Member Article

It's all about perspective

With Simon Raybould of Curved Vision Theatre

I’ve sat through some drivel, recently. Some of it was witty and entertaining at the time, but still drivel. Why? Because it didn’t tell me anything I wanted to know. I’m sure this is familiar to you – you give up hours of your time to hear about X, Y and Z. The publicity for the event promises that you’ll learn answers to specific questions to do with X, Y and Z: you go with high hopes and perhaps even a note-pad…

… only for the presenter to tell you “something” about X, Y and Z but not the specific questions you were expecting to hear about. You leave at the end of the event annoyed.

Why do people do that? Because they make the mistake of presenting from their perspective, not their audience’s. They know about X, Y and Z so they talk about X, Y and Z – forgetting that what’s important to them is not important, automatically, to the audience.

Let me give you a specific example. The presenter was the front man for a large Quango, the first-point-of-contact and one-stop-shop for a particular service. Fantastic…. except that for the full 20 minutes of his presentation he never once told us how we could contact his organisation. No website, no phone number, nothing! Frankly, I didn’t care about how his organisation was being re-organised, I wanted to know how to get in touch with him.

Today’s tip – ask yourself this critical question before you start to design or write your presentation: “what do my audience need to know?” It’s not rocket science!

And if you think I might mean you, contact me at sme@curved-vision.co.uk and I’ll do you a discount on some presentation skills training!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .