For Captivating Presentations, Include These Three Things

Engage your audience with these presentation tips

Three Minute Train the Trainer #23

Let me tell you a story about a disastrous presentation I organized early in my Learning & Development career.

I can’t remember the topic. It was boring, something like contract law, and I had arranged for a local lawyer to present the content.

He assured me that the day would be interactive and that he had plenty of props to keep the audience engaged.

Let’s be polite and say we had a miscommunication. The presentation was deadly dull. Our guest presenter stood at the front of the room and read out slides.

Want to learn more leadership skills to boost your career? Click here to get your free weekly newsletter about leadership & training best practices.

No interaction, no clever training props, no nothing except his voice.

When I joined the managers for morning tea, they all complained, and a couple of them refused to return to the course, saying it was a waste of time.

I was mortified, but I learned a valuable lesson about interrogating guest presenters before I let them loose on my trainees.

Making a presentation or training course engaging is easy. To ensure that you don’t ruin your presentation and you capture the audience’s attention, here are three things to include:

1. Interaction

No one wants to sit in a presentation with no interaction. It isn’t very interesting, and people will drift off, look at their phones, or start planning dinner.

Or, like in my disastrous presentation, they won’t come back from breaks, citing a sudden emergency.

To ensure you provide the opportunity for interaction, you need to plan.

Here are some interactions you can weave into your presentation:

• Ask people about their prior knowledge of the topic, preferably at the presentation’s start.
• Ask the trainees with experience to share their wisdom — ‘Jane, when you were customer service manager at XYZ, how did you approach ABC?’
• Get people to work in pairs or groups to answer a question.
• Ask people to summarize key points.
• Ask questions — ask the question first, then pick someone to answer, and then everyone will get busy thinking of an answer.
• Exercises, games, and activities
• Get the trainees to draw mind maps, flow charts, or schematics to illustrate what you have just said.
• Brainstorms.
• Physical activities such as standing up and stretching.
• A one-minute mindfulness exercise.
• Ask the attendees to write on flip charts or whiteboards with answers to questions or present a summary of key points.
• Ask pairs or groups to present information back to the group.
• Ask people to scribe on the whiteboard or flip chart or help with the tech.
• Role plays.

“The more involvement there is, the more likely they are to connect with and remember the content. Whereas, when there is less involvement retention is diminished. With the right interaction, trainers can create deeper, more meaningful learning experiences as well as creating more focused and engaged participants.” — Five Reasons Interaction is Important in Training, Marc Ratcliffe, www.mrwed.edu.au

It’s worth planning ahead. Work out what questions you will ask, what activities you will do, and how you will engage your audience throughout your presentation.

There are heaps of ways to get people to interact. It just takes a bit of thought. Most of the above suggestions take little preparation, just a plan of what you’ll ask the trainees to do, a whiteboard and some pens.

To ensure your presentation has the best chance of being interactive, setting the tone straight away is preferable. Ensure you are set up well in good time so you can chat with the trainees as they arrive and raise the energy level in the room right from the start.

2. Props or training aids

How much effort you put into creating props or training aids depends on the duration of the presentation, the number of presentations, and the importance of the content.

For a presentation that takes an hour, and if you are only running a few, I’d create some questions and leave it at that.

But if you need to keep your audience engaged for longer, training aides are a useful tool.

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” — Benjamin Franklin

Here are some examples:

• Card sorts — ask the students to sort things into categories.
• Flashcards — questions on one side, answers on the other.
• Puzzles — chop up a laminated image and get the trainees to assemble it.
• Matching games — match the definition/description to the picture.
• Photos — you can use photos as topic prompts or blow them up for the trainees to write answers on.
• Fill in the gaps exercises — create sentences with missing words and ask your students to fill in the gaps.
• A quiz — prepare the questions, and have a prize for the winners.
• Practicing with equipment — for example, if you are training people how to use radios, use radios to practice in the training. Or if you are showing people some policies, get them to locate them on the company’s intranet on their laptops.
• Models.
• Lego — you can get people to build things as a team building exercise.
• Pre-prepared flip charts.
• Flip charts with gaps for the trainees to fill in.
• Role-play scenarios.
• Case studies for discussion.
• Things for people to play with — such as stress balls or fidget spinners.

You need the course to be interactive, but it’s also essential to present using the different learning styles.

Discussion, questions, and quizzes will suit the audio learners, and the visual learners will like charts, graphs, and schematics.

Kinesthetic learners need something to do, which is why training aids like card sorts and puzzles work.

The read/write learners need handouts and something to write notes on, and all types of learners need some interaction.

Using training aids is a fun way to liven up your session. Be wary of how much time you invest in creating them, though.

Knock yourself out for a long course you will present over and over. For a shorter presentation, keep it simple. Otherwise, the return on your time isn’t worth it.

3. Relevant and engaging slides

Yes, you can still have your PowerPoint slides. People are so used to slides that your audience would be surprised at their absence.

But, and this is a big, capital BUT, you should never inflict Death by PowerPoint on your audience.

There is no point in having slides that are:

• Full of words — give out a handout or direct the trainees to an online resource instead.
• Read out by the trainees — get the information across in a more interactive way.
• Too small to read — give out a handout or direct the trainees to an online resource instead.

What you can use PowerPoint for:

• Engaging visuals that act as a prompt.
• Bullet point headings that serve as a prompt — headings only, no detail, no more than seven on a page.
• Quiz or multiple-choice questions.
• Showing embedded videos.
• Mix and match games.
• Instructions for activities.
• Timers for activities.

If your students need the course content, you can provide it digitally or as a workbook, not via PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is a valuable training aid, but you need more than PowerPoint slides in a presentation.

Summary

If you are presenting, it’s for a good reason, so make sure your audience is listening.

If your trainees are bored, they will switch off.

Luckily, delivering an interesting presentation is easy if you put in a small amount of effort.

Remember:

• Involve the audience
• Include training props and aides
• Avoid Death by PowerPoint

Always be aware of any physical or mobility restrictions, neurodivergence or literacy issues your audience may have.

Do this, and I know you’ll be great!

Want to learn more leadership skills to boost your career? Click here to get your free weekly newsletter about leadership & training best practices. You’ll also get a free e-book, The New Leader’s Starter Kit.