Capturing and Maintaining Interest

That's why the opening of your presentation is so important. Although you don't want to spend too much time on the preliminaries, you need to find a way to capture the audience's interest before you launch into the rest of your presentation.

Opening "hooks," or attention grabbers, can include anecdotes, jokes, controversial statements, current events, and interesting facts. But these hooks must be related to your presentation. A joke by itself does little to get the audience thinking, unless it's to wonder why you told the joke and wasted their time.

For example, I work for a dean who has an uncanny ability to get a room full of department chairs to leave a budget meeting with smiles on their faces, determined to make do with resources that have just been reduced. Inevitably, he starts with a story, a cartoon, or a joke that helps everyone realize that he's in this right along with us, defusing the us them mentality under which most budget discussions are conducted.

Whatever it is you do, you want the audience members to start thinking about the objective. If they need to cut their budgets, get them thinking about how they can do it, not whether they want to do it. If it's a sales presentation, you want them to begin thinking about why they should buy your product. If it's a lecture on tomatoes, you want them to feel the need to understand, appreciate, and maybe even eat tomatoes.

When the excitement from the opening bell wears off, a presentation needs some timely prodding to maintain its pace and interest. What can you do to keep things going and to maintain audience interest? Facts, figures, and information may be interesting in and of themselves, but a presentation can suffer from too much sameness. Look for ways to vary what you present. For example, instead of bulleted lists of information, use graphic images. Instead of descriptions, use diagrams or charts. Instead of written quotes, use recorded sound or video quotes.

Returning to the tour bus analogy, consider when it's time to make a brief stop. A well-timed break may help audience members catch their breath, get their blood circulating again, or use the bathroom. You shouldn't assume that just because you can keep going, they all can. They'll thank you by coming back to the presentation with greater attention and focus.

Memorable tours also include interesting side trips and unexpected bumps in the road, but remember that these are not the tour themselves. In a like manner, you can use attention grabbers, or hooks, to maintain interest in a presentation. Once again, these could include stories or anecdotes, examples or analogies, opportunities for interaction such as questions and answers, a statement or visual image that challenges the audience to think, a sound effect, or an unusual animation.

These activities should in some way relate to the topic, but they can come from anywhere. In fact, the more unexpected they are, the more likely it is that they'll accomplish your objective of grabbing the audience's attention once more. Be careful, however, not to take the audience so far off the beaten path that it's hard to get them back. Again, always keep the end in mind.