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. 

Presentation Skills - A step by step Guide to Putting Together a Presentation

Presentation Skills - A step by step Guide to Putting Together a Presentation

The Talkers Template serves as a step by step guide to putting together an Awesome Talk.Presentation. When you have the Topic for your Presentation and do each of the steps in the Talkers Template, you will have your Presentation prepared and ready to deliver.

Along the way we will discuss all that you need to consider in each step.

Here is how the Talkers Template works:

It has ten sections:

1. Topic

The first step,Topic will prepare you to think about how you are going to tackle the Topic of your Presentation. It will also describe how to set yourself some personal outcomes for the Presentation.

After Topic in our Talkers Template the remaining nine steps can be grouped into three distinct Parts. 

Part One is concerned primarily with the words that make up your Presentation How you compile, hone and shape these to best represent what you want to communicate. These three sections are:

2. Broad Aim

The Broad Aim: is where you start the preparation for your Presentation. Answering four key questions will give you all the background information you need to target your Presentation to the needs and interests of your audience. 

3. Objectives

Being clear about what you want to achieve with your Presentation is more than halfway to getting there. In the step on Objectives you will write yours for your Presentation. These objectives will include a way of measuring whether you have reached them at the end.

4. Content

Generating material to Present is easy but knowing what to include and leave out is the difference that makes the difference between an ordinary Presentation and an Effective one! In Content you will learn how to structure and format your Presentation in a way that will not only achieve your objectives but keep your audience engaged. 

Part Two is concerned with the physical aspects of your Presentation. How you use your environment and the things in it to bring your material to life for your audience.

5. Visual Support 

You can maintain the attention of your audience by varying the way you deliver your Presentation and the Visual Support you use. In this step we will look at the options available. 

6. Presentation Notes 

Your body language during a Presentation will be influenced by the type of Presentation notes you choose to use. This section looks at some of the options available and how best to use these to both enhance your Presentation and your interaction with your audience.

7. Practicals and Participation

Involving your audience in your Presentation is a choice that will be explored in step on Practicals and Participation. There are many subtle and obvious ways to do this with equally beneficial results. 

Part Three serves to bring all these pieces together. The whole is always more than the sum of its parts and a Presentation is no different! 

8. Introduction

It may seem strange that you write your Introduction at the end of the process but it is only when you get to the end of putting together your Presentation that you can best describe what it is you will be doing. 

9. Conclusion

You can only tell someone where you have been at the end of the journey so it is at this point in the preparation of your Presentation that you are able to write your Conclusion. We will also cover how you can set up the physical space where you will be giving your Presentation to your best advantage. How to be ready on the day with checklists of the things you will need is also covered here.

10. Title

A Title for your Presentation that strikes a chord with your audience is also best set at the very end of your preparation when you have a real sense of the big picture. It is also the moment to reflect on the process you have used. This is the time for your own mental preparation for the delivery and enjoying the day. Remembering that YOU are your most powerful visual aid this step includes some essential material on body language and how to be aware of and manage your own.

Presentation Skills for Everyone: Introduction

Presentation Skills for Everyone: Introduction

It used to be that giving Talks in front of a live audience was only expected of politicians, scholars, business execs and those with high public profiles.  But now it seems nearly all of us are expected to do this at some stage or other. Whether it is addressing a group at your childs schools, like a Parent and Friends Association meeting, outlining some of the services your business provides to potential customers at a local fair or rallying people to get involved in a community initiative, the scenarios are endless and, it would seem, ever increasing.

My name is Lindy Deveraux and I want to welcome you to Presentation Skills for Everyone. I have delivered Presentation Skills Training to many people in many countries around the world. Mainly to people from the groups I mentioned earlier. Until now there has not been a viable way to get the same quality of information out to the huge amount of people who really need it. Being able to include video and other interactive material in Blogs and enhanced ebooks now makes that possible.

Most of the material available is geared towards the Business or Professional user. Whilst the steps are not dissimilar the information is usually couched in business jargon which alienates those of us that just want to have an entertaining and useful Talk or Presentation to deliver in a less formal setting. With this blog I to provide a set of tools that are easily applied to most of the circumstances where we find ourselves having to give a Presentation. 

There is nothing quite so painful as having to sit through an ill prepared or delivered Presentation. Yet, EVERYONE can be an Effective Presenter or Awesome Talker, as we like to call it. It is not rocket science. By simply following a few steps in the right order you can prepare a Talk or Presentation that your audience will find interesting and actually enjoy. 

This blog is going to reveal how to do this easily and effectively. I have developed the Talkers Template which is a step by step guide on how to prepare and deliver your Presentation. Over the next few weeks I will be taking you through these one at a time so that by the end you will have all the elements required to put together Presentations at any time in the future. 

Your feedback and questions about your own specific needs will help flesh out the information and make it even more relevant to everyone else using it. So I look forward to hearing from you along the way.