Double your Presentation Impact

Delivering effective presentations is a skill that is polished with practice and  experience and there are no magic short-cuts. But here are some simple communication strategies that you can easily use to create additional impact in your presentation no matter where you are on the experience curve…

Use More Visuals and Less Text

According to research conducted by Dr. Albert Mehrabian of UCLA, the impact of the various elements of communication is as follows:

Text and Words  7%
Visual and Graphics 55%
Vocal and Sound  38%

If you just use text, bullets and read these out, the audience misses out on the impact that visuals and graphics provide.

Another piece of research conducted by the Wharton Research Centre also provides a reinforcement of how visuals and graphics create greater message retention. Check this out:

Message retention after 3 days – using bullets/text   10% only
Message retention after 3 days – using visuals  50%

Whoa! Everyone knows intuitively that using pictures is helpful but this is stunning.  You can now see how you can multiply the impact and retention through intelligent use of visuals and graphics in your presentation. By the way, when we talk about visuals/graphics, we are not talking just about the stuff you put on the slides. We are also talking about what the audience sees when they see YOU so don’t be a talking statue.

Use the Principle of Three

People generally tend to remember lists of three items.  Four or five items is a stretch and gets tricky and one or two is not substantive enough usually.  This principle of three applies to individual messages (not more than three points on a slide if possible) and to overall purpose (not more than three main ideas in the presentation).

But what if you have four or five things to talk about? Well then you have to make some difficult choices on what to cut out. Remember, effective communication and presentation is usually more about what you leave out than what you add in – less is more as they say.