Plan & Prepare the Presentation before performing.

A professional, a student, a freelancer, an entrepreneur and everyone involved in world of economy has to give presentation for various reasons. So, some skills are required to be possessed by the presenter to handle this process effectively & meet the target. First step is to understand the process of presentation, which is form of an oral two way communication & there is a purpose & goal of the presentation which should be understood by the presenter. A presentation is an interactive process in which audience is involved thus a presenter needs to be flexible and changing according to the audience. Three main purposes of presentation are – to inform or share any information with the audience, to persuade or change beliefs of the audience and to demonstrate any process or procedure to the audience.
So, the purpose of the presentation should be clear to the presenter. For effective presentation, a presenter has to develop an adequate content containing all information required to be presented and ideas should be presented in a persuasive way to make audience taking interest in the presentation. Good response from audience will help to maintain the confidence level of the presenter.

A presentation goes through four stages – “Plan, Prepare, and Practice & Perform.”

In an oral presentation, a formal, structured & purposeful message is delivered to the audience in a limited time, therefore the presentation is required to be well planned in advance & supported by all relevant & adequate material to meet the goal. Planning of presentation involves purpose identification, audience analysis & occasion analysis. Audience analysis includes presenter’s acquaintance with audience characteristics like age, gender, social-economic-education background, profession etc. Audience analysis will help the presenter to understand the expectations of the audience and relate the presentation with them. The desired results cannot be achieved unless the presenter knows the audience. After audience analysis, presenter should analyze the occasion or venue of the presentation e.g., venue or location at own company or at other company’s premises.

After planning, next step is to prepare the content. The content should be relevant to the presentation with adequate information. The presentation is generally divided into three parts – Opening-in which content is told briefly to the audience, Main Body-in which all content is explained to the audience & Closing-in which main idea of the presentation is reiterated. So, presentation’s content should be prepared & categorized in an order with one part relating to other. In most of the presentations, content is displayed on power point slides; hence the visual display should be attractive and informative as the audience does watch the display content. So, here are some important guidelines for preparing an effective visual layout –

Key points should be highlighted & should be explained in bullet points instead of long paragraphs. Recommended fonts are Arial, Tahoma and Verdana with font size of 40 pt. for the heading & title & 32-24 pt. for subtitles & content. Use of multi fonts is not recommended. Some presenters add some stylish fonts but it can affect the readability for the audience having low eye sight or sitting at rear rows. The presenter should make sure the readability to the audience with colour combination of background and fonts. Use of graphs, illustrations & charts is recommended where necessary & use of animation should be limited as it can distract the attention of the audience.

So, these are some guidelines for effective planning & content preparation of the presentation where I have shared my experience as a presenter. Now we are left with practice & performance part of the presentation; wait for my next article and till that time, try to understand planning & preparation.