PowerPoint Tips Blog

Helping you with presenting, PowerPoint, and speaking

Home » interactive

Use triggers to create interactive presentations

by Leave a Comment

powerpoint-tips-triggers-interactive-1Audiences today want an interactive experience. As a presenter, you can:

  • Ask them questions
  • Answer their questions
  • Organize small group exercises

But you can do more.

You can also integrate your audience into the presentation itself. For example, you can create a menu slide that links to other parts of the presentation (or other presentations) and let your audience decide the order of the presentation. I explain one way to create a menu slide here.

Another way to get the audience involved is to create mini-quizzes on your slides. You can also provide additional explanation if an audience member wants it. These techniques work well when you are presenting in front of an audience but also allow you to create interactive presentations that audiences navigate on their own in front of a computer.

You can do this with PowerPoint’s Trigger feature. (At the end of this post, there’s good news if you have a Mac!)

What are triggers?

[Read more…]

Make your webinars super interactive

by 3 Comments

This is a guest post from Brenda Bence, who is a corporate branding and personal branding expert. She wrote this as a tip for Speaker Net News subscribers and gave me permission to reprint it. You can read more about her at www.BrendaBence.com.

powerpoint-tips-interactive-webinarsBrenda does live keynotes but then often follows up with “virtual keynotes” for members of an organization who are located elsewhere. These are small groups of 12 – 15 team members who are usually in Singapore, Hong Kong, Mumbai and/or Shanghai/Beijing. Here are 8 techniques that she uses to make her webinars super interactive. Note that she uses WebEx webinar software.

  1. Sign in: Get attendees to “sign in” when they first call in. I have a slide with all participants’ names on it, and they have to “sign in” (using WebEx Center technology). They also have to write a one-word description of how they are feeling about attending this program. This starts team members engaging and reflecting and helps me get a sense of the “energy in the room,” just as I would want if I were presenting live.
  2. Ground rules: Make a game out of generating attendees’ own “ground rules” for participation. Then, once the list is created, they have to raise their hand in the sidebar to show they will abide by those rules. Inevitably, someone will offer up ideas along the lines of “focus,” “put away cell phones,” “close up other computer windows,” etc. This avoids my or anybody else’s having to suggest that people pay attention — the audience has set their own rules and are more likely to abide by them.
  3. Notification: I let them know within the first five minutes that this will be a very interactive two hours and that I will call on them randomly throughout the program to answer questions. This keeps people on the alert.
  4. Executive presence: I  always suggest to the client to have a senior-level executive participate during each session, too, and ask him/her to (a) introduce me at the start, and (b) comment a few times throughout the program. Knowing that a senior exec is participating keeps people paying attention and wanting to speak up. [Read more…]