammer thing from my high school science teacher, worked then, works now. If you can’t tell a joke then you may be a boring speaker and nothing you do will help much. But every speaker has to use their own abilities, and if they don’t have any that are conducive to making the audience pay attention then they shouldn’t be speaking. Oral presentations are often over-rated anyway, except for small groups with a lot of interaction it’s a less effective way to convey information than visual media, unless you are an effective engaging speaker, and not everyone can do that.

I agree with what snowthx said - but when you are laying out the problem, try to make it personal. Instead of saying “soap makers in small cities have this problem” say “Helen Jones, a soapmaker in Hicksville, population 2400, has this problem. Studies show she is not alone.” I trust you have some real examples to use.
This advice comes from listening to critiques of articles from my writing teacher - not mine, but others.

Thats a good point and something I would be very comfortable with, also gives me a chance to inject some humor. I have never been a joke teller but can handle a humorous story pretty well if as you say I personalize it.

Here’s some perfect humor for you (although maybe not in this circumstance). Make one of those hats with an arrow going through it. Put it on at the start of the presentation and say “Sorry, I have a splitting headache”, then give them a big smile. If you have humorous story to tell in addition they’ll certainly listen and be more likely to pick up on the humor. You have to grab them right at the start, if you can do that it will all get easier.

Try to put yourself in the position of the people sitting in the audience. What could you say to them that will make THEM care about what you’re saying?

For example, sometimes it’s my job to tell the people in marketing about videogames we have in development. For the most part they don’t care how the games PLAY (although that’s the part I find interesting). They care about how they’re going to SELL. So in my presentation I’ll tell them just a little about how games play and a whole lot about the unique selling points they can use as marketing hooks. They pay attention because I’m telling them the stuff they care about, not the stuff I care about.

Please resist the urge to tell jokes. If your talk is good, you don’t need jokes. And if your talk is bad, jokes just make it worse.

I like that!! I actually have quite a few funny stories archery related.

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Try to put yourself in the position of the people sitting in the audience. What could you say to them that will make THEM care about what you’re saying?

 That is precisely what I am attempting to address. If I did a video of myself is it permissable to post a link here? It would be a rough draft in development.

Cut everything by half. Halve your words. Halve your slides. Cut half of everything out of the slides that remain.

The only thing you need more of is practice.

Trying to be funny is the hardest thing you can do in a presentation.

Another bit of advice: go to some high school/college graduations and listen to different types of speakers. Liberal arts background speakers ramble and usually are incredibly boring. Business leaders are more to the point and back up their points with relevant, real-world examples. A few speakers from any background have excellent humorous timing without telling jokes. Simply showing the difference between theory and real life is usually enough for a laugh.

I can’t speak for the mods here, but I don’t know of any rule that would prevent this. If you post something that’s less than ten minutes, I’ll watch it and give you feedback.

Another question that might help you out: Who is your audience? Can you describe the type of person who will most likely be watching your presentation?