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Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Tip of the week: Create a presenation for the audience, not yourself (Audiences Part 1)

This is the first of three tips related to audiences.  

Most presenters create presentations for themselves rather than the audience.  Not on purpose, but in fact.  There's a few tell tale signs:
1) the speaker starts talking faster and flipping slides faster in order to get through all the slides in his/her deck. 
2)  the speaker shows overly complicated dense slides and only talks about a small portion of what is on the slide. 
3) A speaker uses all the time and has not encouraged the audience to ask questions or clarify what has been confusing.

Why are these signs of ignoring the audience in the presentation creation process?  Corresponding to the points above:
1) the audience never knows about, and will not miss, slides you don't show.  In general, 24 hours later, the audience won't recall more than 1 or 2 of your graphics.  It does nothing for the audience to ram through 80 complicated slides in 45 minutes.    
2) the audience has never seen your slides and when your slide goes up, they don't know what part of the slide to focus on.  If you're creating a presentation for an audience, you need to focus your slides on only those aspects the audience needs to understand.
3) there is no point in giving a presentation if you are not going to get some audience reaction.  Let them read an article instead.  No slide presentation is perfectly clear and even the most polished presenters can't anticipate where the audience will struggle.  Encouraging audience engagement is a sign that you've prepared your presentation for the audience and you care about what they are learning.

Putting yourself in the mental framework of the audience is the greatest single intellectual challenge in creating a presentation.  You have to remember what you yourself once didn't know.  Dry running with less expert listeners is a great way to help.