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Creating presentations by understanding the audience point of view is not easy – though always suggested as a MUST by presentation experts.At Presentation-Process, we will see a simple process to create the presentation from audience point of view.
The step-by-step Minimal® process to brainstorm
This process is different from the usual idea generation methods, in 2 aspects. They are:
- You generate ideas based on audience needs
- Your goal will be to come up with as many questions as possible and not the answers
Let’s explore this a bit more.
Putting yourself in the shoes of your last person
While setting the objective for your presentation, you answered two critical questions:
1. Who is the last person? and
2. What should he or she do?
This is how you do it step-by-step:
- Take Time: Take a clock and set the timer for 15 minutes
- Seek Quiet : Pick up a paper and pen and find a place where you won’t be disturbed
- Start with the objective: Imagine that you are the last person, who needs to take the Next step as defined in your presentation objective.
- Note down your thoughts: Start writing down all the questions you want answered as the ‘last person’, to take the next step. Don’t stop till the timer goes off.
This process helps you move away from the traditional ME to YOU (presenter’s point of view) style of presenting to the recommended YOU to ME style of presenting.
Here is an example:
Let’s assume that you are a Web Designer pitching for website development project for a small company.
The last person is the owner of the business.
The next step is signing a contract with you for the project.
Sample questions after a brainstorm
The questions that might arise during this phase as the owner of the business are:
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These were just a few questions from the top of the mind. The more time you take, the deeper you get, and come up with some real concerns.
As you can see, such a presentation starts with your listener’s concerns in mind and will therefore be more remarkable. The What Is In It For Me flows right through your presentation.
When you answer these questions through a brainstorm session, your presentation almost creates itself. Then we proceed to the…
Next Step: Creating the ‘Concern Areas’ sheet:
It is not enough to have a hotch-potch of questions that a brainstorm generates. We need to categorize, organize and label these questions to make a storyboard, which is ready to be converted into slides.
When you take a closer look at the questions, you would realize that the questions can be grouped based on the broad concern areas.
Example of grouping concern areas
| Continuing from the previous example… Idea Group 1: Credibility:
Idea Group 2: Cost:
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For the sake of easy reference, we will call the headings as Leaders and the questions under concern areas as Clarifiers.
As you can see, we have quickly generated ideas for the presentation and put them into thought-groups in a very short span of time. This article gives an overview of how to arrive at leaders and clarifiers.
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