RISE to your presentation!

Myth: I’ll never be able to make a presentation. I’m not a natural speaker.

Reality: No-one is a ‘natural speaker’.  It is, like everything else, a skill we learn. A few hours of good coaching in public speaking and presentation delivery can make a huge difference.

Meanwhile, a good rule to remember when preparing a presentation is the RISE formula.  Do your best to make it each of the following:

RELEVANT

The content of your presentation must be what your audience expect to hear, and it must be related to their interests. Ideally, you should avoid just providing lists and descriptions and try to have a central message running through your presentation that will reach their hearts as well as their minds.  A list of the services your that company can provide is important, of course, but supporting all of that should be the message that you can offer a very considerable advantage that your competitors cannot, and bring home what that message is.

INFORMATIVE

It is important that your audience come away feeling they have learned something new.  There must be a ‘takeaway’ of some kind that is of benefit to them.

SIMPLE

We must ensure our presentation is easy to understand. 

• Avoid big words that non-native speakers (or even natives) have difficulty understanding. A big mistake made by presenters is using highly specialized or technical jargon that most of their audience have no clue about.
• Keep your sentences short, especially in your PowerPoint slides. Nothing confuses an audience faster than lots of long sentences squeezed into a single slide.
• Using bullet-points instead of sentences will help you to keep the amount of text on a slide to a minimum. Five slides with two or three bullet points on each is much better than one slide crammed with writing.
• Divide your delivery into clear, recognizable segments. Pause at the end of each sentence, and to help divide your points, use signal-words/phrases at the end of each section, such as ‘And next…’, ‘This brings us to our next point’, and ‘Before we move on, I’d like to quickly summarize’.

ENGAGING

The bad news is that we absolutely must engage the audience.  The good news is that it’s much easier to do than we might think.  There are a number of ways to do this.

• Ask questions (but directed generally, not targeted at any one person) that will make people think or reflect; hopefully, at the end, you can provoke some discussion this way too
• Surprise people with interesting facts and statistics (“Did you know that 96% of people don’t trust statistics?” or “If sharks stop moving, they will sink to the bottom and die.”)
• Use interesting illustrations in your slides, whether photos, cartoons, or graphics
• Tell stories and anecdotes, although you should keep them relevant to your point
• Culture and background are very important, so try to get to know a little about your audience in advance; knowing what people want, makes it easier to give it to them.