Presentation Skills - Step 2: Broad Aim

Broad Aim is where you start your preparation in earnest! You will gather information about your audience by answering four questions. This will enable you to target your Presentation to their needs and interests. 

Establishing Your Broad Aim

There are four key questions to ask in order to begin preparing your Presentation. The answers to these questions will allow you to enter the world of your audience. At first glance they may seem obvious but you would be surprised how few Presenters know this information before they stand up in front of their audience let alone before they begin preparing their Talk. 

Why are you Giving this Presentation?

Who is the Audience?

What do they Want?

What is the purpose?

We will go through each of these in turn to be clear what information you are after for each one. 

Why are you Giving this Presentation?

This is the intention behind your Presentation. Having clear intention is a very powerful way to begin. Do not be tempted to give an answer such as ‘Because I am passionate about the subject!’, or ‘Because I have to?’. That is not the information we are looking for here. Come right back in and find the reason you are giving the Presentation. 

Lets look at how this applies to three different scenarios:

To teach the ladies in the quilt group how to do my particular quilting stitch.

To secure a percentage of X Corporations charity budget to fund a project in the area they operate in the Asia Pacific region.

To explain how to build a mezzanine floor into a camper van.

Who is the Audience?

To have any chance of entering the ‘map of the world’ of your audience you need to know who they are! If you do not know then find out. Do not guess! Simply ask. You will be surprised how much information people are willing to give about themselves. 

Even before you start asking questions the internet is a remarkable resource. If you will be meeting someone with a public profile or pretty much any profile these days you can find an enormous amount of publicly available information very easily by doing searches on them. 

If you are giving a Presentation at a fair or exhibition and are wondering how on earth you could know who will be attending in advance you are about to be pleasantly surprised. Nearly all of these events have a huge amount of quality information on hand in order to sell advertising. In fact, once again, you can go usually go to their website and click through to the section for their sponsors to have all you need readily at your finger tips. 

WHAT DO THEY WANT?

This will take some research on your part but you will be surprised how available the information is and how eagerly individuals are willing to give it to you. If you know who your audience is going to be and are able to ask any of them informed questions in advance they often breathe a sigh of relief that your Presentation is not going to be a waste of their time so are happy to tell you as much as you need to know!

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE?

This last question generates our Broad Aim. The Broad Aim relates to our goal, aspirations or purpose. It is distinct from the objectives which can be described as our action plan to get there or stepping stones on the path to achieving the Broad Aim.

Exercise

Now it is your turn. If you are in the process of preparing to give a Presentation take the time to answer the questions for your own Topic. By the end you will have your Broad Aim and be ready to move on to setting your objectives which I will cover in my next post.