Preparation - Preliminary Analysis

Identifying the Objectives

If you are not clear about what you want to accomplish with your presentation, you are guaranteed to produce a vague and embarrassingly inept performance. Define what you want your audience to do because of your presentation. There are five main purposes for the presentation:

• Persuading: influencing opinions/urge people to adopt a certain course of action
• Challenging: reveal what people must face up to/dare to do.
• Informing: update people with news/facts.
• Teaching: training or coaching, giving instruction.
• Giving bad news: reveal bad news.

Yet, your objective will still be that they do something because of attending the presentation. Specifically, what do you want to achieve?

Try to narrow down the objective to one single strong sentence – that spell out exactly what it is that you want to achieve.

Identifying the Audience’s Objectives

For this, try and get inside the mind of your audience.

It appears that a large crowd of people packed together in one place achieves two important results that still cannot be so well achieved by any other means: the affirmation of unity and solidarity, and the acclamation of leadership. This is not true of small gatherings, but as they grow larger it becomes more and more true. A large audience is not, for most practical purposes, a place for detailed and reasoned argument. The more people there are, the smaller the proportion whose knowledge, experience, intelligence and interest are at the right level, and the harder it is for the argument to be comprehensible and relevant to any but a few. So, you must appeal not to the diverse minds but to the common emotions – hopes and fears, elation and aggression, admiration and contempt, shared experiences and shared aspirations.

When you get so many people together, you are not dealing with the intellectual differences of the individual but with the biological identity of the species. In an audience, we discover our group identity and we accord special prominence and respect to those who lead us to the discovery.

To pitch your presentation at the right level and to establish the appropriate language level, you need to identify the type of audience that you will be addressing. Can you speak in a language that is understandable by the audience? This is a question you should ask yourself before every lecture. Audience language means ‘words that the audience use and understand’.

If your audience prefers pictures and simple language, give them exactly that. Other audiences are familiar with technical words, so pitch your lecture at their level of understanding otherwise they may think you are insulting their intelligence.

The characteristics of the audience are extremely important:

• Size of the audience
• Gender
• Age
• Culture
• Ethnic background
• Political and religious beliefs
• Corporate culture
• Status and titles

Why is the audience there? Why must they attend the lecture?

Obligation - Sometimes we are required to attend lectures or meetings at which we are forced to take a passive role.

To be entertained – Some organisations use speakers more for their entertainment than content value.

To learn – Half the battle is won if you know that the audience is hungry for information.

To pass time – Attending a lecture is often a way of passing time.

To network – Anyone who has attended an industry conference knows that, for most delegates, the lectures tend to be secondary to the networking opportunities.

To impress – Some members use the occasion not to listen and learn but as an arena in which to be noticed.

To manipulate politically – Some will attend and shamelessly try to sabotage your platform for the sake of scoring political points.

Finally, you should be able to formulate another key sentence – the one which expresses the final impression you want to leave in the mind of your audience when the presentation ends.

The following questions might be helpful.

• What are they thinking about the subject?
• To be quite basic, how much do they already know about the subject – what is their level of technical interest and understanding? You will have to go into more details and explanations if they are relatively unfamiliar with what you are going to talk about.
• Why would they attend?
• What’s in it for them?
• If you try and look through their eyes, would they be attending with an expectation of you which you are not yet prepared for or able to meet?
• How interested would they be in your objective?
• What values do members of your audience hold?
• What is important to them? Be careful if you are trying to transfer a tried and tested presentation into a new type of audience.
• What needs do you believe the audience have?
• What internal political or financial constraints will limit their capacity to get involved with your proposals?
• Do they have a budget to finance the recommendations you are going to make?
• What do they think of you, because of previous interactions with you? Is there anything you must make sure to do differently?
• How many will be attending, that is, what size of group will you be addressing, and what will the venue be like?

Planning for the Duration of the Presentation

A lecturer may ask himself “How long does the subject need?”, but a presenter needs to ask, “How long can the audience spare?”

Most people are worried that they will not have enough to say. There seems to be some sort of guilt about giving short measure. Consequently, the great danger at this stage is of having too much to say.

In planning it could be helpful to mark the paragraphs of your script with A, B, C in terms of importance. Should your time run out you can easily cut the “C” paragraphs without sacrificing critical contents.

In planning your time keep in mind that the use of visual aids will “spread” your timing.

A presentation that runs too long upsets everybody. Should you not plan correctly, and your presentation go to long you will find yourself going too fast, cutting on interesting, but less essential, parts and consequently making the whole presentation more indigestible.

The Do's of Effective Presentation

The Don'ts of Effective Presentation