As a speaker, the larger the number of audience members in front of you, the better, in terms of potential sales, impressions, and messages delivered.
But not always.
If your goal is to really and truly get people to understand your message, then the smaller the audience, the better. Here’s why:
In large audiences, often people are afraid to ask questions. If there are 70 or 700 other people in the room, most people are too bashful or nervous to stop the presenter and ask a question. But if there are only one or two other people in the room, then almost anyone feels comfortable asking a question or letting someone know, “hey I don’t get it.”
Furthermore, as a presenter, you can easily tell if an audience member is following you if you have only a few people to look at. This is why schools often boost about their low student/teacher ratios.
For those of us in the business world, here is the lesson. When communicating truly important messages to critical audiences, try to speak to groups as small as possible. Rather than giving a company wide speech to 400 people, try speaking to different divisions within your company in increments of 10 people or fewer. Yes, it may take longer to do it this way, but the communication will be much more powerful and you will give your employees a more comfortable environment in which to give you feedback.
For those of us who train people, smaller is also better. For example, I am often asked to do a half day of presentation training for 8 executives. Each executive only wants to spend a maximum of half a day, hence the request for a half-day training. Here’s what I do: I recommend that 4 be trained in the morning and 4 trained in the afternoon. It’s twice as much work for me but the training is twice as powerful for each trainee and the net time out of the schedule for each executive remains just 4 hours.
Of course there are times when bigger is better, like when you are running for president. But never discount the ability to make a huge impact on people by keeping your audience small and intimate.
