Making Effective Presentations:
Introduction

The key to effective presentations lies in careful preparation. You need to know about your audience and their expectations; you need to identify your own objectives (do you intend to inform or persuade your audience?); you need to sequence your information in a logical way and you need to know the best ways to create and keep the audience's interest. You should also have your audio-visual aids ready and in the right sequence and should check that the equipment is in working order.

Your audience

Before you start to think about the content of your presentation, look at what you know about the audience. Ask yourself:

1. why they are attending
2. what they want to know
3. how much information they  have already
4. what technical language they use or are familiar with.

If you were presenting information about road safety, your approach to an audience of parents would be quite different from your approach to an audience of policemen. Parents would be concerned primarily with protecting their children. They would be looking for advice and information on safe practices. The police, on the other hand, would be far more interested in statistics, on looking for those responsible for road accidents, on the relationship between traffic regulations and safety.

Presentations for information

If you have information to give an audience, you must decide on the most logical sequence for the material. In your introduction you should state your name, your company or organization and your credentials and the purpose of your talk:

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Mary Green and I'm a consultant with the Insight Corporation. I have ten year's experience in the field of X and the purpose of my talk today is give you the results of our recent research into Y.

It is important in the first stage of the presentation to give the audience some signposts and some approximate times. This is rather like having an agenda for a meeting; the audience knows what to expect and finds it easier to follow:

My presentation today will take about fifteen minutes and falls into three stages. First I will remind you briefly of the background to the research. Next I will spend about eight minutes outlining the results and I will conclude by talking for two or three minutes about the implications of these findings. There will be another ten minutes available at the end of my talk for you to ask questions.

As you reach the end of each stage of your presentation it is a good idea to signal this:
That concludes the background information...

and to briefly summarize the main points of that section,
and, as you can see, there are two main points to bear in mind: the effects of early research on current practices and the gaps in our knowledge that were identified.
You should then signal your move to the next stage:
Now I want to turn to the results of our recent research.

 

 

For a teaching lesson plan for this lesson see: Effective Presentations Lesson Plan For teaching lessons on business and careers see:  Teaching Business Lessons and Careers

Go to Part 2: Presentations to Persuade

 

 

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