Know Your Audience
You must have a rapport with the audience. You must know what really interests them - this will require a little research on your part. You cannot properly relate to people you don't know. Embrace your audience. Remember, it is about them, not you. Are you going to challenge them to think differently, behave differently or perhaps, confirm them?
The Rule of Tell'em
Tell'em what you are going to Tell'em, Show it to them, and then Tell'em what you showed them.
Start your presentation with the punch line. A lot of people have trouble with this one. Presentations are not mystery novels or crossword puzzles - don't depend on your audience to to do anything but go where you lead them.
Most people do not remember much of what they hear or see. Usually most presenters will be lucky if half of the audience can tell their friends what the presentation was about with any accuracy right after the show! So how can you get your audience to remember what you want them to? Put your conclusion as your first slide after the title slide. This slide should follow logically from the points you will be making and will help the audience to focus in on what you consider important throughout the rest of your presentation.
Your "tell'em" slide should be the thing they remember first. Several days or weeks later they might also remember the logical organization of your ideas and points, but only if they can remember your main point or conclusion (your "tell'em"). So emphasize your conclusion!
"If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time — a tremendous whack."
— Winston Churchill
The KISS Principle - Keep It Simple Stupid
There are numerous ways to apply this principle. The more complicated you let things get, the more trouble you can expect. Keep the presentation itself simple, straight forward, and direct. Avoid convolution and complexity. Make it all simple for the audience. If they want to know the whole story - they can "read the book" on their own later.
Don't try out new equipment 15 minutes before the presentation starts. Avoid the number one mistake in the speaking business...failing to check your audio-visual equipment before your presentation. Show up early to check out the sound system and any other equipment you will be using.
Keep your presentation focused on the message, don't get carried away with special effects and razzle-dazzle. Real presentations are not sales vehicles or media events. A presentation is not a form of Park Avenue advertising. A presentation can be used to help convince a client that he should buy your product, but shouldn't include dancing girls and boys and loud music.
Powerful Speech Points
1. Ease the audience into your presentation. Take 30 seconds to three minutes to introduce yourself and your material before getting into the meat of it. Grab the audience's attention in the first few minutes with a question, startling comment, inspiring story, or funny experience. This will help you connect immediately with everyone and reduce the tension. Stay away from jokes!
2. Tell stories not facts. Don't be a newscaster, be a story-teller. Stories are the best way to illustrate points. Use stories and don't just repeat the information on your statistics slides, data, charts and quotes. NEVER become a master of ceremonies to your slides. Every 5-7 minutes, back up your facts with signature stories. People retain information better when hearing a story.
3. Keep the audience awake. Don't darken the room too much. Keep the room as light as possible to keep the audience's attention.
4. Present no more than four points. Often, presenters have a broad focus and provide too much detail on a subject. Stick to only four points with a narrow focus.
5. Keep in the present. Speak in the present tense to get the audience to feel involved. The most important objective of any speaker is to appear credible and knowledgeable about his or her subject. Speak to your audience as if you were having a conversation. Look at one person long enough to deliver one complete thought, then move to another individual and repeat the process. Everyone else in the audience will also feel attended to.
6. Save hand-outs for last. Don't give hand-outs before you start your presentation or the audience will be distracted.
7. Ask questions and answers at the end of your speech. Always allow a few minutes to respond to questions and answers.
Bonus Tips: Don't say thank you. Use a better tag line. End with an idea or challenge instead of saying a limp thank you. Use humor. When you get the audience laughing, your points hit home and you gain audience control. Give the audience praise. Know something about your audience and find an opportunity to praise them. When addressing a group that has been a part of a worthwhile community project or other important event, acknowledge them for it.
Rehearse Your Presentation
Forget about winging it. You need to know your presentation in order to keep to the point and not wander. You don't want to memorize your script either - otherwise why do it live at all? It would be pointless to gather everyone together and play them a recording. That's what you will be doing when you memorize your script and "play it back" when the lights go down. You need to know your script well enough so that you will not have to pause to compose your thoughts. You want to present - not recite. Rehearsal is essential to gain the smoothness you will need to have the audience concentrate on the point you are making and not your nervousness, your ineptitude at operating the projector, laser pointer, computer, public address system or even room lights. Rehearsal is also essential to help you become comfortable and familiar with the flow of ideas throughout your presentation and appear to talk comfortably about them.
Articulate your consonants. Mumbling is the most annoying habit of speech. Consonants are what make speech intelligible, the "bread and butter" of speech. If people have to work to understand what you're saying, they'll stop listening. Use inflection and pronounce all syllables. You will sound more professional when you do. The voice has a natural range of 5-8 tones that give it vitality and add color and interest to what you're saying. Fading away or dropping ends of sentences will leave the listener in the dark. If the point is important enough to be made, it's important enough to be heard. Tape yourself and learn what your voice sounds like. Identify the speech habits you want to eliminate and develop. Be optimistic, it is possible to improve how you speak if you simply start working on it.
Implicit in rehearsal is the assumption that you are well prepared and will not wait till the last minute to throw everything together. Few presentations are really ever "finished" and it is normal to put polish and finishing touches on your presentation right up to the last minute. But there is a big difference between polishing up well chosen ideas and starting the creative process two days before you have to be the star.
Actually, a very good twenty minute speech can be put together in an hour or two if you know your subject. But, a presentation is not simply a speech. Speeches can be moving things to listen to and argue a point about a topic very well (its been done for centuries). But creating a presentation is similar to making a movie. A presentation will usually be very in-depth and technical about a topic in a way that a speech is not. Presentations are much more fact-oriented and have a visual component that speeches do not. The most straight-forward presentation is one that mirrors your words on the screen. Although words can be very powerful, the real power of a presentation is the imagery associated with it. Coming up with the right imagery is what will usually take the most time and be the most challenging creatively. Time needs to be allotted to determine which imagery is best for your presentation.
Once you have a well established presentation you know front to back, what else can you do to get into the hearts and minds of the audience? Add emotional content. Be enthusiastic, passionate and confident in your conclusion. Start with your conclusion, be confident and enthusiastic about it. Lay it out for the audience point by point as your presentation progresses always showing your passion for the topic. Rehearsal is the only way to practice infectious enthusiasm. Practice pausing before and after important points. Don't be afraid to leave open space. The use of silence is a key requirement to becoming an effective speaker.
It is sometimes helpful if you have the time to rehearse in front of a live "test" audience. Eliminate your "tell'em" and conclusion slides from the presentation and only show the body of the presentation. Then see what they found interesting, memorable, or confusing. Have them list what they thought was most important and find out if they got your message. Use this information to polish and refine your presentation.
Dress For Success
Common sense stuff. Have a freshly shaved or powdered or combed face. Working alone in your cubicle or in your lab or workshop is one thing. Getting up in front of your peers to present your important idea is another. If you show them you don't value the occasion, then why should they? Presentations don't always require a suit and tie, but don't choose your time in the public eye to show off your anti-social behavior. Always be a step above the audience. If it's business casual, be a little dressier than casual.
Pace
Not too fast and not too slow. How much time do you have and how many words do you plan to say? Everyone wants to put as much as possible into their presentation. Unfortunately, most people put in too much and end up either sounding like motor mouths or run too long and are cut off when the next group starts coming into the room. Speaking at 200 words per minute is too fast for your audience to be comfortable. Often silence makes a far better point than a buzz of words and you should use a moment of silence to preceed your important points. If you have rehearsed well, you know how long your presentation will take, give or take a ten percent. You need to sound relaxed, smooth, and thoughtful. Your thoughts should progress logically and your slides should flow accordingly.
There are no fixed rules about how long each slide should be up. But if a slide is up less than 15 seconds or longer than two minutes, there should be a good reason. If you are spending several minutes on one slide, think about having several slides with smaller content. Some charts or graphs might take quite a while to present, so there are good reasons to leave a slide up for a while. Once you are done talking from a slide loose it. Don't leave slides up that are not pressing on to the next point. That means for a 30 minute presentation you need to have no fewer than 16 slides or no more than about 65 or 70.
Watch the weatherman on the news broadcast in the morning. His or her images are seldom up for more than seven seconds and they talk like motor-mouths. In about a minute you are given more information than you can possibly remember, but if you are listening you can pull out just the information you are interested in. So when you have a whole bunch of information to present, only some of which might be of interest to a particular individual, use the weatherman approach, but not for longer than a few minutes because your audience will tune you out.