Step 1. Do Your Research

Task 1: Document What You Know and Assume About the Audience

The first step is to write down whatever you know and whatever you assume about your audience. For example, here is what I knew and assumed about the audience for a talk I recently gave.

What I know

• 50 people.

• Most of them work at the company that is bringing me in, but they are also inviting some people from the outside.

• Pretty evenly split among interaction designers, programmers, and Internet marketing people.

• Fairly knowledgeable about the topic in general.

What I am assuming

• A few people under 25 and a few over 50, but most people are in their 30s and 40s.

• Mix of men and women.

• Some will have heard about me or read some of my books, but most have not.

• Will be curious but also somewhat skeptical of my point of view; may not be interested in change.

The “what I know” part came from conversations I had with the person who was arranging to bring me in to speak. When I sat down to start crafting the presentation and began writing out what I knew, I realized that I had some assumptions that I had not checked with the host. I made a list of assumptions and went back to the host with the list to check out what was accurate.

Be careful about assumptions

Early in my speaking career I was asked to speak at a conference for city clerks—the people who do the management and administrative work for local government. I assumed that this group would be somewhat serious, perhaps a little reticent to engage in group activities, and certainly not the right group to play games. I was totally wrong. It was one of the most rambunctious, noisy, playful groups I had ever encountered. That taught me a lesson about making assumptions, and since then I have learned to write down my assumptions and see if I can get my contact to confirm them or set me straight.

Task 2: Document the Goals of the Organizer and the Goals of the Audience

When you give a presentation, you often have two audiences you need to care about. One is the people who come and hear you present, and the other is the host or the person or group that has asked you to come present. In order to have a successful presentation, you need to address the needs and goals of both groups—and they aren’t always the same.

Your host may have a very specific goal in mind—for instance, “I want our product managers to call me and ask for my staff on their projects.” The people attending the presentation might have a different goal: “I want to save time and money on my projects.” These goals might fit together nicely, but they aren’t the same.

Ideally, you will craft a presentation that meets both goals, but you have to know what the goals are before you can do that.

Sometimes the goals of the host or organizer don’t match the goals of the attendees. If you suspect that is the case, then you need to talk to your host about the disconnect so that you can decide what to do about it.

The most important questions to ask

If you ask in general about the goals for the presentation, you will likely get some vague response: “I want our team to understand...” Instead, the questions I ask are these:

When my presentation is over and people are leaving the room,

A. What will they be saying to themselves and others?

B. What action will they take when they get back to their desks/homes?

Asking these questions results in the best information about what is really important to the host or organizer. In terms of what is most important to the audience, you can ask the host, but they might not know. If you can’t actually talk to members of the audience, then you might need to make a list of your assumptions about what is important to them and then check those assumptions as best you can.

Ask for measurable behavior

When you ask for information on the goals of the session, see if you can make the person’s answer be specific and concrete. If they say, “I want people to understand how important it is to do X,” ask them, “How would you know that they understood that? What is the behavior you would see? For example, if they understood X exactly, what would they do that is different from what they do now?” You need to know specifically what behavior the participant would engage in that would show that a particular goal had been met. Would they pick up the phone and call someone? Would they make room in their next project plan for a research phase? Would they read a book? Sign up for a class? Speak to their staff about something?

When the goal is measurable, it will help you decide what you need to do in your talk.

Task 3: Compare Where They Are to Where They Want to Be

An effective presentation that really hits the mark is a presentation that stretches people—but not past the breaking point. If you don’t stretch people to think and act in new ways, then the presentation will be boring. However, if you stretch people too far, then they will give up and won’t take the action you want them to take.

How big is the gap?

The question is, how big is the gap between where people are now and where someone (you, the host or organizer, the participants themselves) wants them to be? For example, let’s say the goal is to get people to donate $100 to a particular charity. Whether that is a good stretch goal, not enough of a stretch, or too much of a stretch depends on their starting point. If your audience has donated to this charity before or regularly donates sums of $100 or more to charities, then this is a good stretch goal. The gap between the goal and where they are is enough to stretch them and allow you to make an interesting presentation, but not so far that the call to action is unreasonable.

If your audience regularly gives hundreds of dollars a year, then the gap is too small. There is no gap. How can you get people excited about giving you $100 when they already give much more than that?

And if the audience is a group of recently unemployed people who are worried about getting a job, then the stretch is probably too much and people will just turn you off.

Design for a reasonable but stretchable gap

If you know your audience, and you know the goals of your audience and your host or organizer, then you can determine if that gap is reasonable and stretchable. If it’s not, then you need to adjust the goals of the presentation so that it is.