Tips for Keeping Your Audience's Attention

By Heather C. Conover
Conover + Company Communications

Whether presenting a paper at a professional meeting, a proposal to a prospective client, or a plan to your colleagues, the presenter wants to capture his or her audience's attention, keep their attention, and move them to some sort of action or opinion.

How does one do this effectively? With information so readily available on the Internet, it's easy to fill a presentation with lots of facts and figures. But are these of interest to your audience? Maybe. But, just because something is of interest to you, the presenter, is no guarantee that it will be of interest to your audience.

Think of your presentation as taking your audience with you on a journey. Put yourself in the audience's position. If you were sitting in the audience, what questions would you ask? What information would you want from the presenter? While there are a number of techniques that help in formulating the content of a presentation, the method used by news writers to decide if a story is newsworthy is very effective. News writers look at values. Values are always relative to your audience. In other words, you may find something very relevant to you, but it may not have any particular significance to your audience.

The values that news writers consider are timeliness, proximity, impact, prominence, conflict, currency, human interest, and the bizarre. All of these things give information some value to the audience.

• Timeliness - How new is what you are talking about? When did it happen?
• Proximity - How close is the story to your audience? Establishing a bond with your audience very early in your presentation is important.
• Impact - How many people does your subject matter affect?
• Prominence - Is someone famous involved?
• Conflict - Is there a fight, a disagreement, or a controversy surrounding your topic?
• Currency -A subject with currency is something people are talking about today. For example, the economy has currency because of its fragile state. The war on terrorism, Iraq, and the Middle East also have currency.
• Human Interest - Does your topic appeal to the emotions, and pluck at the heartstrings?
• Bizarre - Is the story so unusual that it is a curiosity?

Take the time to know your audience. Considering these values in relation to your audience is a good start to creating a presentation that will hold your audience's attention.

Winter 2003 -Volume 13, Number 1

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