15 ways to improve your presentations in 2009
December 31, 2008
This is a big meaty post with 15 ways to improve your presentations. These ideas are designed to challenge you to stretch yourself. With each idea I’ve pointed you to further resources from fellow presentation bloggers or from my own archives.
Choose one or two to work on at a time. Bookmark this post, so that once you’ve implemented those, you can come back and work on some more during the year.
1. Customise your presentations for each audience
Six ways to take charge of what your audience remembers
June 27, 2008
We ask people on our courses what they remember from the last presentation they went to. Typically they either remember nothing, or a random point or story that the presenter told.
So when you’re presenting, take charge of what your audience remembers. Here are six ways to do that:
1. Focus your presentation around one Key Message
Al Gore uses evidence to make his point
May 7, 2008
Al Gore’s TED talk is chock-full of evidence to make his point. I’m using the word evidence here loosely to include all the techniques he uses. There’s stories, examples, analogies, quotes, metaphors, and statistics.
I did an analysis of how much of the body of his talk was composed of evidence. Here are the results:
Answer your audience’s questions
May 5, 2008
Effective presentations have a structure and flow. An effective way of building the structure of your presentation is to imagine yourself answering the audience’s questions. This is what Al Gore did in his latest TED talk.
First you need to craft your Key Message. Then consider what the audience’s questions might be once you’ve stated your Key Message. Let’s do this exercise for Gore’s talk. To paraphrase, Gore’s Key Message was “We must take action”. Here are the thoughts audience members might have on hearing this message:
A Simple and Concrete Key Message
May 3, 2008
An effective way to plan a presentation is to start by crafting the Key Message. The Key Message is the one thing you most want your audience to remember.
You could also think of it as the five second version of your presentation.
