49 - Captivate your Crowd: Audience Engagement Strategies for On-site or Online

Abstract Information: Presentations are ultimately about audience learning. Successful presenters work in service to their participants, whether they are presenting an evaluation report, giving a keynote speech, facilitating a professional development workshop or training session, or even running a meeting. Effective presenters need to know how and when to engage their audiences with stories and opportunities for active learning. “Stories are powerful because people are hardwired to listen to stories. Stories take your audience on a mental journey. Audiences cannot resist a well-told story even if they try” (Akash Karia, author of TED Talks Storytelling).

Participants in this highly interactive workshop will learn fundamental principles of audience engagement by experiencing each activity as they consider how it can inform their own presentation planning. They will experience more than a dozen ways to engage adult audiences through activities and mini-lessons that flow together coherently, while allowing time for processing and reflection throughout the course. Participants will come to understand the WHY, the WHAT and the HOW of audience engagement, explore purpose distinctions for audience engagement strategies, and receive instruction on how to effectively integrate stories and interactive learning strategies into presentation planning. During demonstrations the instructor will also share how each audience engagement principle and strategy can be used in an evaluation specific context.

Since much of our professional development and presentations are now in virtual environments, each strategy will be shared with instructions for facilitating in-person as well as virtually.

Relevance Statement: Evaluators are frequently called to teach or train, such as when clients request training as part of a project or when evaluators decide on their own to include workshops or webinars as part of the services they provide. Training, also known as “professional development” or “professional learning” is about improving and building professional capacity - acquiring new knowledge, skills, dispositions, and capabilities, and ultimately boosting job performance. Training is positively linked to organizational performance (Garavan, McCarthy, Lai, Murphy, Sheehan, & Carbery, 2021). In addition to training, evaluators engage in other types of presentations, such as conference sessions, and sharing evaluation findings with interested parties and decision-makers.

However, evaluators don’t necessarily have background in teaching, training or presentation skills and must acquire these skills to be able to effectively share their knowledge and expertise. Distractions are a powerful enemy and thus, presentations must engage our audiences in the content. “At any given moment, people can turn away from us and choose another source of stimulation - even if we are as interesting as a clown on a unicycle” (Simon, 2016, p. 61). Further, we’re now in a hybrid world, where any given presentation can be scheduled for on-site or online, and evaluators need to know how to navigate both formats, and each comes with unique challenges.

As a former teacher who has developed everything from a 5-minute conference presentation to a full semester graduate course, I’ve built up a large repertoire of strategies to engage my audiences and participants and ensure that they are actively involved in any given presentation. This is what I’ll draw from in sharing strategies for both on-site and online presentations.
Stories are also an important presentation tool because they can emotionally engage and inspire. Stories help bring abstract concepts to life, simplify complex ideas, and demonstrate real-world applications of theoretical knowledge. Stories captivate attention, making people more open to learning. They can elicit an emotional response and pique interest in a topic leaving participants wanting to learn more. Stories also make it more likely that participants will remember what they learned. For all these reasons, story is the perfect component of an effective workshop, training session or virtually any type of presentation. Evaluators need to know how, where, and when to engage their audiences with story, seamlessly blending the story elements into the content and using audience engagement strategies to involve participants.

References:

Garavan, T., McCarthy, A., Lai, Y., Murphy, K., Sheehan, M., & Carbery, R. (2021). Training and organisational performance: A meta‐analysis of temporal, institutional and organisational context moderators. Human Resource Management Journal, 31(1), 93–119

Simon, C. (2016.) Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions. McGraw-Hill Education, New York.