An embedded presentation

How many  times have you been to a presentation which has not impacted on you significantly? 

You arrived three minutes before the speaker mounted the platform, you listened, laughed politely, noted what he or she said and then filed out with the rest of the audience after the speaker had left the platform.  Two days after the presentation, you had forgotten all about it.  

Imagine a smooth, flat stone on a smooth, flat, shallow rock near the water's edge.  What happens when the tide comes in? The stone is washed off the rock.  Now imagine some moss on the same rock.  What happens when the tide comes in?  The sea washes over the moss which remains firmly attached to the rock.  An embedded presentation should be as firmly attached to your audience as the moss is to the rock.  How to achieve this?

Begin the embedding process as early as possible
Make sure the audience know who you are and what benefit they will derive from your presentation in the programme notes or similar.  You could also email or contact your audience ahead of time to prepare them for your offering.  In this way you will have at least a neutral soil and hopefully a fertile one in which to plant your seeds.

Think back to the last presentation you attended.  How could the presenter have prepared the soil better, to make you in the audience more receptive to the changes he wanted to induce in you?  Did s/he do anything to prepare you for the presentation ahead of time?  How much did you know about the presenter before the presentation?  Would the presenter have made more impact on you if he or she had in some way or other have contacted you ahead of time? 

During the presentation
You will be wanting to create some sort of change in your audience eg, you might want them to buy your products or you might want them to be better informed about your department's strategic goals.  Whatever goals you have, make every effort to involve the audience in such a way that you create these changes.  This is what a truly embedded presentation is - a presentation which impacts on your audience's lives for a long time after they have walked out of your presentation.

Again, think back to the last presentation you attended - or at least one in the recent past. What three things did the presenter do to make impact on you - to ensure that his presentation would become embedded in you, like the moss on the rock?

After the presentation
The success of your presentation can only be truly judged when your audience resumes their separate lives.  To take the two situations above: if you receive lots of orders from your audience, then your presenation has been successful.  If your audience uses the information about your department's strategic goals in a constructive way, by changing their work habits to fit in with the strategic goals of your department, then your presentation has been successful.  You have achieved your goals.  We could also think about what we could do post-presentation to  embed further.  We might email people perhaps, get feed-back from them, visit or phone them.

TASK THREE - What could the presenter have done to have embedded it further in you, so that it would impact on and influence you?