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1. Open the Space 👐Here & Now: How might establish collective awareness of this space, this moment, this session, this event?Them & You: Who are you speaking to? What kind of connection or relationship do you want to share with them? what feeling? How might you acknowledge them in this moment? how do want them to engage? How might you ask them to show up in this moment? What are some simple elements that people need to know about who you are and why you’re here to speak with them?Context & Purpose: What do people need to know to be crystal clear about the topical context of your presentation and your core purpose for presenting?Awareness & Concern: What do people need to know in order to understand the significance and relevance of the current situation that you are seeking to address through your work?2. Anchor the Value ⚓The What: What is the scope of your research and change work? What is one meaningful or exciting finding or impact from your work that you can share now to give your audience an experience and evidence of its value?The How: What are some key points from your theory of change that can help your audience understand how you are working to create change?The Why: Why is what you’ve done, and what you are doing through this work important? What critical value is being created because of your work?3. Position the Opportunity 🛒Momentum: What opportunity for change is motion now through the work that you are doing? Message: In sharing this opportunity, what is the core message or takeaway that you are seeking to communicate to your audience?Connection: How is your audience already becoming connected and part of this change? Meaning: What does it mean for them to get involved? As they get involved, what value is here for them? What is inspiring about this for them?4. Create the Invitation 🎈 Primary path: What is the primary path of engagement that you would like to invite your audience to pursue with you? Invitation to engage: How do you invite them to join in this path? Is there an offering that want them to consider?Expectation setting: What can they expect to happen when they take action? 5. Energize the Action 🔋 Action: What is one specific, concrete “now action” that you want your audience to take? Context: How might they do this action from where they are in this moment?The call: How do call them to take this action right now?6. Close the space 🔗Change: What may have changed for your audience, and for you, now that you’ve shared this value, opportunity and action? Connection: What feeling or emotion has been created? What connection and understanding has been shared? What responsibility and possibility has been created? Completion: How might you complete this moment in a powerful, authentic and connected way?
2. Frame
Once you have a compelling intention for your presentation, and taken time to consider the parameters and vision of the experience, its time begin building a frame for the content you’ll be generating to bring your vision to life. In this section, we will present some techniques to help you frame up the different sections of your presentation and help you think through your strategy.
This is often where people will jump right into building a presentation outline. However, rather than build the exact outline in this step, we recommend thinking through the general arc of the session to brainstorm ideas for content elements and key points that you may wish to include.
To help you do this, we’ve provided a guided thinking process with six sections of brainstorming prompts. Each section is anchored to an important communication objective for your presentation. As you move through each section, use the questions to brainstorm a list of bullet points for content from your work that may be useful in helping you achieve the communication objective.
When you start a presentation, your first objective is open the space. This means to take the lead in acknowledging the moment and everyone’s participation with you, usually with a spirit of gratitude, and to set the tone and agenda for the conversation. Ensuring that the energy is one that is accessible and safe for you and your audience is important, as is inspiring listening, buy in and engagement for your presentation. Some helpful questions to ask as you brainstorm potential content:
Having opened the space for your presentation and establishing your context, you’ve set the stage to communicate the specific value of your work to create change. Your objective is to communicate the what, the how and the why of your work in a way that ensures understanding and can anchor in everyone’s mind the critical importance of your initiative. Here are some helpful questions to ask as you brainstorm potential content:
When a valuable initiative to make change is underway, it’s only natural for others to ask how they might fit into the story. Your objective in this section is to answer this question in a way that positions your engagement opportunities as valuable and relevant to your audience. Some themes to explore as you build this out:
With the sense of opportunity and value in place, it’s time to create the invitation. By this we mean, your invitation for the audience to engage and be part of what you are creating. This invitation may or many not include a particular offering, but either way, you’ll need to be clear about what you are inviting your audience to engage with, and why it is valuable to them.
We use the word ‘create’ here very intentionally, because this is a powerful moment in your presentation that you are creating together with your audience - a moment when you are giving them permission to be part of something that is alive in you. It is critical that you trust yourself in this moment, as you will be bringing them ‘into your world’, and your audience will mirror you. This can be a vulnerable thing, and a sense of connection is important. The key is to come from a grounded place of humility and possibility in creating the invitation, and embrace your authentic power.
Up to this point in the presentation you’ve provided a lot of value, and planted some powerful seeds in your audience’s mind for them to think about. While it can seem natural to leave an audience with a general invitation to get involved based on the value of your work, if you actually want this engagement to happen, it would be wise to direct your audience to a very specific and particular concrete action that you want them to take right now.
Giving this direction is often referred as a call to action, and it is important to energize this call in how you communicate so that it jumps out in everyone’s mind as the now thing to do (and not just think about). Putting your audience into action will lock in their engagement with you and help deepen their connection to your message and your work.
Wow. You’ve made it through all the key points to frame your message. You’ve been present. You’ve shared your research. You’ve activated your audience to engage. All in a very short time! That was a lot - for you and probably for your audience as well. With all this done, it can be very helpful to close the space in a way which with creates a sense of completion, integration and space. Some questions to help you reflect as you design your close:
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