Use a Question Slide to Involve Your Audience and Help Them Focus

How many times have you attended a presentation where the speaker never interacted with the audience? Did you, like most people would, struggle to keep focussed? Any public presentation is only as good as its audience is engaged. Here's a simple but super-effective way to intereact with your audience: make a question slide.

Below is an example Presentation Tree wrote and created for The Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians. This was slide 21 out of 30. It was designed to help stimulate the audience's interest, and to challenge their pre-conceptions. The answer, a surprising number, was programmed to appear on a mouse-click. The answer was shown only after several members of the audience answered the question.

Try this: at some point during your next presentation, stop the show. Ask a question that challenges the people listening to you. Ask for a response. When someone offers an answer, be sure to repeat it, for everyone's benefit. Try to get more than one response. This really wakes up--and focuses--your audience.

You may follow a previous speaker who lulled the crowd into a passive state. Shake things up. You have a great opportunity to make immediate impact--simply by starting with a question.

If your topic is, say, telecommuting, try this starter: "How many people here today drive more than 10 miles to work every day?" A presentation on newsletter marketing can engage its audience with this question: "How many people here today are connected to a business that publishes a newsletter?"

When you ask a question, be sure to raise your own hand. This encourages a response--if you're looking for a show of hands.

Do you have a long presentation? Plan to ask a challenging question in the middle of the show. This will rouse your audience and keep them interested.

For another example, if you give a presentation on real estate development, and know that suburban growth has increased at a surprisingly high rate, you might ask: "Which county in our area would you guess has the highest rate of population growth?"

And, if you really want to get sophisticated, you can use electronic voting machines, which easily allow you to ask a question, and then take an instant poll, with the results displayed on screen. Some companies, such as Padgett Communications, support displaying the results in impressive, eyecatching charts. Click the following link to learn more about audience response technology.

It doesn't matter if people guess right or wrong, say yes or no, or disagree wildly. What does matter is that answers are volunteered--and that you've engaged your audience. They're listening to you now.

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