It’s every presenter’s worst nightmare—you’ve spent weeks researching your content and laying out your slides, and you’re confident that you’re going to nail the delivery. But when the time comes to make your big presentation, you’re met with blank stares or silent Zoom windows. Nobody in the audience is asking questions or showing the slightest interest in participation.
The sinking feeling of losing the audience can cause even the most seasoned presenter to lose sleep at night. But rest assured that it’s not just you. In one study, more than four out of five professionals admitted shifting their focus away from the speaker in the most recent presentation they attended. People’s attention spans are prone to wandering unless the speaker gives them a good reason to stay engaged.
Fortunately, there are a number of relatively simple things anyone can do to make their next presentation more of an interactive experience and less of a snoozefest. To help you connect with the room, we’ve pulled together 10 ideas any presenter can use to increase audience engagement.
10 ways to increase audience participation
1. Start with an icebreaker
Warming up your audience and encouraging them to participate right off the bat helps set the stage for a successful presentation. Letting your audience know up front they’re going to be involved commands their attention and gets them comfortable with the idea that “hey, this might actually be kind of fun.”
Your icebreaker could be closely related to the content of your presentation or something completely off the wall. The point is to break down the power imbalance between speaker and audience early on.
Whatever icebreaker questions you choose, collecting responses via a real-time polling platform allows you to engage with remote audience members. It can also encourage more introverted audience members to participate without the anxiety of raising their hand in front of a group.
2. Encourage questions from the audience
One of the best ways to increase participation is to make the audience a part of the action. Studies have shown active learning improves retention compared to traditional lectures. When attendees are encouraged to chime in with questions, they naturally engage with your content rather than checking out and succumbing to distractions.
While a traditional Q&A session at the end is better than nothing, taking questions in real time can make your presentation feel like more of a conversation and less of a lecture. And just like your icebreaker, collecting responses digitally means microphone-avoidant attendees can offer their input.
3. Do a dress rehearsal
Most people have been in a meeting where the presenter couldn’t get their video to play, the microphone was too quiet, or someone was missing the right adapter to plug in their device in the first place. Consciously or not, it’s bound to put a damper on any initial excitement the audience was feeling.
When your presentation is plagued by technical issues before it even gets started, you’re faced with an uphill battle to recapture people’s attention. Make sure you’re well-rehearsed with any tech solutions or audio/visual interfaces you’re depending on to deliver your message. If you’ll be presenting in an unfamiliar space, try to scout it ahead of time if at all possible.
4. Gamify the experience
Getting people’s competitive juices flowing is an awesome way to encourage audience participation. With modern polling apps like Poll Everywhere, you can ask questions in real time and reward people with points for submitting correct answers.
Whether you’re offering a reward for the winner or simply the satisfaction of being listed on a leaderboard, mini-gamifications encourage your audience to think critically about what they’re hearing and participate in the discussion. One survey discovered 80% of workers found game-based learning more engaging, suggesting gamification is a valuable tool for captivating audiences.
5. Focus on storytelling
What would you rather listen to—a captivating story from a charismatic speaker or a long list of facts and statistics, with little context about why you should care about them? As you probably expected, the people in your audience feel the same way.
One study from the London School of Business found that people could recall about 65-70% of information shared in the form of a story compared to just 5-10% of information shared via statistics. Try weaving the content of your presentation into a story by including relevant background information and following a problem-solution-outcome format.
6. Tell a joke
Humor is a powerful ally in engaging an audience and in establishing the overall likeability of any public speaker. While you don’t need to turn your presentation into a stand-up special, a timely witticism here and there can be one of the most important tools in your arsenal. If your audience is laughing, they’re participating.
In addition to the dopamine hit that comes with a good laugh, many neuroscientists believe humor can improve our ability to retain information. Keep your humor on-topic and remember not to force it, though—a bad or tasteless joke could have the opposite of the desired effect.
7. Limit the text on your slides
We’ve all witnessed a PowerPoint presentation where the presenter fills every slide with wall-to-wall text and proceeds to read every word aloud over the course of what feels like several thousand years.
Most people read faster than they listen, so when an audience is shown a lot of text, they’re likely to read ahead and get out of sync with the person presenting. It’s not exactly a recipe for great audience engagement.
Author and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki coined the 10/20/30 rule, specifying that no presentation should ever have more than 10 slides, last longer than 20 minutes, or contain any text smaller than 30-point font. While it’s OK to treat this as more of a guideline, the point stands that your presentation content should be as concise as possible to maintain maximum interest.
8. Pick your audience’s brains
Beyond just taking questions from the audience, asking them to share their ideas or opinions is an excellent way to encourage participation. And when the entire audience is able to respond in seconds via text, app, or browser, you can truly gauge the group’s overall opinion rather than giving undue weight to the loudest voices.
Audience sentiment questions are useful for determining a group’s understanding or opinion of any given topic along a fixed scale. Or if you’d like a little more nuance in your responses, you could go with a word cloud or ask for open-ended comments.
9. Make use of video
Viewers retain 95% of information when it’s received in the form of a video, compared to just 10% when it’s consumed in text form. Adding a short video to your presentation at around the 10-minute mark (right when people’s attention usually starts waning) can be useful for keeping your audience tuned-in.
Creating video content has become much simpler than it used to be, and you don’t have to have a huge production budget to create videos that will captivate your audience. Apps like Powtoon, Animaker, or Moovly have made it much easier to create short videos that spice up your presentation and make complex information more digestible.
10. Give your audience choices
Once you’ve gotten a few minutes into your presentation and established the big-picture topics you’re covering, letting the audience choose between follow-up topics is an easy way to encourage participation. A quick multiple-choice poll where people vote on where you’ll go next gets the audience thinking about what they find most interesting and makes it easier for presenters to give the people what they want.
Even if you circle back to the other potential topic choices later in your presentation, giving your attendees the opportunity to determine their own destiny for a few minutes is a big win when it comes to audience engagement.
Elevate your presentations with Poll Everywhere
No matter the size of your audience or the topic you’re covering, creating an environment that gets people participating is key to holding any group’s interest.
Poll Everywhere helps you transform your presentations from dull lectures into thriving two-way conversations, thanks to a variety of Activities like polls, quizzes, word clouds, and more. Within minutes, anyone can design and create interactive presentation elements that keep your audience attentive and involved. Poll Everywhere also simplifies team collaboration to ensure brand consistency across multiple presentations.
By gathering responses in real time via text, app, or browser, you’ll encourage greater participation and gain valuable insights on what your attendees really want to know. And because Poll Everywhere integrates directly with popular presentation apps like PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Keynote, you can stay focused on building a compelling story.
If you’re looking for more ideas on how to connect with your audience during presentations, download comprehensive guide to creating engaging presentations. You’ll learn from presentation pros on how to deliver a more captivating and interactive experience from start to finish.
