Understand The Situation

Is there any opportunity for audience interaction?

One of the best ways to keep an audience engaged in a presentation is to make sure they play a part. We all remember this from high school: there was the class where the teacher spent the whole time talking to a chalkboard without ever stopping to ask for questions, or to look at the class. Had he turned around, he would have seen a good third of the students asleep on their desks and the other two thirds drawing on their notebooks or making origami.

From our education, we also remember the classes that kept us actively involved in the process. The teachers posed questions, waited for responses, and then asked if we had questions before they moved to the next topic.

The same concepts apply to any presentation: the more the audience is involved, the better. You can't usually give adults homework the night before a presentation, but you can draw on the experience they already have. You can ask them questions. You can ask them what they expect to get out of the meeting. You can ask for suggestions, for help, advice, past experiences. You can also pause for Q&A before you move from one topic to the next. Not only does this keep the individual person in the audience involved in what you're saying, it also changes the speaker around so the rest of the audience is not listening to a single voice the entire time. Bringing your audience in broadens the range of viewpoints and expertise that are brought to the table, improving the process for everyone.

Clearly, not every rhetorical situation lends itself to all kinds of audience participation. A small department meeting has limitless opportunities, but a presentation to the school board has few. However, accounting for the level of participation that is appropriate to both the rhetorical situation and the physical space will help you make sure your audience is a central element in your presentation.

That leads to the next point in our discussion: audience analysis.

Speaker, know thy audience.

You will hear so much about audience during this class that you may end hearing it in your sleep. Whether you are giving a presentation, writing a newspaper article, singing a song in a pub, or performing at the Met, there is absolutely no element that is more critical to human communication than understanding who your audience is. Is it a hiring manager, the School Board, the Town Council, or upper management at your company? What motivates them? What are their goals and objectives, and what will absolutely shut them down?

As they say, there is a time and a place for everything--the key is understanding what "thing" is right for this time and place. You can begin to arrive at that understanding by asking a few simple questions.

What does the audience already know?

First of all, think about what your audience already know about this subject. Their level of expertise will determine the way you present your information. For example, if you are a guest speaker at a school, and your topic is the space program, the way you structure your presentation will need to be very different if you are talking to a group of first graders, a group of high school freshmen in the honors science program, or a group of at-risk seniors who have no understanding of physics. Presenting highly technical information to the first graders would bore them to tears. Presenting it to the at-risk teens would waste a good opportunity to reach someone with some fascinating fun facts, but giving your freshman honors students the "fun" version might seem like pandering.

Bottom line: understand who you're talking to so that you can maximize your opportunity.

What do they need to know?

Once you have a fairly good idea of what your audience already know about the topic, then you can refine what they need to know. To do this, let's return to our discussion of the rhetorical situation, and the question of what has happened/what needs to happen. Just take a few minutes thinking about how much information they need to get to "what needs to happen."

In the previous scenario of the department head at the microchip company, what needed to happen was that our department head needed to not get fired. Management had to understand the major factors that contributed to the incident, and the whole team needed to walk away with an understanding of their part in preventing a similar event from occurring again.

To do this, our department manager will need to make a list of all the key factors that contributed to the incident and explain them to management. The management team does not need an excruciating level of detail, just a general understanding.

What are their motivations and priorities?

In order to make the whole presentation more meaningful to the audience, it is extremely helpful to understand what their motivations and priorities are. As with the other topics we have discussed in this section, there is no one-size-fits all way to approach an audience. Understanding their wants and needs will help you present your information in a way that is meaningful to them.

Let's say you sell one product: photocopiers. You might go around the country giving sales presentations to groups of 10-15 people, explaining the merits of your one photocopier. There may be 25 reasons why you should buy that one photocopier, but you will soon learn that any single group of people will only care about five of those reasons, because those reasons match their particular goals. Your prospective client could be focused on cost-cutting and would want to focus on how much less expensive your product is than your competitor's model. Or, they may have a culture of quality at every level, and would rather hear about the machine's reliability and performance.

Understanding what your audience wants and needs will help you find the right way to frame your presentation so that it resonates with them. And if we haven't made it clear by now, the presentation is all about them.

How do they feel about you and your idea?

It has happened before: people get so excited about one of their ideas. If they are surrounded by like-minded people much of the time, they can develop idea insulation. Then, when they go to speak to a group of people with different backgrounds, goals and objectives, they are often surprised to realize that their concepts just don't fly as well as they thought they would. This speaker often arrives expecting to give a pep-talk and unity message, not realizing that he has walked into the lion's den. If he's very savvy, the speaker in this position reads attitude and body language quickly and adapts on his feet. If he is not paying attention, it can turn into a very unpleasant day, possibly involving the throwing of week-old vegetables.

With a bit of research, a presenter can get a pretty good idea about how his audience feels about him and his idea before he walks into the meeting room, and can tailor his message as necessary to spend more time on persuasion and addressing objections. The easiest way to get a sense of what to expect of the audience is just to ask a few members of the group.

If you are presenting to a group you don't know well, consider talking to your major point of contact to simply ask, "Do you have any sense about how the group feels about this idea?"

If you are working with a group you already know, chances are you already know how they feel about you--it's a good idea to take those feelings into consideration when planning your presentation. Although you can't change who you are, you can be aware of the issues your audience may have and be prepared to address them.

Why are they there?

Another good clue to your audience's predetermined view of your idea can be why they are attending this presentation in the first place. In other words, did they choose to give up their Saturday afternoon to hear you speak about gardening, or is this a mandatory meeting they couldn't get out of? The reason for their presence will greatly impact their mood and attitude, and the kinds of strategies you will have to use to reach them.

In the case of the Saturday afternoon gardeners, their attention is already yours, but the pressure is on to make sure they get as much out of the experience as they expect. To do this, again, a little research is in order. If you know some of the attendees, you can ask them what they're expecting. If you have an email list, you can send out a proposed agenda ahead of time and ask for additions and special requests. Don't make the audience think you don't know what you want to discuss, but do let them know you are flexible and you want to make the experience useful for them.

In the case of the mandatory meeting the audience couldn't get out of, don't assume you can just put something together at the last minute because you have a captive audience. The captive audience can be very difficult to reach--but if you don't make the effort, then the net effect is negative feelings and an hour of ineffective time. To try to reach them, start by putting yourself in their shoes, and try to remember a time when you had pressing deadlines and had to be somewhere you did not want to be. Then make sure you have reviewed all the guidelines given here to make your presentation as focused and targeted as possible. With this group especially, it is critical to respect their time limits.

How much time will they give you?

Remember, no matter why people come to the meeting, they always have competing commitments.

Before you begin the nitty-gritty of planning the presentation, make sure you understand how much time you will have. The level of detail you can provide will vary greatly depending on whether you have two hours or five minutes to speak. For extremely short presentations (for example, a strictly-enforced three-minute limit for public access mic time at a School Board meeting) simply outline your central points (we'll discuss this later in this training) with a goal of getting the group to schedule more time for you at a later date.

Then, when you get more time, think about how much information you can effectively present in the given amount of time. Avoid throwing more information at people than they can readily digest. When time is short, stick to the high-level view. When you have more time, develop the ideas more fully and incorporate more audience participation.

When you reach a point where you are developing a series of meetings--like a semester-long course, all these same principles still apply, the organization just has to be taken one level further.

Whatever amount of time you have, make sure you respect the time limit. No matter who your audience is or why they are attending your meeting, they always have competing commitments and obligations. In a lively meeting, conversation and debate may make the meeting last longer than expected. That kind of interaction is exactly what a healthy presentation should look like, so don't cut it short (unless another group needs your meeting space), but do provide an opportunity for people to escape gracefully if they have another appointment they need to rush off to. This can be as simple as taking a minute to recap at the end of the appointed time, and letting the antsy people know that if they need to leave, now is the time.