Why presentations?

Why do we make presentations?

This sounds like a pretty basic question, but one that I think deserves to be explored. Not many people enjoy giving presentations, do they? Some people are even terrified of it. Why do we put ourselves through this uncomfortable experience? With all the technology we have available today for communicating our ideas, why do we even bother with the painful process of creating and delivering presentations? Why don’t we just email our PowerPoint slides and be done with it?

Because presentations are not about communicating facts. All evidence to the contrary, giving people facts is not the point of presentations. So what is the point? Presentations give speakers the opportunity to persuade, motivate and impress their audiences. In a presentation, we have the chance to move our audiences emotionally, to illustrate our ideas with powerful stories and to inspire our audiences to believe in and act on what we are saying.

If your objective is simply to give your audience a lot of facts, please skip the presentation and send them a document with all the information they need.

But, if you want to do something more, then you’ll need to give them more than just facts and tell your audience why this information is important to them. Show them how they can benefit from knowing these facts. Illustrate how this information can help them. Motivate your audience to act on your proposals by connecting these facts to something tangible and important to them.

So, the next time you have a presentation to make, ask yourself what you really want to achieve. Do you want your audience to have a better impression of your organization? Do you want them to sign a contract? Do you want to motivate them to adopt and adhere to a new company policy? Do you want them to donate to your cause, start investing with you, become your clients?

Once you know why you’re making the presentation, you can forget about ‘just giving them some facts’. Help the audience fulfill your objective by moving beyond the facts and giving them a reason to listen to you!

© 2009 Jeanne Trojan. All rights reserved