A great speaker can captivate an audience with voice and body language alone, the rest of us need good supporting material to assist us in communicating our ideas.

Most presentations are designed to achieve one of two functions; to inform or to persuade. Whatever your goal is, the key word is “communication.” You are trying to communicate information to an audience. That information may consist of research results, training and education material, products or services information, or possibly financial reporting. As a presenter, it should be your goal to communicate your information clearly and effectively.

Planning
An effective presentation begins with the planning stage. Plan for all aspects of your presentation by asking yourself these questions early: “What is my topic? Who is my audience? What do I want the audience to learn from me? What is the purpose of this presentation? How will I deliver the presentation? How much time do I have to present?”

Topic and Purpose
Using the answers to these questions, you can create a plan for your presentation. Define your topic by writing it down. What is the basic theme of your presentation? Next, define your audience.

Every aspect of your presentation will be affected by your audience. A formal research presentation to a large international medical meeting in a 2000 seat auditorium requires quite different preparation from a talk to potential doctors and dentists at your old high school.

What is the audience’s current knowledge of your subject? Will the information be of relevance to them in their everyday lives, or are you just informing them for some other reason. For example, a talk on recent advances in our understanding of why misfolded prion protein in the cytosol is toxic and causes neurodegenerative disease given at a neurological research meeting will assume a very different level of knowledge compared with a similar talk given to a local charity group!

What will they want to learn about your topic? What information do you want to clearly communicate to this audience? Are you trying to inform them, amuse them or persuade them? Keep these answers in mind when you are developing your visuals.

Environment
Are you presenting to a large group in an auditorium, or to a few people around a conference table? The size of the screen, the size of your audience, and their distance from the screen should be determined before you begin developing the visuals. As a general rule, the larger the set, the more formal you need to make your style. You will find it hard to interact with more than 30 or 40 people, unless you are a skilled speaker.

Respect your audience, and make sure that your typography and graphics are large enough for everyone to read. Along with the venue and the audience, you need to consider the room lighting. Will the room be well lit or have low-level lighting?

Time Limit
When planning your presentation, determine how much time you will have to communicate your point. As you develop the content, you will want to practice how much time it takes to go through each slide, pacing yourself in a slightly heightened conversational tone. Whenever appropriate, plan enough time to answer questions from the audience.

Gather materials
Before you begin designing or developing your presentation, gather all existing materials required to support your subject matter. This may include logos, charts, graphs, statistics, quotations, photographs, existing slides, or any other visuals that will help you communicate. Appropriately chosen images and well-developed graphics will help you convey your message much more effectively than bullet point after bullet point of text.

Which version of PowerPoint
We will assume that you will be presenting using PowerPoint, though there other options. Which version is available on the machine from which you project the presentation? If you do not know, either find out or assume it is no more that Office 2000. This is because some of the effects that you might choose to use in PowerPoint from Office XP or even PowerPoint 2003 will not be supported.

Typically older versions of PowerPoint do not support transparency.

Making an initial impact
Those first few slides are crucial. You need to grab the attention of your audience.

Humor can make or break a presentation. Good speakers can carry it off but they are a minority. An occasional caricature or cartoon can also be useful, but never overdo it.

Make sure that your humor works! If you are planning to use a joke, first test it on friends and family or on a practice audience.

If humor is not your strong point, try an opening with impact. A colleague began a memorable talk on trauma some years ago with an image of a young girl in a car crash, who died at the scene. He asked the audience what injuries she might have died from. When he pointed out that her only problem was an obstructed airway, he grabbed the audience’s attention right away. Some call this the “a-ha” factor.

You might begin by quoting an expert on the subject who is known to the audience. The more relevant, novel, fascinating or controversial your opening quotation is the greater the impact. Be outrageous, it certainly grabs their attention! Be aware however, that outrageous must still be politically correct and definitely not offensive.

Develop an outline
The next step in preparation should be to develop an outline, listing the points you wish to cover and the order in which you will present them. This is the presentation structure, you may think of it as a skeleton that you will build upon. The outline can be very rough at this stage. As you expand these ideas into slides and rehearse your timing, you may find items that need to be cut, added or revised. Keep focused as you develop the outline, and remember your main objective of the presentation.

Now for the set up; tell them what you are going to tell them! (Once you have finished your presentation, you will want to summarize this again.)

Write script
It can be beneficial to develop a script from your outline. For certain high-level presentations, a writer will carefully craft each word of a script and the presenter will read them from a teleprompter. During these high-level presentations, an audio-visual team handles the presentation graphics and video, advancing them at pre-determined points on the script. While this may be overkill for your situation, writing a script can help you determine which words you will use in front of the audience, better preparing you for an effective delivery.

Sorry folks, that is as much of the chapter as we want to provide for your preview. The images are samples from a total of 15 in this chapter alone. To learn more, you will just have to buy the book!