If you are going to use handouts, be sure you have enough. Handouts serve several purposes:
- Listeners like to take notes. Listeners like to have something to take away from your presentation as a reminder of what you said. Many listeners will take notes on any scrap of paper that is handy. By providing your listeners with handouts, you can reduce the time they spend taking notes because they will already have the main information you are presenting.
- The less time they spend taking notes, the more time they can spend focusing on you.
- Handouts help reinforce your main points. People listen selectively. As hard as you try to emphasize a particular point, some listeners will remember some other point you made that was probably less important. Handouts will help you drive home your main message.
- Handouts make listeners happy. People like to take away something tangible from a presentation, something more than their recollection of what you said. Giving people handouts makes them feel as if they “own” the information they have just heard.
When you write your speech, it is beneficial to condense what you are saying into its key points. This is beneficial for the sake of having visual prompts for what you are going to say, but can actually serve a dual purpose. If you condense a speech into its key points and other useful information, then in this form or in a slightly amended one it can make an excellent handout.
As wonderful as your speech may be, remember that it will be experienced slightly differently by however many people hear it. All of these people may take something slightly different away from the room, so if you have absolutely concrete points that you would insist on them remembering, ensure that these are available on the handout.
By giving everyone a handout you also ensure that they feel as though they have participated in the presentation. Rather than simply demanding that they sit there, listen and remember everything you have said, you give them what is in effect a souvenir of the occasion (in fact, souvenir is by origin a French word for “to remember”).
This will be something they can refer back to after the event, particularly if they annotate the handout themselves with their own thoughts or something specific that you said during the presentation. Additionally, this allows them to sit and listen to the presentation as you deliver it, without having to constantly write and refer back to detailed notes during the speech.