How do you design a high-impact presentation? Envision the desired results.

What is a high-impact presentation?

According to Communicating Nutrition, it is “a presentation an audience will pay attention to, engage with, and act upon.”

This post and the two to follow will share content from a webinar titled “Designing and Delivering High Impact Presentations: Envision, Enlighten, and Engage,” based on Section 4 of the book, which I presented with coauthor and colleague Sonja Stetzler.

In that webinar, we described a high-impact presentation as follows:

The audience does more than…

• stays awake and doesn’t leave, and more than

• pays attention and doesn’t look at their phones

The audience...

• willingly engages throughout the presentation, and

• enthusiastically expresses how they intend to implement what they’ve learned

In this 3-part series, we will explore what it means to envision, enlighten, and engage. This post explores envision.

What does it mean to envision?

It means to picture something. When it comes to creating a high-impact presentation, it means to picture the outcomes desired and the path you will take to get there. Visualizing something can translate into making it come into being.

Neuroscience has demonstrated that visualization is effective not only for planning purposes, but it also improves how we perceive something, and it can improve our performance. It’s also motivating and increases our confidence and self-efficacy.

How do we envision the desired outcomes for a presentation?

Designing a presentation begins with identifying your target audience and assessing what they need. Then, working with your audience, determine outcomes that will meet their needs. Help your audience envision the possibilities.

• What do they want and need to know?

• How do they want to feel as a result of your presentation?

• What do they aspire to do with what they learn?

How do we envision the path to take to reach these outcomes?

To determine your starting point, you must complete a needs assessment to learn what your audience knows, feels, and does now, as well as discover the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors they aspire to. What are their pain points, problems to solve, and nagging concerns? What are their hopes and dreams?

Create key messages that will take your audience from where they are now to the desired outcomes you determined together. With the end in sight, design the presentation to move them to where they want and need to go.

Prioritize the evidence-based content you will deliver to meet audience needs without exceeding their attention span or time constraints. Build on their current knowledge and answer their most pressing questions. Distill your key messages into one big idea that resonates, inspires, and spurs action.

Select presentation approaches that match audience preferences and available resources. That may include a lecture-style talk with PowerPoint, but it might be more effective to use a discussion, a demonstration, or a video presentation. There is no best way to present information.

Whichever approach you choose, select a structure that ties it together from beginning to end. Effective structures include telling a story, using a numbered list, comparing and contrasting, problem-solving, and more.

One of my favorite structures uses the 4 A’s(1):

1. The first A is for anchor, in which you ground the topic in the audience’s lives.

2. The second A stands for add, when you provide new information. Add what the audience needs to know most, not everything YOU know about the topic.

3. The third A stands for apply, when you have the audience do something with the information.

4. The final A stands for away, which allows the audience to move the information into the future. This includes setting goals or determining action steps.

Whatever design structure is chosen, select one that builds knowledge, starts with the audience’s current understanding, provides a rationale for learning, creates meaningful context, takes the audience to a deeper understanding of the topic, and enables them to apply it to their lives.

Now that we’ve envisioned the outcomes we desire and determined the presentation structure that will maximize our impact, it is time to enlighten our audiences with a clear message supported by well-designed visual aids, which create more powerful and persuasive presentations.

Next week’s post will cover how to enlighten an audience.

“Envisioning the end is enough to put the means in motion.” ~ Brande Roderick

1.      Norris J. From Telling to Teaching. Learning by Dialogue; 2003.

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