LearnHub

114 Tips for an effective Presentation - The NEW, STRUCTURED version

The following 114 tips should help you to make an impressive presentation.

BEFORE THE PRESENTATION

Your attitude:

• Look forward to the presentation, see it as exciting.

• Bring a positive, enthusiastic attitude to your presentation.

• Whenever you find yourself thinking about the event, create a scenario to which you return again and again of yourself succeeding brilliantly.

• Create a picture of yourself giving a splendid speech. Replay it a couple of times in your mind, until it's clear and precise.

• Be passionate about your subject!

Your appearance:

• Be well groomed and well dressed. Make sure you give the right impression! The audience deserves it.

• As a women don't overdue it in terms of appearance. Don't distract your audience's attention if this might mean to loose your pitch.

Your presenting style:

• Enter a drama class, drama competition. This can help you for this kind of acting.

• Steal from everyone. Watch other people's mannerism especially those you admire. Imitate someone (style, mannerism, voice, gesture, content, etc.) who engages you imaginatively and emotionally. It will help you to overcome your own limitations.

• Listen to other speeches, presentations etc. Learn from them and think about what you can apply for your own presenting style.

Your audience:

• Research your audience: Who are they? What are their needs and expectations? What is the contact to want to convey (be aware what you are not going to say!) What are their hopes, fears, motivations? What kind of story will help you get your message across to the audience? What is the age range? What is it socio-economic make up? Are you speaking in your first language or theirs? How different are you from them? What do you have in common? What is their status compared to yours? Do you know anyone in the audience? Would it be appropriate to address them directly? The more you know about the people in front of you, the better you'll know how to connect with them!!!

• Try to find information about your audience (who they are, what they do, what their problems are, what their aspirations are, etc.).

• Tailor your presentation to the people to whom you are speaking.

• Try to solve an audience's problem. Ask yourself: What is the problem that the audience has for which my information is the solution?

Preparation:

• Prepare well. Preparation is the key to success.

• Delivering a good speech/presentation is about working so hard beforehand that during the speech you can let go of yourself and focus on the receiving end - the audience.

• Rehearse with a video recorder or/and with a friend to receive feedback.

• Rehearse everything. This includes how someone else introduces you, how you walk on and walk off and being familiar with the microphone you are using.

• Rehearse at least three times before a significant speech.

• Write the speech by yourself (Make it your own!)

• Make sure you know what you want to achieve with your presentation.

• Spend time getting your timing right.

• Take your time and think about what you're saying.

• Work on your delivery skills and think carefully about how you convey the information. The success of the presentation is not determined by the information given as much as how that information is put across.

• Search for an opening line that makes your audience laugh, relax and listen.

• Make sure you have answers to the following questions:When is the speech to be given? Who comes before me? Who comes after? What kind of an occasion is it? How many people will be in the room? What are they expecting? Are you the after-dinner entertainment, or a keynoter?

• Write out the story and mark the emotions you're trying to convey at each turn of the story.

• Find a strong start! Your opening should be designed to get attention and to make people wonder where you want to take the presentation.

• Work on variety of speed, pacing, pitch and tone.

• Make it your goal to be short with sharp information well presented and well researched - don't overburden people with too much detail.

The Venue:

• Have a look at the room in which you are supposed to speak beforehand. Go to the front of the room, where you'll begin your talk. Look around. Work all the way around it. Look at the stage, or the place you'll be speaking from, from every possible position an audience member will occupy. Look at the lighting from various angles.

• Visit the site early. Check if there is anything that could possibly distract your audience or looks more interesting than you. If this is the case, try to remove it.

• Speak up. Position a person as far from you as possible, and practice speaking to that distant person so that he has no difficulty understanding you, using the first few lines of the speech.

The last minute before you start:

• Make sure you have some water before you start and you have some ready at your table.

• Take a deep breath before you speak, then swallow, then begin.

DURING THE PRESENTATION

Body language:

• Avoid touching your face, head, and hair.

• Make eye contact for five to six seconds with people in the front, left and right, and the back. do this when speaking and look away when you are thinking.

• See people's eyes and notice when they are bored and adjust on the run.

• Develop your skills in reading body language consciously.

• Read the mood of the audience. Get a sense of what they want to hear and what you want to say.

• Even if you're trapped on a stage or behind a podium and you can't get close to the audience - still try to get close to it. Move to the very edge of the stage. Grab the microphone, leave the podium and the stage to wade into the audience. It makes you feel closer to your audience.

• Work form your passion, and simply allow the expressiveness of your body to follow your feeling naturally.

• Shake the hand of the person who introduces you.

The start:

• Speak from notes, don't read a speech.

• Start impressively, maximise the first 30 seconds. Kick off with a surprise, provocation, a joke, a question. Use lots of energy, smile confidently, and take charge or the space and the audience immediately.

• You can open a presentation by telling a successful parable: no irrelevant detail, an implicit moral at the end, and a topic that the audience can understand.

Speech and language:

• Talk always in a positive and enthusiastic way.

• Speak at your natural pitch, neither too high nor too low.

• Support your core message with voice and expressing, gesture and motion so that there is no inconsistency in delivering your speech.

• Take few core messages and reinforce them several times. Make sure your visual and vocal cues reinforce your content.

• Use an emotional appeal. You can speak to others only if you have a common link. Make people feel moved and touched by what you have said.

• Don't be too quick in your delivery. There should be room for the odd pause, to help people to take in what is being said to them.

• Keep your speaking upbeat, professional and conversational.

• Set an example yourself if you want to motivate others.

• Go straight to the heart of the listener, not the mind.

• Keep it simple and true. Never speak down to your audience. Never try to impress them just for the sake of impressing them.

• Repeat a memorable phrase often! Just the memorable phrase, not the whole concept! (e.g. at the beginning, in the middle, at the end)

• If something is important, say it several times but in different ways!

• Say the right thing at the right time in the fewest possible words!

• Pause when it needs to pause, move on when it needs to move on. This is meant by listening to the audience.

• Articulate your words!

• Never get angry - it weakens you!

• Try not just to be technical, verbal, logical, statistical.

• Keep the content of your presentation simple and comprehensible. Avoid jargon - there's nothing more irritating than a speaker using jargon and assuming that others share the knowledge! (Unless you speak in front of experts in a particular sector.)

• It's not what you say that counts in the end, but what the audience hears.

Delivery method and content:

• Make sure you know your subject inside out, in order to establish credibility.

• Using PowerPoint:-Power Point presentations are speech outlines put together for the speaker's benefit, not the audience's. The result is that the audience will be distracted by giving the audience twice as much to do and two places to look.

• If you use a PowerPoint presentation don't use too many slides and don't put too much information on them!

• Make smooth transitions between your topics - or your slides, if you use them.

• Use PowerPoint only for: illustrations, pictures, graphs, pie charts. If you use words, keep them to a title or some bulleted concepts. Otherwise it's just distracting the audience and raises the risk that the audience will find it more interesting than you.

• Use games, they are a good icebreaker at the beginning, as long as they are related to your talk, and personalised as much as possible to the specific audience.

• Showing a video can be an ice breaker.

• Think of putting in a song when the emotion of the moment demands something more than words.

• Use humour when you can.

• Tell true stories. Illustrate points with stories, particularly funny ones.

• Share experience with your listeners.

• The audience will not be interested in knowing how much you know about a subject, but they are interested in knowing how your information can help them solve their problems! Think in terms of BENEFIT!

• Be clear about the messages you want to get across. There shouldn't be more than three core messages. Say the one that matter!

• Talk from the heart! With your passion comes a close relationship with the audience. Show you are human.

• Do something out of the ordinary - people will remember you.

• Hold people's attention - and keep in mind that their attention span is short.

• Think of giving a presentation with a colleague. A change of voice, a change of pace can re-stimulate the audience.

• Make the audience laugh.

• Make an intellectual, emotional and physical connection with your audience.

• Move people to action. (That only occurs if they come to trust you from hearing and seeing you offer a solution to a problem they have.)

• Your focus should be on the audience, the audience's focus should be on the content.

• Give an elevator speech by: * delivering a benefit for the listener; * mention the word "you" (meaning the audience); refer to emotion. So try to connect with the word and the emotion.

• Get your listeners to think with you.

• Be flexible - be able to respond to the unexpected.

• Speak up! Make sure also the last person in the corner is still able to follow your speech with ease. Otherwise the audience might drift.

• Whatever goes wrong, simply acknowledge it and ask the audience what to do about it.

• Be flexible when things take an unexpected turn.

Audience involvement:

• Give your audience something to do, or they will just remain passive observers.

• Make a bridge with the audience, involve them. Connect with the audience by being who you are - being relaxed and natural.

• Make people feel they have been spoken to individually.

• Call for volunteers to join you on the stage. Live illustrations can really help in driving a point home. But don't forget to make the volunteers feel appreciated, by inviting the audience to applaud.

• Involve your audience by having questionnaires and self-tests, make them stand up and testify, have them undertake small group activities, make them write down ideas/goals on cards and then explaining it to a neighbour.

• If there is any chance, acknowledge winners and give out prizes. Competition makes up an audience and releases huge amounts of energy.

Question Time:

• You should confront difficult questions that are thrown at you head - on, even if the question is unanswerable at the time. Honesty is the best policy.

• Handle interruptions with dignity.

• You have every right to say "I don't know" in response to almost any question. Audiences will not think you're stupid if you say "I don't know." But it shouldn't happen all the time.

• Answer objections constructively.

• Deal honestly with criticism.

• Make sure that you always repeat the question! You could do that by adding eg. "Is that a fair way to state your question? Then make sure by asking the person whether she/he believes that you've answered the question well.

• Special tip for women: If you invite the questioner to discuss points afterwards, pay attention. Some people want to get too close to you, particularly if you have a public profile.

• Don't do a Question & Answer session at the end. Try to take questions as they come up throughout. This allows you to end the presentation with your strongest point. But you need to be extremely comfortable in your talk, so that you can stop and start it without problems. It makes your audience feel as if they are involved in the creation of your speech.

The end:

• Don't end your speech neither with a summary nor with Q & A. These are weak ways to end. Instead, save a bit of your speech for the close - the best bit. End with a stirring call to action, or your favourite story that makes a compelling point.

• Don't forget to say "thank you". That's the only way for the audience to be completely sure the speech is over.

• Finish on an emotional note to maintain interest to the end.

• Try to end on a note that sends people away with something to remember.

• Make sure that the audience takes away your main point.

• Send them away laughing.

AFTER THE PRESENTATION

• Learn from your mistakes for your next presentations.

• Listen to feedback - often it can be very helpful.

Thanks for your interest.
Karin Schroeck-Singh