How to make a fun presentation?

Your next presentation could be more fun!

From being a trainee until you retire as a senior professional, presentation remains a part and parcel of your corporate life. Board room presentation stays with you, be it internal among your co-workers or external among your stakeholders and clients. Survey tells us that – almost a quarter of the attendees indulge in texting, another quarter remains busy checking mails, and some are just not interested but pretend to be listening, leaving only a handful of serious audience in a presentation session.

Presentation which is supposed to convey your ideas, strategies, proposals, forecasting et al; when not done properly fails the entire purpose. It should be interactive, participative, exciting and interesting to keep your audience hooked on to it until the last slide.

Let’s take a look at some of the vital points that could help you make your next presentation livelier and fun.

Add local flavour

Considering that the audience come with different emotional baggage and background, ice breaking session is key to commence any presentation. Bring in that local flavour through a small quiz or a local story, which is sure to grab their attention.

Engage your audience

To have constant attention of your audience, you need to engage with them. Interact with them, ask questions, ask them to share their experience and paraphrase the same as a content of your presentation. Instead of rhetoric questions, poll the audience and share the results.

Tell stories

A good presenter is a great story teller – watch those TED talks and you will find out how the presenters relate stories to their presentation themes. Hence, collect stories and deliver them as per the audiences’ interest level. Stories help to draw attention.

Incorporate videos/music/memes

Cut the monotonous slides and spice it up with videos, music and memes. The video clips should be in line with the themes of your presentation and will entertain the audience for sure.

Brainstorming and Q&A session

Make your presentation more interactive by keeping a brainstorming session, so that it becomes a two way communication and your audiences feel a part of the entire show. Engage them in a Q&A session too.

Add humour

Presentations are fun, when you garnish those with a pinch of humour. Know your audience and use safe humour to hook them into your session.

Making a presentation interesting and fun is the onus of the presenter. He should have the ability to read his audience and accordingly mix and match various parameters to make the presentation a super hit. Bollywood and cricket being immensely popular, analogies can be drawn from these two fields to make the presentation more appealing. Voice modulation of the presenter also plays a key role in creating an effective boardroom presentation.

One has to be creative while presenting, and that should be instantaneous – instead of remaining stationary and reading through the slides, one should walk up to the audiences, make eye contacts and have a vibrant body language. All these will definitely help you to make a rocking and memorable presentation.

How do you usually perk up your presentation? Please share your story.