A fundamental element in a successful presentation is preparation. If you are asked to make a presentation, give yourself ample time to organize and plan things out so it will be an impressive result. An effective and successful presentation is a product of carefully planned and well-rehearsed preparation.

You need to develop a presentation scheme for an organized approach. In your planning, three essentials should be outlined on your planning sheet. These are establishing your objectives, knowing your audience, and preparing for the content or material. Planning your presentation helps you decide on how to present the content and the order of relaying the information to your audience.

Establishing the Objectives

A good preparation does not start with how to kick off on the content or how to introduce your topic. Setting the primary and secondary objectives of your presentation is the first thing to do. Know what you wish to achieve and get from your audience after your presentation.

Know what you want to accomplish from your speech. Having a set of defined objectives for your presentation will keep you focused on the topic. From your objectives, you might want your audience to simply respond to the information, take on a new perspective, or respond to a particular action. Your objectives lay the basis for knowing your audience and planning the content.

Knowing Your Audience

Once a clear set of objectives are established, the next step is to research your audience so you would know them even before you met them. During the presentation proper, it is important to put yourself in the shoes of your audience, understanding where they are coming from, what they need, feel, and hope to accomplish. But this you can successfully undergo if you have a good background of who they are and what their interests are.

To carry out this process in your preparation, you can do a little survey of their background through the help of the program organizers. After having collated data, allocate time to study their profiles. Moreover, knowing the number of audience you will likely have in your presentation will also help in the preparation of your visual aids so you can determine what visual material works for them or not. Also, the kind of activities or audience participation you wish to achieve will depend on the number.

Preparing the Content and Material

An important step in this preparation stage is conducting intensive research and using visual materials. Generate your ideas and make good use of the available resources such as reference books, newspaper, magazine articles, colleagues, and the most powerful source of information, the internet. You need to come out knowledgeable about your topic to build a good credibility.

After doing a good amount of research, start making the outline or structure of your topic. A logically structured speech starts with an introduction, the body, and a conclusion. The ‘Introduction’ will let the audience know the topic and the main points. The ‘Body’ will contain the supporting explanation to the key points.

In developing the body of your presentation, you may use helpful methods such as examples, experiences, figures and statistics. Make sure that the delivery of the body has to be in an organized manner. The ‘Conclusion’ is a restatement of the key points. So, you can either do a recap or summary of the entire context or you can simply drive home to the main points of the topic.

The use of visual aids or visual materials is very essential to your presentation. Apart from keeping you on track in your speech, it also gives your audience a good picture of what you are trying to convey. These visual aids also serve as your guide as you elaborate on the body of your presentation. Consider the factors of availability and usefulness in choosing your visual aids so you will not end up using something that does not create an impact to your audience.

You have many options to choose from in using a visual material for your presentation. You can make use of flip charts, illustrations, overhead transparency, videotape, posters, and slides using PowerPoint Presentation. It is said that your audience will retain 65% of the information relayed with the use of oral and visual presentation.