Audiences today expect to have a conversation with speakers, and they crave real connection with successful speakers.  The best way to ensure that these good things happen during your presentations is to involve your audiences throughout. 

But that takes some art.  How do you think about it?  How do you avoid the lame arrangement of too many presentations where the speaker drones on for 45 minutes, then stops and says, “Any questions?”  As the audience shakes itself awake, and starts wondering if it does in fact have any questions, the speaker stands there for what seems like an eternity, then gives up and concludes that no one cares.   

How do you avoid this dysfunctional state of affairs?  How can you involve audiences in your presentations? 

Following are a series of questions to ask the audience, in order to start connecting with them.  The questions have to be tailored, of course, to your particular situation.  They are intended as a guide, as a way to think about connecting with an audience.  Take the questions in the broadest possible sense and apply them to your particular subject and audience. 

1.  Ask them who they are – get them to report on their personal stories, insights, attitudes, connections to the material, perspectives on the topic, etc.  

2.  Ask them to brainstorm – get them working together to solve the problem at hand.  Brainstorming works best when it’s specific and involves a piece of the issue, not the whole issue. 

3.  Ask them to play games – most groups enjoy friendly competition to solve a problem, issue, challenge, game, or treasure hunt.  Make the prize good enough that the audience doesn’t perceive it as tacky, but not so grand that people will be seriously upset if they lose.  A gift certificate, a bottle of wine, that sort of thing. 

4.  Ask them to report to the group – once you’ve imparted some new information to the audience, it’s good to ask them to work on solutions, reporting back to the group on some aspect of what they’ve found.  Again, keep it specific. 

5.  Ask them to teach others – if an audience has learned a new skill or idea, then get them to teach each other to reinforce the learning.  Keep it specific. 

6.  Ask them to design responses  — if you’re presented an issue to a group, and they’ve taken your thoughts on board, then it’s good to ask them to design responses.  You might have them structure a new system to handle the IT problems you’ve been lecturing about.  Keep it simple; don’t expect too much off the top of the audience’s head. 

7.  Ask them to initiate a path forward – if your talk involves some aspect of future thinking, planning, solving, re-designing, and so on, then get the audience to create the first few steps – and even take the first one.  If you’re talking to an audience about solutions to our health care mess, for example, you might want to get participants to establish a process going forward for ensuring that everyone’s voice gets heard.