Powerpoint: Making it Audience-Friendly

Getting yourself to work on presentations can be daunting. You need time to learn your material. Then you’re to decide which goes into powerpoint presentations. And while you work on these particulars, you’ve got your audience to consider.

How do you ensure that your presentation slides are audience-friendly?

1. Check the audience number and sitting positions. These two are significant factors for identifying the angle of view the presenter is expected to cover. If your presentation is to be made inside an auditorium, or any other audio-visually equipped room, you need not worry about their (audience) sights’ access to your slides.

Knowing the number also puts more challenge in your presentation planning. This challenge lies in your ability to integrate interest-hooking images and thought-provoking texts in your powerpoint slides – all of these in lieu of fully catching your target audience’ attention.

2. Orient yourself with your audience’ background. Are they your classmates and of differing majors? Whatever category they may fit, it is helpful that you find time in knowing them. The rationale behind this is that knowing them suggests their needs, in context to the presentation.

For instance, if your audience happens to be your classmates who major in finance, while you are to report about credit cards, look for particular content that’ll feed these finance majors with significant information about the topic. Moreover, considering your knowledge of their background, you can be expectant that this audience are receptive of the terminologies of which you are planning to utilise in your powerpoint. In turn, you may cut your plans for any concept introduction (about credit cards) as they may already be knowledgeable about it; in place, you may put something more crucial and assumingly alien in this finance majors’ ears.

3. Provide effective channels of interaction. After completing your presentation, what do you aim to do? Don’t you want to know if your audience got the message you were so actively conveying? You don’t need to content yourself with the post-presentation evaluation. Instead, you may use your slides to initiate this query. You may post probable audience questions after every slide or two; after these questions are answered, you may have them ask more.

There are a number of effective methods for such interaction. You can check some of this in the Internet or even ask in advance your audience; who knows, they may just be willing to provide you with suggestions? Apart from directly knowing your audience’ reception of your powerpoint report, you can expect for this step to have a positive impact in your audience evaluation (hint: audience greatly appreciates a great presenter and listener).