Your presentation will have to be delivered and recorded with the intended listener in mind. The audience you are presenting to should be in your mind when you are structuring your presentation and choosing what information to include… what do they know, what do they need to know? In this case, the organisation you are presenting to is going to be listening to your proposal: How will you address them? What tone will you take in your presentation, formal or informal? How will you make sure the information you provide will be understood by the audience?

You can begin to think about what tone is most appropriate for your presentation based on the reason and setting for the presentation, but also the audience you are presenting to. How formal will you need to be? If you are presenting to your best mates, throw in a few jokes and be silly, if it’s for your boss, potentially less of that! The tone underlies all the information you provide and aids the impression you give and how it is received. What tone would be most appropriate for the action project presentation?

Keeping your audience engaged is a key aspect of presenting. If you were standing in front of a room full of people, you would probably want to scan evenly across everyones eyes while you talk, keeping everyone engaged and drawing them into what you are saying. 

However, this looks very different when it comes to presenting virtually! What is easy to do, however, is just swap out ‘eyes’ for ‘webcam’. Talking straight into the camera will be the virtual equivalent of engaging as personally as you can with the audience.

This is a simple point but makes all the difference in how you feel while presenting and how the audience perceives your presentation. Body language is a form of communication and helps reinforce the points you make in your presentation – watch any public speaker and notice how they hold themselves! The key to coming across and feeling confident is to try to avoid being ‘closed,’ by slouching or crossing your arms or legs. Instead, you want to be ‘open,’ try to get in a comfortable position, sit/stand upright with your shoulders back and feel like you own the room… you’ll have them in the palm of your hand.

In order to maintain eye contact and communicate as naturally as you can, you will need to feel confident you know your points and what you want to say. Avoiding reading from a script is great practice, but to help you remember the structure of your presentation and the points you have to make, you may want to highlight certain words in the slide as a prompt, or associate a certain image on the slide itself with something you wanted to say instead of using flash cards while presenting.

Presentations are not everyone’s cup of tea, and that is fine! Public speaking can be a daunting prospect, especially for someone who is not used to presenting regularly. But the important thing to remember is – nobody is perfect! Everyone is always learning when it comes to these skills, no matter how many presentations you have done. The more you throw yourself into something that feels uncomfortable, the more comfortable it becomes. Nobody will be expecting a perfect presentation, if you feel like you make a mistake, chances are the audience didn’t even notice, or even if they did, they wouldn’t care!