3 Tips For Delivering An Educational Presentation

It’s widely understood that presentations are designed to deliver varying degrees of educational outcomes.

However, presentations with the sole purpose of knowledge transfer (or actually changing behavioural patterns) can be amongst the hardest to deliver.

Why? Because often the audience’s starting position on any given topic is either neutral or completely incognizant.

At PDCO, a lot of our work centres around not-for-profit and government agencies looking to do just this, and we’re directly involved from the concept development stage.

If this is you, too, then there are three main things to consider when putting together your content.

1 - Find The Investible Reason For Your Audience

Or to put it more bluntly: “why should the audience care?”

Attention is a rare commodity in our age, and it's increasingly becoming scarcer. As such, if you want it, you better lead with a reason why people should give it to you.

This may come in the form of statistics, industry insights or similar, but it should always be an appeal that is easily understandable, unbeknownst to the audience and have very real implications.

Take our article from Statistic Brain, for example, it’s easily digestible, shocking and the implication is obvious - my attention span is short (becoming shorter) and I have a lot of distractions around me.

2 - Tell Them A Story And Make Relatable

Stories are integral to the learning experience.

Metaphors are powerful because of their ability to relate a complex problem to a known, simpler phenomenon that we are experienced with.

No matter what industry or field you are in, the use of stories and metaphors are universally effective to convey your message.

3 - Tell The Story Visually With Authority

Fun fact: humans can’t listen and read at the same time - you think you’re multitasking, but in reality, you’re switching between the two.

90% of what we experience comes through our eyes, and visuals can be absorbed much faster than text can. When you’re in a time-poor environment, this is actually more crucial than anything else.

You’re a voice of authority, too, so not just any visuals will do - 90’s clip art, pixelated graphics and redundant artwork undermine your position irrespective of the reality of what you are saying.

Keep it relevant and high-quality, and you’ll reap the rewards from a highly engaged audience.

Do you need help putting together a great presentation that convinces your audience to change their behaviour? Get in touch - we’d love to chat.

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