What are some effective ways to engage your audience and check for understanding during a presentation?

Knowing your audience is CRUCIAL! I've seen too many presentations where the presenter gives a canned presentation and the audience tunes out because it's over their heads or not customized to them. The FIRST role of any presenter is to CONNECT with the audience. And that begins with knowing who they are before you've ever said a word into the microphone!

Though you can generally know who your audience is, the bigger the group, the more diverse they will be. For example, even if you're presenting at an event for HR leaders, those leaders will all have different experiences, backgrounds and thought processes. Certainly the more you know your audience the better, but don't have the expectation that you can be everything to everyone in your audience.

When I'm preparing to speak or present, I try to consider what "one idea" I want the audience to leave with. I can't spend an entire 45-60 minutes talking about the exact same thing, but I want to be clear about my core focus. At times my objective is to entertain. Other times my goal is to educate or convince. Occasionally my main purpose is to sell. If you understand your desired outcome and your "one idea" it will help you create the right experience for your audience.

How you share your content is just as important as what you’re sharing! An amazing story or point could fall on deaf ears if the structure of your presentation does not resonate with the audience. The tools listed above are helpful and should be used in conjunction with other strategies like content planning calls. These calls ensure you know your audience and structure your content to best suit their interests and goals.

Here are my top tips for visual aids: - Use visual aids that will add to your presentation, not distract your audience. A photo is truly worth 1,000 words. Don't add 100 words to it. -Use words sparingly - the worst presentations have a million words on the slide. -Speak to what is on your slide. Don't include information you won't address as this is confusing to your audience. -Don't spend too much time on one slide. Speak to a slide and move on to keep it interesting. Remember - your audience is there to see YOU - not your slides.

There are countless ways to engage an audience. Ice breakers can get things started off right. Throw in a survey question and have people text in their responses. Have an open ended question that audience members can respond to. One of my favorite ways to engage my audience? Whenever I feel like I've been speaking for too long I insert a few memes into my content. This breaks things up, makes the tone of my presentation more fun and re-engages the audience.

When sharing stories with a smaller audience or client group, I like to intersperse questions and answer opportunities with the content, rather than holding all questions for the end. This helps me to understand what resonates with the audience and tailor my content based on their questions and interests.

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