How you can give an effective presentation
Public speaking isn’t easy but it’s a useful skill as you might be asked to present information as part of a university or work assignment. It’s a skill that takes time to perfect (if you can ever perfect it at all) and can be nightmare fuel for some. Public speaking is scary but there are things you can do to make it easier and engage your audience. As long as you can keep your audience interested then everything will be okay.
If you’ve ever watched a TED talk, you might have noticed something that most, if not all of them, have in common. They use storytelling to convey their message.
Storytelling is an incredibly effective way of engaging audiences. For one, they give your presentation a clear structure (beginning, middle and end) and, generally, people are more likely to listen to what you have to say because people tend to enjoy stories - people have been enjoying stories since the dawn of time.
Many TED talks follow a similar structure to the one below. Perhaps you could try structuring your next presentation like this:
Introduce the situation: the people, the place, the time.
Introduce the obstacle: the thing that happened you had to overcome.
The resource: this is the thing we used or did to overcome the obstacle.
The effect: how we felt, how things were improved.
The result: tell people about what things are like now.
The action: this is where you call people to action by explaining that they can do something too.
Another thing that we find helpful when giving presentations is using sites like Mentimeter. The site can help make your presentations more visually appealing and interactive because you can introduce quizzes, polls and other tasks for your audience to complete. Including these can also help to minimise presenter talk time (which we’ll call PTT) and give your audience a voice. If you can’t use Mentimeter, try bringing a ball. Honestly, it might sound silly, but we find it to be an incredibly effective way of engaging your audience because you can use it to ask specific people questions by throwing it to them and, if you’re working with a particularly difficult crowd, those who don’t want to speak often concentrate harder on you, the speaker, because they don’t want to be picked out by you. It’s a simple but effective way of keeping your audience’s eyes on the prize.
When it comes to designing slides, remember “TMI” - Too Much Information. Your slides shouldn't be doing the heavy lifting for you (the presenter). They should only summarise the main points of what you’re saying and be brief. Use bullet points and images, graphs or tables to help illustrate your key ideas and don’t put too much text on one slide - people rarely read a big chunk of writing and if they do, they’ll likely tire and get bored.
Lastly, remember that non-verbal communication (NVC) is incredibly important. Move around the stage, make eye contact with your audience and smile.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can give effective presentations at university or work, sign up for one of our free webinars.