Preparing For Your Presentation

Define Your Audience

In any presentation it is important to connect with your audience, but this can be especially important when presenting online when your audience is in a different location. One way to help connect with your audience is by making your content more personalized and relevant to them. Gathering some information about who your audience is can help you decide what may be important to them.

Questions to Help Understand Your Audience

Here are some questions to consider about your audience:

What is your relationship with your audience?

Will you be presenting to your professor? Your classmates? A future employer?  A potential customer? Your audience may impact choices in your visuals, examples and your overall tone.

How big is your audience?

Will you be presenting to one person, a small group or a larger group?  With a smaller audience you may be able to have a less formal conversation to address questions, with a larger group you may need to better determine how, when, or if you will address questions. You will want to communicate your method of taking questions to your audience. You may also need to allow more time for questions and technical troubleshooting with a larger audience.

What do they already know about your topic?

How much knowledge do your audience members have about your topic? Are there terms you're using that may be unfamiliar to them that you'll need to define? Is there common ground that you can use as a connection point? For example, you may be presenting to your professor and classmates from a course, so you could use a common course topic as a way to connect to your own material.

Engaging your audience with stories

After reviewing who your audience is, you can try to write your presentation like a story to make it more meaningful to your audience. Sharing information in the form of a story helps the audience feel like your ideas and experiences are their own, connecting them more to your message.

The Three Part Story

One suggested story format for presentations is to think of it in three parts: the beginning, the middle and the end. Nancy Duarte discusses presentations as story using a variation of this structure.

The Beginning

Create tension. A common approach is to establish a problem and a potential solution and the gap between them. You can also try establishing a question at the beginning that will be answered throughout the presentation.

The Middle

Go back and forth between the problem and the solution or question and answer.

The End

Show the final solution or answer and why it is appealing and have a call to action for your audience.

From https://blog.gotomeeting.com/how-to-fix-a-boring-webinar-with-great-storytelling/

The Dramatic Arc

The dramatic arc pictured below is used as one way to map out a story. You can take your three part story and think of it in terms of this arc. Your initial question/problem can be mentioned in the exposition, with excitement building up to the answer/solution.

Why use an outline?

Having an outline for your presentation can help make it easier when building your materials and running the live presentation. An outline can help you map out key points, consider the order of your content and plan visuals.

Consider the goal or purpose of your presentation

Is your presentation intended to educate your audience, to persuade them to a point of view, to sell something, to market yourself? Consider what you want to accomplish. It may help to consider your audience when deciding your goal.

List the main points

Think of the main points that need to be told to convey the story of your presentation and list them in an outline. You can also add sub-points. Once you have the points listed,  you can consider the order to put them in.

Rehearse your presentation

Before you're in front of a real audience, you can benefit from rehearsing your presentation out loud. Rehearsing will work best if you can make it as real as possible, going through your presentation as if there were an audience.

After rehearsing on your own, you may want to try running your presentation with a test audience. The audience could be classmates, friends or family.  You can test with one person or a few people.

Potential questions for your test audience

• Could you hear me clearly throughout the presentation?

• Was I speaking too fast/too slow?

• Could you see all visuals clearly? Did you have enough time to read words on the screen?

• Was there anything that you found confusing or unclear?

• Did you find the amount of material was enough, too much, not enough?

• Was there enough time for questions?

Check your timing

You may be given a specific time limit for your online presentation.  When rehearsing you can check on the timing of your presentation. You may find that your presentation is too long or too short, so may need to edit your material.

Adjust your presentation as needed

It's common to find small things that you may want to change after rehearsing your presentation. You may end up making changes to what you say out loud or the content or the order of your slides. You can take advantage of rehearsing to make these changes before testing with an audience.