It’s important to realise that most people will be able to remember only a few key points from a presentation. Don’t overwhelm the audience with facts that they will forget as soon as they walk out the door. Focus on a few key points.
It’s a good idea to write your key points on a flip chart or show them on a slide. That will help your audience understand how your presentation is organised. If you return to your flip chart page or slide when you move on to a new key point, the audience will be able to see where you are in your presentation.
As well as this, at the close of a presentation you can then go, one by one, through the key points that you have made. Making a point coherently consists of three steps: introduction, substance, and reinforcement. If you want the audience to leave your presentation with a certain point locked in their minds, then it is essential that you address all three of those steps.
Whichever way you choose to organize the body of your presentation, it is important to keep the elements of it down to a manageable number. Taking one of the above as an example, we will look at how a “Problem/Solution” style of presentation can best be cut down into a few manageable steps.
An organisation may have any number of problems which it wishes to address. If there are, say, fifteen problems that it wants to get to the bottom of it, covering all of these in a presentation results in the problem that fifteen of anything is a large number to remember.
In order to ensure that the presentation does not result in an audience being bemused by the sheer number of problems, it is advisable if you can to find a category for each problem, whether it be “time”, “manpower”, “finance” or another suitable category.
Your intention should be to find a few category headings which can cover a few problems each. If these problems require more time, this can best be covered by a meeting where the attendees are all people who have experience in the specific field where problems exist.
Any presentation will benefit from this kind of organisation. One thing worth remembering is that the “rule of three” is adhered to by most people, if not consciously then certainly subconsciously. Therefore if you can keep concentrated discussion to around three headings – or a maximum of five – then you will be able to retain attention much better than if you have a numbered list which never seems to end. You can always, after all, emphasise the key points at the end of the presentation.