How can you present technical information to a diverse audience?

Here's the key: use THEIR lingo and language, to describe the content in their map of the world - not INCOSE's, IEEE's or OMG's if that's not their scene.

As I need to cover few countries with different cultures and languages, one method I found useful to break the ice during the discussion is to use some of their languages and some knowledge about their festivals. Second step of knowing your audience is to understand their area of interest whether technical or business oriented, that will help you to design the discussion topics and ultimately, catching the expectations and making sure that you're bringing value for the audience rather than pitching sales words.

Know your audience, avoid using technical jargon, imagine explaining your product to your grandmother and use plenty of metaphors.

In my experience, providing an outline of main issues you are going to address at the beginning of your presentation helps listeners find their way throughout the presentation. The outline will preferably have 5 to 8 headlines-any more than that may cause attention fatigue. As you progress from one headline to the next, show the audience the same outline, with the next headline highlighted. This will make the audience feel your presentation is moving. The outline also acts as an implicit contract between you, the presenter, and the listeners. You promise to go through the items in the outline one by one. If you stick to your promise, you may count on your audience to stick with you.

When presenting technical information to a diverse audience it is best to avoid technical jargon that a substantial subset will not understand. If you are talking at too high of a technical level you will quickly lose a significant portion of your audience for the remainder of the presentation. Leveraging analogies is a great way to make technical concepts more relatable and easier to understand for a less technical audience. Leveraging visual aids such as diagrams, graphs, and graphics are also great ideas in order to keep your audience engaged and understanding.

In my experience, mentimeter or a similar service can be helpful in this regard. You could start out by asking the audience to type the keywords and concepts that they already know about the subject. The audience will then collectively form a word cloud. During your presentation, you could elicit immediate feedback from the audience by asking them to fill out single question surveys. And at the end of your presentation, you could ask the audience "What are your main takeaways from this presentation? Which keywords do you remember most?". You can then compare the initial and final word clouds to clearly show the audience they have gained new knowledge.

Tailor the duration according to the audience. Unless you have a hands on session, it merits going beyond an hour or hour and half tops. Else my experience people, lose interest by end of an hour, not because it is not informative, but it is more of a mental block on our focus levels..

Use a diverse team to create the presentation. Invite others to critique, review, and improve upon your presentation. Diverse creativity for a diverse audience.