Presenting to Virtual Audiences II: Tips and Best Practices

Last week we discussed some of the benefits and major challenges of presenting to virtual audiences. It’s a different ballgame than being in the same room with the people you’re presenting to – it’s harder to connect directly with audience members, and any technical issues can derail things completely.

When your audience isn’t in the same room – or maybe even in the same time zone – with you, it allows you to transmit information to a large and far-flung audience without incurring travel costs. However, that lack of physical presence can become an issue in several ways.

Let’s discuss strategies for addressing some of the challenges of virtual presenting.

1. When They Can’t See You: If there’s no video feed, there’s no way to use gestures or body language to help communicate confidence and generate engagement. You can’t make eye contact with anyone, either. This can compromise the sense of rapport and connection between you and your audience, and even impair your delivery if you’re typically an animated speaker who relies heavily on nonverbal communication.

This means all the warmth, dynamics, and animation of your message must be communicated through your voice alone. Use the four P’s of effective vocal delivery:

• Projection: Speak with sufficient volume and breath control.
• Pauses: Pause before and after important points.
• Pace: Speak at a pace that is easy to follow.
• Pitch: Your tone of voice affects the emotional mood.

Vary your volume, inflection, and pacing and use pauses to retain your audience’s attention and avoid a dull, monotonous delivery. In a virtual delivery, you must make the effort to convey conviction, enthusiasm, and energy, or your audience will disconnect from your message.

2. Lack of Connection: Not being able to make eye contact or address individuals in the audience can seriously compromise the warm, connected sense of rapport that a presenter strives for in a live setting.

If the virtual audience is of a size that makes it feasible to occasionally take individual questions, or check in by name with audience members, it can help to generate more rapport and personal connection. It may be impossible to interact with every individual audience member, but even the people listening to others’ personal interactions will tend to feel more engaged and involved.

3. Keeping Their Attention: Remote audience members may tend to multitask. This may lead to audience members missing important information and compromise their understanding of your message. You also have no way to know whether your audience is engaged, or how your presentation is being received – are they all riveted to their screens, or are most of them secretly uploading pictures of their lunch to Instagram?

 Knowing who you’re talking to and what they are really interested in is always key to capturing and holding the attention of any audience. Prepare a focused presentation with a logical structure, and find the story within your data. Stories are the hook that keep people interested. Keep your presentation lively, and mix things up every once in a while to prevent boredom – an unusual rhetorical device, startling statistic,  thought-provoking question, or amusing slide graphic can help keep the audience interested.

If your audience is relatively small, or if you are able to sample a larger audience, building in some interactive materials, asking for feedback from individuals, or having audience members participate by reading slides or asking questions can help ensure that they keep paying attention – and give you some idea of whether they’re paying attention.

4. Technical Issues: If you or your audience start having technical problems, it can disrupt the presentation completely. What if you are visible onscreen and your audio is out of sync? What if the connection is weak or slow, or the feed dies?

 Testing ahead of time may help you diagnose or prevent some technical issues, but there will always be some uncertainty – which is why it’s crucial to have a backup plan. Make contingency plans to reschedule the presentation, present from a different computer, switch from wifi to an ethernet connection, or shift the conference to a different platform should the need arise.

 As with live presentations, the purpose of any virtual presentation is to communicate a message to the audience, so take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that they are engaged, entertained, and informed – wherever in the world they might be.

 

Baker Communications offers leading-edge Presentations Training solutions that will help we address the goals and achieve the solutions addressed in this article. For more information about how our organization can achieve immediate and lasting behavior change that leads to success during presentations in any setting, click here.