Engage from the stage—techniques to help you capture and hold your audience’s attention
Audiences are becoming more and more difficult to engage as people are distracted today more than ever. As a speaker, realizing this and taking steps to make sure that you capture and hold your audience’s attention through sound engagement techniques are critical to your success.
This article introduces you to the three dimensions of audience engagement. Like gears, these dimensions often intersect and interact in practice. But thinking about them separately as you design your speech will help you craft a much more compelling and engaging presentation.
What does audience engagement mean?
I hear the word “engaging” tossed around when I talk to clients. They want an “engaging” presentation for their staff, or they want an “engaging” training session. A little investigation reveals that what they mean by “engaging” is actually “interactive”. And those are two very different things.
You can be engaging without being interactive and vice versa. And with a large audience, interaction can be very difficult (though doable) but engagement is still very possible. You just need to be intentional about it.
I have a simple practical real-world definition of engagement as far as an audience is concerned. Engagement means that an audience is, first and foremost, paying attention… continually. To achieve that, I suggest you look at engagement through three very important lenses.
Intellectual Engagement
Your audience needs mental stimulation or they will tune you out. Information is rampant and easy to access today via the internet. Your audience needs a good reason to stay engaged with your content. And if your content is not insightful, interesting or stimulating, your audience will get bored.
Also, if your presentation is seriously flawed from a logical or factual standpoint, you run the risk of serious damage to your effectiveness, not to mention your credibility.
Here are a few tips to help you achieve intellectual engagement
Make sure it makes sense
Check your content for logical consistency. If you find any flaws, do the work of addressing them and walk the audience through your thinking. This can be very effective with audiences that are highly educated or that are already intellectually invested in the subject. You can read more about this here and here.
Pace your ideas
Presenting your ideas too slowly can lead your audience to boredom. I learned this very quickly after putting together a trial run of an online course. The test group gave me feedback saying that, though the ideas were valuable, the audio lessons were too slow in pace and I spent too much time on some ideas. This, they said, made it hard for them to stay engaged.
The point? Make sure your ideas are coming at a good speed to keep the listeners alert. It is a balancing act between too fast and too slow. I recommend pacing through simple and foundational ideas quickly and spending more time on complex or counterintuitive concepts.
Now on to the next tip.
Vary your supporting points
It is easy to default to a certain kind of supporting point for your ideas. Some of us are storytellers; other love data and statistics; other still just want to explain until they are blue in the face. However, using the same kind of content gets boring and predictable leading your audience to disengage. Instead of this one-size-fits-all approach, use different support tools like analogies, anecdotes, quotations, parables, statistics, research, metaphors, case studies etc. This will add variety to your presentation and keep your audience engaged.
Before we move on to the next dimension of engagement, note that when choosing your engagement methods for the intellectual dimension, make sure it is suited to the knowledge and skill level of the audience. Too easy, and they get bored. Too hard, and they get exhausted. For more on this, read this short article.
Now, onward!
2. Emotional Engagement
The intellect is great at understanding and making sense of things. But it is emotion that leads to motion and change. No matter how dry your topic, look for opportunities to infuse some emotional content. This will make you much more persuasive than intellectual content alone.
Some techniques engage your audience emotionally
Tell stories that invoke the kind of emotion you want.
Use picturesque language and ask the audience to visualize something that will spark emotion
Use emotional visuals – pictures of people expressing the emotion you want to create or scenes that can spark an emotional response.
Speak to the audience’s hopes and fears.
Use humour where appropriate.
Your emotional engagement pieces do not need to be over-the-top. Instead, tailor the intensity to the audience and occasion. And remember that there is a broad range of emotion—not just sad and happy. Just like with the first dimension, variety produces interest and engagement. Aim to provide some variety of feeling.
Now for the last and often least considered dimension of engagement.
3. Physical Engagement
The connection between physical movement and mental states is still greatly underestimated. Yet we live it on a daily basis. We go for “walks to clear our heads”, we speak of “changing our perspectives”, we “shift uneasily” when we hear something we disagree with, and many by now are familiar with the concept of power poses.
On the other hand, we are also all too familiar with the fatigue we experience after sitting in a rather fixed position for a long time.
It is clear that physical movement influences us. And if that is true for you, it is also true for your audience.Good and strongly facilitates mental and emotional engagement. Also, it keeps people awake. Where possible, get people to move in a meaningful way.
The physical movement need not be a massive calorie-burning workout. Simple activities that cause even seemingly minor bodily shifts help keep the audience engaged and research suggests, can even impact how they respond to your message.
Some techniques engage your audience physically
Poll the audience and have them raise their hands.
For longer presentations, consider a stretch break in between.
Use humour – laughter is movement and it can shift the feel of a presentation and provide physical relief especially after mental or emotional demanding content.
Have the audience members interact with one another if appropriate.
Have people write ideas on flipcharts, post-it notes or just their notepads – the act of writing itself induces engagement.
Make it your own
The ideas and techniques shared here are not exhaustive. Neither are they truly separate from each other. For example, a well-chosen bit of research can be presented as a story that makes you laugh while stimulating some emotion. In this sense, it engages on all three levels.
The key is to take the ideas in this article and make them your own. Use this information as a way of thinking about your speech.As long as you are asking yourself if your approach will aid your audience’s engagement along these dimensions, you are on the right track. And you will have a lot more success in your presentations than before.
Until the next article, speak with skill.
