Liven Up Your Presentations!

When your presentations contain a lot of data and graphics, how effective do you find them? Do people seem captured by all that data or do their eyes glaze over? After the presentation, do they come up to you and ask for more information or are they just waiting to be let out? If your presentations are very data intensive, chances are that most of the time, your audience will seem distracted and you will find it difficult to get your key message across.

Here are some tips on how you can liven up even the most data intensive presentation.

• Make sure you know the subject and the content of your presentation well. If you need to pause often to check up on your notes or look at slides, even if it is a momentary pause, you will find people getting distracted. Practice your presentation till you know where you will be presenting your data, what the data exactly is and what point it is meant to prove.
• Your data should be conveying something of interest to the audience. If you do not, there will be no motivation for them to be sitting there and looking at all the data, however colorfully it may be presented. Try telling your audience at the start of the presentation, that what you are going to talk about will benefit them and that you will be proving this with the help of some interesting data. Present the data such that you bring out the benefits to the audience clearly.
• Many experts tend to use a lot of technical terms and jargon even while speaking to a general audience. Explain your data in simple terms and even if you do need to use technical terms, explain what they mean.
• Even if your presentation is highly technical and contains a lot of data, you can add a human element to it by including stories and anecdotes, whether from personal life or something you may read somewhere. Tell it by way of illustrating a point or to bring home the significance of the data.
• Another excellent way of engaging the audience when your presentation is highly data intensive is to fill your presentation with questions. Let the members of the audience come up with answers and explanations. Let them study the data and try to understand what it is trying to convey and what they make out of it. Depending on how much time you have, you can give some of them time to present their own view points and speak about similar experiences. This will serve as an excellent platform from which you can explain how your product and services can help all of them meet the challenges they face.
• Finally, the more technical your presentation, the more you need to keep the attention of the audience focused on what you are saying. Move around the stage, use gestures, modulate your voice and vary the pace to make your presentation more effective.