Rick Enrico Blog Archives

Presentation Tips: 5 Quick Steps to Audience Engagement

Posted on September 17, 2022May 3, 2023 by Rick E

When delivering presentations, nothing is more important than connecting with your audience.

It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to close in on a deal or proposing a new project to the higher-ups. You can’t say that your ideas have been well-received if the audience can’t engage with your pitch. It’s not enough to pique their interest with a few video clips or anecdotes.

Before focusing on the spectacle, you must ensure your presentation is perfectly executed. Your ability to present with clarity and certainty is essential to audience engagement.

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Here are quick presentation tips to make sure your audience has an engaging experience:

Learn your presentation inside and out

I’m sure you’ve sat through a presentation where the speaker constantly stammered through their speech, trying hard to remember what to say next. No matter how attractive their material was, the uncertainty in their delivery probably proved to be distracting. To avoid being in a similar situation, you must learn every detail of your presentation.

Audience engagement rests in your ability to command attention. You can’t do that if you’re reading from your slides or fidgeting with note cards. The audience needs to see that you know what you’re saying. Take the time to rehearse your presentation as much as you can. You can also try the memory palace technique to memorize your key points.

Condense your PowerPoint deck

By now, we’re all familiar with “death by PowerPoint.” There’s no easier way to disengage an audience than by presenting them with slides loaded with too much information. If your slides are complete with indecipherable charts and text, take a step back and focus on your visuals.

Instead of filling your PowerPoint deck with bullet points and text, try to illustrate your points. Use images and other multimedia elements to articulate your ideas.

When dealing with data, you must decide which ones are the most relevant to your core message. Several online tools can help you with data visualization.

Tailor your presentation to the audience

Very few presenters consider the perspective of their audience. Their presentations often sound like generic spiels because of this.

How do you connect with something you’ve heard a million times before? To stand out, you need to remember that the audience isn’t a homogeneous group. The people sitting in your audience are individuals with unique perspectives and opinions. In other words, audience engagement relies on your ability to personalize your message.

To get inside their heads, you need to ponder four important questions. Answering these will give you the necessary context to create a presentation that will pull your audience in:

Who are they?
Why are they coming?
What action do you want them to take?
Why might they resist your message?

Keep everyone interested by creating soft breaks.

Audience engagement would be much easier if it weren’t for our short attention spans. With so many tasks begging for attention these days, it’s no surprise the average adult’s attention span is only a few minutes short.

As hard as you try to simplify your message and learn more about the audience, it’s hard to contend with everyone’s shifting attention.

That’s why presentation expert Carmine Gallo emphasized the importance of the 10-minute rule. If you lose the attention of your audience, you can re-engage them by creating “soft breaks” after every 10 minutes or so. Give them a chance to pause and digest new information by incorporating videos, demonstrations, and other activities.

Try to create an interactive environment by posing questions they can answer through polls or a show of hands. If you want to, you can also call up other people from your team to share a new perspective with the audience.

Deliver your presentation with passion and enthusiasm

Finally, lead by example. If your presentation delivery falls flat, your audience will quickly pick up on that. You can’t expect them to feel enthusiastic about the ideas you’re sharing if you’re mumbling through your presentation.

You need to show how passionate you are about your subject matter. That’s the only way to deliver a message that will make others feel the same way.

It isn’t hard to deliver a presentation that engages and connects with an audience. In five easy steps, you can easily ensure that your message sticks and stays with everybody.

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Featured Image: Steven Lilley via Flickr

5 Effective PowerPoint Delivery Methods for Presentations

Posted on September 16, 2015April 15, 2020 by Rick E

Most presenters barely notice what particular presentation technique they’re using whenever they take the stage. This is because they’re not fully aware of how it could influence both their performance and their audience. When you prepare your pitch, decide whether you want to use a fast-paced approach or spend more time discussing your main points.

This provides a guide for organizing your ideas and translating them to your slides. While there are many presentation styles which work best for different speakers, there are also PowerPoint delivery methods that they can use to optimize their slides. Here, we’ll define some techniques introduced and practiced by popular presenters:

The Takahashi Method

Named after Masoyoshi Takahashi, this approach relies heavily on keywords with one main point placed per slide. Instead of using images, bullet points, or other visual elements, words are used as visuals.

This method requires many slides (depending on your content) since each one only has a few words displayed. Applying this method encourages your audience to pay more attention to you as the speaker, since you are the one explaining what’s projected on-screen.

The Kawasaki Method

Named after Guy Kawasaki, and also known as the “10-20-30” method (10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 font size). This approach is commonly used for investor presentations where a short yet impactful approach is needed to stand out among the competition.

This allows you to give brief but understandable messages within a limited time.

The Lessig Method

Used by Lawrence Lessig, this style has a limited use of images, relying more on words, similar to Takahashi’s style. Concise words or statements are used and slides are changed around, depending on the words the presenter delivers.

This focuses more on telling a story and injects a more synchronized approach, generating interest and allowing audiences to be more attentive.

The Godin Method

Seth Godin’s technique is a combination of texts and images, where the speaker uses striking photos to let the pictures speak for themselves. This lets him explain what he’s trying to point out and reiterate his main ideas through images.

This approach differs from Takahashi and Lessig’s, since they’re more focused on conveying their message primarily with text. The advantage? Using this appeals to the audience’s passions and establishes an emotional connection with them.

The Steve Jobs Method

Steve Jobs’ style concentrates on large images and texts, focusing on one statement per slide and combining it with visual elements. This gives the presenter the chance to offer demonstrations and allow a more interactive way of communicating his ideas.

This method enables your performance to be more interesting and powerful, allowing the audience to get the message easily for maximum impact.

In Conclusion

Let your objectives dictate your manner of presenting. Situations requiring brevity and conciseness might require the Kawasaki Method. The Takahashi and Lessig methods favor a confident presenting style to better focus attention on the speaker. The Godin and Jobs methods use strong images that create strong emotional connections.

The key is to understand and identify your objective as a presenter. Once you know this, you can then decide on what presentation style to use. Choose which one of the delivery methods suits you the most. Let SlideGenius experts help you out!

Making Your PowerPoint Accessible for the Visually Impaired

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Rick E

When you’re up on the stage, you may notice that the crowd isn’t paying attention to your PowerPoint.

They might not be satisfied with your delivery style and content. But what if this disengagement is because of its design?

Though you may have used a template that appeals to you, you might unknowingly be making it harder for people look at what you’re trying to present.

To get your message across, it’s imperative to engage the audience in your discussion.

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There’s More of Them Than You Think

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “[In 2015] 285 million people are estimated to be visually impaired worldwide—39 million are blind and 246 have low vision, which are caused by uncorrected refractive errors.” This means that your audience might be comprised of both people with normal vision and people with visual impairments.

Just because they’re not wearing prescription glasses doesn’t mean they’ve got perfect eyesight. Some people wear contact lenses or don’t even know they have a problem with their eyes.

Regardless of what corrective wear they’re using, an audience member’s visual impairment could be the reason they struggle to understand your presentation.

Common Visual Impairments

Low vision, color blindness, and dyslexia are three of the most common vision impairments.

For people with poor vision, objects appear out of focus whether they are near or far.

Color-defective people have a decreased ability to distinguish colors from others. Red and green are the most common colors that are hard to differentiate, while and blue and yellow are the least common.

People with a reading disability or dyslexia can take longer than others to identify colors, objects, or numbers.

This is what people with clear eyesight see versus what color-deficient people see:

If you’re new to making your design accessible to more people, don’t fret. Here are few basic guidelines:

How to Make Your Design More Accessible

Choose a Readable Font

Managing your content’s font and size helps your audience read your slides from a distance. The World Blind Union (WBU) highly suggests using sans serif font types such as Helvetica, Arial, and Verdana. Unlike serif typefaces, these font styles don’t have small finishing strokes, which makes them more legible and readable for people with low vision and dyslexia.

Left: “Sans” in sans serif font, without finishing strokes; Right: “Serif” in serif font, with finishing strokes.

When deciding what font size to use, consider what a comfortable viewing distance would be for a person seated across you—32-point is the ideal text size to use in most room settings. This is so that near-sighted people can understand what you’re pointing to, even from a distance.

Control Brightness and Contrast

Your template may have a vibrant and powerful look, but is it readable for your viewers?

Even if you painstakingly selected appealing colors for your PowerPoint, it’ll work against you if they’re virtually identical to each other. Using appropriate brightness and contrast is a great way to improve the readability of your slides.

Try employing a light background with dark text and graphics for your slides. This combination provides enough contrast that boosts the readability of your work for anybody who might have trouble distinguishing one color from another. When deciding on your color palette, always go for clarity instead of only visually appealing colors.

2015-14-06-SGBlog-FC-IMG04-PowerPoint_Presentations_for_the_Visually_Impair — A good and bad example of color brightness and contrast. Here, white text pops out more on a dark blue background and is much more readable compared to a slightly lighter text of the same color. Image Credit: Effective vs. Ineffective

Limit Animations and Effects

Animations and effects might not sit well with visually impaired people, so keep them at a minimum.

Partially-sighted audiences wait for the text to stop moving before they can start reading it. Steer clear from moving text effects such as “Fly In,” “Bounce,” “Spiral,” or “Zoom.”

2015-14-06-SGBlog-FC-IMG01-PowerPoint_Presentations_for_the_Visually_Impaired — An example of text that has been unnecessarily distorted, making it harder to read without adding meaningful impact.

When it comes to choosing the appropriate effect, “Appear” suits most presentations because it’s the simplest and quickest animation.

Any effects that show one bullet point at a time are also good effects to consider. These help your viewers focus on specific points without getting overwhelmed by too much text on the screen all at once.

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Preparing an effective PowerPoint is already a challenge. Preparing one for a visually impaired audience is even tougher.

Match your delivery technique with these design tips to provide a fully accessible presentation while leaving a great impact on your viewers.

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References:

“How To Make Visual Presentations Accessible To Audience Members With Print Impairments.” World Blind Union, 2012. Accessed March 24, 2015.
“Comfortable Viewing Distance for Text on Presentation Visuals.” Think Outside the Slide. n.d. Accessed March 24, 2015.
“Choosing the Right Colors for Your PowerPoint Design.” SlideGenius, Inc. June 3, 2014. Accessed March 24, 2015
“Design 101: Basic Principles for Your PowerPoint Designs.” SlideGenius, Inc. July 31, 2014. Accessed March 24, 2015
“Visual Impairment And Blindness.” World Health Organization. August 2014. Accessed March 24, 2015.

Update: There are now 1.3 billion people living with some form of visual impairment worldwide. Thirty-six million are blind while 217 million people have mild to severe vision impairment. (2018)

Featured Image: Pixabay