This speaker guide will help you to shape your talk for the target audience and will provide useful hints for preparing valuable and well accepted presentations. It is for everybody who is willing to present at meetups, user groups, conferences and other type of events.
Pick an interesting topic
First and most important thing when you plan to give a talk at an event is to pick a topic that will be interesting, useful and engaging for the audience. If you manage do this well, half of your work is done.
No matter if you have 50, 500 or 5000 people in the room, you should know that they have certain expectations. They may be there to learn something new, have an exchange with others, have some good time or all of these together.
By choosing to be at the event, they gave up some of their free time (which otherwise will be spent with family or friends) and they expect to have something useful in exchange.
When you prepare your presentations, do your best to ensure that their time with you is well spent.
No marketing pitches
Never, ever use your time on the stage for marketing pitches!!!
If you think people are there to listen how good is your product or company, you are totally wrong.
Marketing presentations are like the TV advertisement in the middle of a good movie. They are even worse – it is like showing you advertisements instead of a good movie.
So instead of doing marketing, bring something useful for the people. Tell them how you solved problems, overcome challenges or build something useful. Make sure your content brings value for the audience and keeps them interested. Leave the marketing behind the scenes.
Know your audience
Once you have a good topic, you need to present it accordingly. Your presentation should be prepared to fit well the target audience. Here are few factors that you need to consider:
- Are they beginners, intermediate or experts?
- Why are they attending the event and your talk?
- What do they want to learn?
- What are their interests?
Consider that if you are presenting at an event that is open for everybody you will have a mixed audience. This means you will need to adjust you presentation to be understandable by beginners, while keeping also more advanced people engaged. That may be tricky, especially when presenting technical topics.
Finding the right balance is crucial because if your presentation is too simple and high level, beginners will understand it, but advanced users will be totally bored. On other side, if your presentation is too complex, large portion of the audience may not understand the subject matter.
Finding the right balance is a key for success when presenting in front of mixed audience.
Keep the timing
If you are presenting to an event, you will usually need to fit in a fixed time slot in the agenda.
Before preparing your presentation, ask the organizer of the event how much time you have on the stage. Often you will have 20-25 minutes for the talk and another 5-10 minutes for questions and answers related to it.
Always ask how much time you have and make sure you are fitting into it. This will help you avoid uncomfortable situations.
In general people will forgive you if the talk is a bit shorter, but you may get interrupted if you significantly exceed the time.
In case you are preparing slides for the talk, but you are not sure how much time you will need to present them, consider an overage of 2.5 minutes per slide. That is usually a good indicator.
Once you are ready, a small rehearsal of your presentation will help you to perfect the timing.
Get feedback
Once your content is ready, get some feedback to see if there is space for improvement. You can show the presentation to friends or colleagues and get their opinion.
Here is important to approach people that will provide you honest feedback which will help you to improve your content. The best would be to ask close friends or colleagues, that are not afraid of hearting your feelings and are ready to provide constructive critic.
Once you are confident about the quality of your presentation, send it to the event organizers and ask them for feedback as well. They know well the audience and have best interest to help you deliver a good presentation. Therefore their feedback is very valuable.
Be careful with live demos
If you are going to show a live demo, make sure you are well prepared.
Having long live demos is not recommended because people usually get bored of them.
The longer the demo, the higher is the chance of something going wrong with it.
Our general recommendation is to avoid live demos. If you really need one, keep it as short as possible and test it multiple times before you go on the stage. If you rely on specific hardware, software or connectivity, make sure that they are reliable and properly setup.
You can also consider showing a recording of the demo instead of doing it live during the event.
Be careful with jokes
You have probably witnessed the positive effects of a nice spontaneous joke during a presentation and you may be tempted to use some jokes during yours. If you are heading this way, do it with care.
Telling good jokes is a skill. Very few people can spontaneously tell a joke that will make everybody in the room laughing. There are also many jokes that are really funny for some people, but are insulting for others due to cultural or religious differences.
Therefore if you want to bring some jokes during the talk, it is better to choose them carefully, plan them in advance and do several rehearsals before you go on the big stage.
Practice before the delivery
Last but not least, practice your presentation before you bring it in front of a bigger audience. If the event is important, you may need to make several rehearsals until your presentation is fully polished and ready for the stage.
The simplest way of rehearsal is practicing your presentation alone or in front of a mirror to check how you behave and if you are familiar with the content. If this feels too lonely for you, you can consider practicing in front of a close friend, a colleague or a family member that will provide you honest feedback. Use this feedback to apply corrections and then repeat again the process.
Before presenting at a big event, you may also consider showing your presentation to a small group of colleagues and ask them for feedback.
Once you feel comfortable and happy with the result, you are ready to go. The good news is that usually 2-3 rehearsals, are enough to achieve this goal.
Congratulations, you are now ready for the stage!
