Presenting for an audience, do's and don'ts.

In school and the professional world we all have to give presentations. Some of us love it, some hate it, but we all use Powerpoint for it. Personally I have a love-hate relationship with that program but must admit that it’s the easiest way to quickly collect the information you want to show. Maybe Bunkr is a good alternative to Powerpoint, but have to try it out myself first… But let me share some things to make presentations more fun for everyone (presenter and viewers!).

How to start?

People are still coming in, they are talking with each other, … but you have to start! So grab the attention. Switch out the lights for instance or start with asking a question! You must start with capturing the attention of your audience and you have only 60 seconds to do so. So here are 5 killer ways to open up your next presentation on slideshare.

How to (not) present it?

At the bottom of this article is a nice infographic with a list of 10 ways to kill your audience during a presentation. Click here for the original version.

A lot of the same remarks are in this movie with Don McMillan:

An other movie with tips is on the TedX site:

6 tips on how scientists and engineers can excite, rather than bore, an audience

And this is a movie from TEDxFlanders with Lars Sudmann “On public speaking”:

The best and most inspiring keynote presentation I saw myself was from Aral Balkan at Multi-Mania in 2012: A Happy Grain of Sand the video is from an other event). A few weeks ago he gave a training about presenting (Slide & Stage) which I unfortunately could not attend myself. But Aral shared his notes & links so go and learn from the master… These slides do not include all that was covered, and good slides wouldn’t, as a slide deck should “compliment” your talk, not replace it.

How to end?

“Audiences all over the world want one thing from a presentation, to be entertained. If the best content rich presentation has no humor, then it will always lose out to the maybe empty but funny presentation, where you probably didn’t learn a dot, but you had a good time. Its just human nature. "

So leave your audience laughing and end with a funny twist in your conclusions.

An example?

On this link you can find an example of how a bad presentation (from NSA) looks when a designer reworks it…

Before:

After:

Death by Powerpoint: Top 10 Ways to make your Audience Suicidal during a Presentation