Convincing presentations

Good preparation and observing a handful of tips can help to improve your presentation and make it more convincing.

Successful and entertaining presentations are no coincidence!

Everyone can give a good presentation. Following a few of the tips on this page, you too can inspire with your next presentation.

Slides often contain too much text. The presentation remains monotonous throughout; the presenter or speaker simply reads the slides, and the audience get bored.

This does not have to be the case remembering a few simple rules.

Preparation

• Think carefully about what you want to achieve with your presentation. Then organize your presentation around this goal.
• Three statements can hold your audience. Choose these carefully.
• Practice your presentation, if possible in the room where you will eventually give it.
• Check the technical equipment, e.g. your flipchart, pencils or the beamer. It is unprofessional to solve technical problems in front of the audience and disturbs the presentation.

Slides

• Keep the amount of content on PowerPoint slides to a minimum. No one can or wants to listen to you speak and read PowerPoint slides with the same content at the same time.
• Use the power of images. Find suitable images to trigger desired emotions. Emotions will make your presentation more exciting, and the audience will remember the presentation better.
• Slides are not a handout. If your slides are too self-explanatory, the audience will not need you as a speaker. If necessary, create two variants (slides as a handout, and slides for the presentation).
• Use animations only where they make sense in terms of content.
• Choose a large font size (at least 20 pt), so that your audience can read the font well, even from a distance.

During the presentation

• Involve your audience! Remember: "I forget what I hear. I remember what I see. I understand deeply what I do. "“
• Make a change. Audience focus begins to decrease after just ten minutes.
• Develop a sense of timing. Nothing is worse than rushing through your slides, nobody will be able to follow them. Take breaks and do not hesitate to repeat important points so that your listeners can process better.
• Convince with your personality, don’t forget to use humor.
• Stand up straight.
• Speak loudly enough.
• Talk in stories.
• Face your audience. Keep eye contact with your listeners.
• Use simple, short sentences.

After all ...

Often you will want to make your presentation slides available to listeners. Depending on the size of the file and the number of listeners, this can be done by e-mail. You can also reserve a dedicated place for presentations on your company's intranet. If you want to make your presentations available for everyone, there are websites where you can upload them. One of the best known sites is slideshare.net, which allows you to easily upload PowerPoint, PDF and OpenOffice presentations.

My aim is for you to give successful presentations.

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