A Guide for Public Speakers

Back from your travel seminar, you are filled with impressions, images and feelings about your experience.  How do you share what you have learned with others?  These basic guidelines will help you develop an effective presentation to do just that.

 

Organizing Your Presentation

Organizing your talk will be the same whether or not you use slides, Power Point or other visual aids.  You are trying to help your audience understand particular issues, so you want to be persuasive and clear.  Remember, your talk is not a travelogue, so there is no need to do a point by point chronology of what you did on your trip.  Instead, your presentation is an illustrated talk, with a beginning, middle and end – visual aids just enhance your story.

 

The most important thing to do first is to prepare an outline.  Decide on the points you want to talk about, and then add appropriate information as well as the visual aids you need to make the points come alive.  You will need to focus, since you cannot expect to cover all issues in one talk!  If you use visual aids, remember that you need not limit yourself to pictures you took yourself.  Get copies of images you need from other sources such as the web or other individuals/organizations. 

 

Consider the group to which you will speak.  Are the group members knowledgeable about the region you will be describing, or will they need some historical overview?  Is there some particular issue that interests them the most (i.e. education, labor issues, religion)?  You can safely assume that most people are interested in what you will say, since they have taken the time to attend your presentation.  If you are not familiar with the group beforehand, you might invite persons from the group to ask four or five key questions on their minds about the places you visited to get a sense of what their major concerns are.

 

Finally, prepare a point of action for the audience to take at the end.  You might suggest writing letter to the editor of the local paper, subscribing to a recommended listserv to follow the situation, donating money to a special project, or responding to a particular legislative issue.

 

Getting Ready for Your Presentation

• Time your talk by practicing what you will say beforehand:  keep it to 20 to 40 minutes in length.

• If you are using visual equipment (slides, computer, video) plan ahead and make sure you have all the equipment you need, and that it functions properly.  Prepare for the possibility of technical errors! 

• Include a map of the region for reference

• Collect materials for a literature table.  You can even put together a fact sheet with some salient points for the audience to take home with them.

Setting the Scene for Your Presentation

• If you can, circulate among the audience as they arrive to engage them in conversation or enlist their help in setting up.

• Have background music from the region you visited playing as people gather.

• Introduce yourself!  Tell people a little bit about why you went on the travel seminar, the philosophy and style of the Center for Global Education, and how your experience affected you or changed your perspective.

• Talk clearly and slowly, making sure everyone can hear you.

• Be clear about the agenda for your presentation, and let your audience know how long you will talk and that there will be a question/answer period.

• Set some ground rules for the Q&A time before you begin your talk.  Spell out that you prefer to give your talk first with Q&A time at the end, so that everyone has a common body of information to fall back on as you answer questions.  Indicate that if someone can’t hear something or missed a name, he or she should feel free to ask right away.  This way you have made the rules clear for all, and if someone tries to interrupt you, you are simply repeating what you have already made clear to everyone, not just putting off this person. 

Giving Your Presentation

• Begin with some background information.  Include a brief synopsis of the region’s history and U.S. relations with countries there.

• Chose some key phrases you will repeat throughout your talk.

• Build your talk around your own experience; this is your greatest strength!  This does not mean that you should lay out the exact chronology of when you visited whom—it is unimportant what day you visited with what people.  What will impact your audience are stories about the people you met during appropriate places in your talk.

• Keep statistics and non-English names to a minimum, and be sure you can pronounce those you use.  Make statistics come alive by using examples and comparisons (e.g. Namibia is slightly smaller than Texas and Oklahoma combined; or 70,000 Salvadorans killed in the course of 10 years equals about 1.4% of the population).

• Don’t avoid controversial issues.  Present the facts and the context in which they took place.

• When possible, lighten things up a bit to give your audience some room to relax.  After making an emotionally heavy point, mention a humorous or heartwarming anecdote. 

• Conclude with positive energy, genuine anger and challenging inspiration to help move people to respond to what they have heard.  Give your audience specific ideas for things they can do to take action and get involved before the question and answer period, as some people will leave as soon as you finish the body of your talk.

The Question & Answer Period

• Be clear about the time limit for the question and answer period, so that people who have to leave will be able to do so without feeling they are interrupting.

• Take care to avoid that no one audience member dominates this part of the session.  Remind him or her that there is only a limited amount of time, and that everyone needs a chance to ask questions.

• Do not take aggressive or hostile questions personally.  Address the issue and respect the emotional tone of the person asking the question, but do not engage the participant in a lengthy debate.  You might respond, “I respect your knowing so much about” or “I can see that you have strong feelings on this issue.”  Remind the audience that many respected people, including members of Congress, have differences on these issues.  You can also remind them again that you are speaking of your beliefs, based on experience.

• Don’t be afraid to admit that you don’t know the answer to a question!  Offer to try and find out, or recommend resources that might be helpful.

After the Presentation

• Take time to reward yourself!  Putting a presentation together takes time and energy, but remember that the more experience you gain, the easier each presentation will seem.

• Follow-through on any commitments you made to send people material or resources that they might have requested.

• Thank your hosts for their time and attention with a brief handwritten note or card a couple of weeks after the presentation.  This is a nice way to maintain a relationship