How to Keep Your Audience Engaged

30.11.18 10:17 PM Comment(s) By Bob Sullivan

Let's face it, many presentations we attend are boring. Most presenters just "wing it" and don't have actual presentation training. They have learned from watching bad presentations, and then use those "skills" to present themselves. One of the main issues with presentations is that an audience's engagement will wax and wane throughout a presentation, and most presenters either 1) don't understand when that happens, or 2) don't know how to bring the attention back to their presentation. We will be covering the second issue in this post.

Launch a Flare!

The skill that many presenters don't know about to keep audiences engaged is called using a flare. A flare can be many things (I will give some examples below), but basically they are clever strategies to pull the audience's attention back to your message. Every one of the key points in your presentation should be accompanied by a flare to make sure that the audience is engaged for that key point.

Types of Flares

As mentioned before, flares could be anything at all, so long as they bring the audience focus back into your presentation. Here are some examples of flares, but it is not a complete list:

Analogies
Stories
Props
Current events
Videos
Flip charts
Numbers
Facts
Figures
Questions
Demonstrations
Testimonials
Humor
Case studies
Quotes

One Word of Caution

Flares are a loaded gun. Your flares must be relevant, tested, and work to tie into your important message, or they will just confuse, or worse, distract your audience from the key message you are trying to convey.

In your next presentation, take a small risk and add something from the list above to your key message. Just make sure that you practicebeforehand. You will be surprised how much better an audience response you will receive!