We are all presenters. You are a presenter. You just might not be aware of it. In a way, presentation is sales. You might not be trading items for money. But you are trading ideas for engagement. You have something that is important enough to you that makes you want to share it with someone else. What you want in exchange is their involvement, active engagement, and excitement added to your own. If you only get a half-hearted response, it is probably because you only gave a half-hearted presentation.
If you want people to be excited with you, then you have to let your excitement be the most important part of your presentation. People don’t buy your news, they buy your excitement about your news. You can convey that excitement over the phone or even in a letter almost as well as you can share it in person. Just know that when you are not face to face, you have to work a little harder and do a little more to make people feel what you feel. One way to do that is to add the digital component. Here are a few tips to help you make better digital presentations:
Go Big
Don’t just send dead tree announcements of your baby’s gender. That doesn’t convey your excitement regardless of how many exclamation points you put on it. Instead, find something at a site like Gender Reveal that will knock their socks off. Even if you can’t have a face to face event due to Covid or distance or dragons, you can go for something spectacular like a gender reveal confetti cannon that will blow away any other video message you might have otherwise prepared.
Even with the best of cameras, video changes things. It really can make you look fat or thin, or short, or Klingon. The point is that cameras don’t capture the essence of what you are feeling. It is a little like a stage performance. To emote all the way to the back of the room, you have to go big. If you want your smile and excitement to be infectious, you have to go big, like confetti cannon big. There is no such thing as too big of a gesture when doing a digital presentation.
Be Accessible
Embrace accessibility. That doesn’t just mean using large fonts for your subtitles. Though that certainly couldn’t hurt. To be accessible is to be available and usable for as many people as possible. If your fonts are very small, then only a limited number of people can appreciate what you have done. Going larger means more useable by a larger audience.
By putting your art presentation in digital form, it can be consumed by more people in more places. That makes it more accessible. Especially now, people are not able to benefit from museums and expos. Things will get better soon. But for now, we are still sheltering in place, with or without a law demanding that we do. By adding a digital component to your presentations, you benefit a lot more people. And those people will remember you when things get back to normal.
Get Interactive
One of the best things about going digital is that it allows people from all over the world to react to what you are doing. With the proper online engagement tools, you can get instant feedback in real time to your digital content. It is not enough to put up a website. People have to interact with it. One form of interaction is to click on an item for more information. A higher form of interaction is having them leave contact information for future interaction of some kind. An even better form of interaction is to have them return to your site frequently. You can’t just give people an information dump. You have to guide them through interactivity to a point of deeper engagement.
Everyone is a presenter. By adding a digital component, your presentations will be even more successful. Just remember that when you go digital, go big, be accessible, and get interactive.
