How can you, a keynote speaker or perhaps a more humble everyday presenter, increase what your audience retains of your speech or presentation?  After all, whether you are grand or humble, you put a lot of work into the talk, most likely sweating the details, and surviving the nerves, in order to deliver the goods to your audience.  Wouldn’t it be nice if they remembered what they heard from you?

The research shows that audiences remember a dismal 10 – 30 percent of what they hear in a speech.  Can that be improved?  I gave a speech about body language 15 years ago and had a member of the audience approach me about 5 years ago saying that he remembered nothing of the speech except for one story.  I thought that was pretty good for ten years later!

But harder on the heels of the actual delivery, it seems to me,  an audience member should recall what — at least half of the speech?  More would be nice, but let’s not run before we crawl. So how can we get those doleful numbers up to something approaching 50 percent?

Not forgetting to state the obvious, we do remember stories, so give your audience classic stories with heroes, villains, conflict, and resolution.  Make sure that the characters have something at stake, and come in low on Maslow’s Hierarchy, fighting for their lives.

That’s a great start.  But what are some less obvious ways to add punch to your speech so that the audience sits up, pays attention, and stays with you to the end, remembering (just about) everything?

Take short breaks.  Breaks, it turns out, are one of the most reliable ways to increase retention.  The right length is not fully known; even breaks of less than 10 seconds can help and can restore some energy when that runs low.  For very demanding cognitive tasks, apparently, you need 10 minutes or more to recover.  Somewhere between those two extremes, perhaps, the golden mean lies.

Surprise your audience.  Surprises activate the whole brain, and wake up the hippocampus, an area of the brain key to memory.  So give your audience something unexpected.  The Spanish Inquisition, anyone? Nobody expects that!

Relate your message to them. We remember things better when we understand how they relate to us specifically.  Getting the audience to imagine acting out the information in some way apparently can as much as triple what you remember.  A powerful technique, then, and one that everyone should think about using themselves.

Get your audience to draw a picture. If we scribble a picture, even if it is not well drawn, we are more likely to remember what we heard.  Important caveat:  quality does not matter.  So tell your audience not to stress out over pictorial perfection.  Rather, have them just scribble something that acts as a note for each participant.

Get your audience to move.  I’ve posted before about how physical motion helps encode some thought in memory.  Climbing a tree can improve retention by 50 percent.  So can other simple physical activities like walking around obstacles, balancing, and yoga.

I’m getting this lovely image of an audience weaving its way through the chairs in the auditorium, drawing stick figures as they go, pictures of how your ideas look on them.  That should amp up the memory – especially if they’re surprised by all of this effort, and I don’t see how they couldn’t be.

Jumping through a few hoops with your audience may greatly affect your impact on the audience’s memory of your speech.  How can you not build some of these activities into your presentation?