Top 5 Strategies to facilitate Effective Presentation
May 24, 2022
Are you a professional and want to give an effective presentation or a fresher looking forward to present for the first time? If your answer is, here are my top 5 Strategies to facilitate Effective Presentation. Let’s get started.
1. 10 Minutes Rule – Did you ever notice duration of LinkedIn learning videos or TED talk? Well LinkedIn learning each video is less than 8 min and TED talk is around 18min. What does it mean? Less is always more. We human have little attention span and find it difficult to focus on anything that goes beyond 10-18 min. Once I was called for a conference to speak for 10min and I really struggled initially to curtail my talk from 45 min to 10min, eventually I found it was worth doing it. Ideal duration for the presentation is 10-20min, beyond this discussion dilutes.
2. Stand and Talk – We think better on our feet. Experiment it, give a talk while standing once and another time try giving it by standing right in front of audience. It not only provides 360 movement space, but also space for utilizing appropriate hand gesture, body gesture and better interaction with audience. There are various hand and standing gestures are there to enhance the talk while you stand and talk. Will discuss about it some other time.
3. Lean – Simple is always effective. Keep the presentation as lean as possible. A picture is worth, use picture, graph wherever possible in place of long sentences or complex numbers. Apply 5*5 rule, no more than 5 sentences in a slide, and each sentence be maximum 5 words. Title to be as small as possible. One idea per slide. Keep it simple. These are some ways to keep the presentation lean.
4. Tell a story – Presentation is like a story telling, its more effective when there is a logical sequence. Story has 3 parts: –
a. As-Is situation, current stage, introduction.
b. Challenges, twist in story, action and last one
c. Victory, achievements, proposal to management, achieved targets/objectives.
Tell a story to engage effectively and long-lasting effect.
5. Focus on only 2-5 take away/objectives – Focus on maximum 5 learning outcomes, decision to be made or points for discussion. More number of topics you try to cover will dissolve the focus of audience and leave them perplexed. Prioritize 2-3 points and focus on developing the presentation around it. There are hundreds of effective presentation ideas, however I prioritized top 5 for audience to get maximum benefit. Also its easy to remember and practically possible to implement them.
Please practice these top strategies and share your experience in comments.
Exercise- Give a presentation before applying these strategies and note in a journal. Give the same/similar presentation using these strategies and compare the improvement.
