What do you do if you have an incredibly large amount of data that you must present to an audience, but you are limited to a strict time amount of, say 10-30 minutes?
By far, the absolute worst mistake you could make is to do the following: cram every fact you can find into a bullet point and then on a PowerPoint and then race through that PowerPoint in front of your audience. You can guarantee that no one will remember anything you say if you try this technique (though you will be in good company, since this is what most bad-to-average presenters do).
If you goal is to actually communicate your ideas, facts and data, then you should use at least one or more of the following tactics.
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Email (or snail mail) reports, slides, fact sheets, graphs or even books to members of your audience IN ADVANCE of your presentation. That way, those who are highly interested can sink their teeth into your data, plus they will be more familiar with your concepts when you start to speak.
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Give out written fact sheets or other handouts during your speech, BUT AFTER you have already finished talking about that subject. If you hand out the fact sheets before you start the discussion on that topic, your audience members will ignore you and will focus on reading. By waiting until you have already covered a subject, audience members will be less tempted to begin reading while you speak.
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Pass out remaining materials AFTER your speech is over. This way, those who want lots of data will have it, those who don’t can throw it away. Nobody can accuse you of not covering all your bases.
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Email (or snail mail) your attendees dozens or even hundreds of pages of text or graphs that give ALL of the details surrounding the subject of your presentation. Again, those who are interested can hit “print” and have all your wisdom. Those who aren’t interested can hit delete.
When you are giving your actual spoken presentation, you must not yield to the temptation to try to cover lots and lots of data quickly, because this is not how the human brain processes spoken information. Instead, you should introduce a point, give a few facts about it, give an example, then tell a story and then provide a slide that illustrates your one key point. Then repeat this process.
So remember, it’s OK to dump data, but don’t do it in your speech and don’t do it in the PowerPoint slides that you are projecting to the whole room. Instead, dump your data using the four tactics above.
When a client comes to Media Training Worldwide for either media training or presentation training, we employ very one of these methods of communicating data.
Clients are given books to read in advance of the workshop, handouts during the session, handouts after the session and then more training tools and books sent afterwards. This truly is the best way to help people absorb large and medium bodies of knowledge.
