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Blog Beginner Guides

How To Make a Good Presentation [A Complete Guide]

By Krystle Wong , Jul 20, 2023

How to make a good presentation

A top-notch presentation possesses the power to drive action. From winning stakeholders over and conveying a powerful message to securing funding — your secret weapon lies within the realm of creating an effective presentation .  

Being an excellent presenter isn’t confined to the boardroom. Whether you’re delivering a presentation at work, pursuing an academic career, involved in a non-profit organization or even a student, nailing the presentation game is a game-changer.

In this article, I’ll cover the top qualities of compelling presentations and walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to give a good presentation. Here’s a little tip to kick things off: for a headstart, check out Venngage’s collection of free presentation templates . They are fully customizable, and the best part is you don’t need professional design skills to make them shine!

These valuable presentation tips cater to individuals from diverse professional backgrounds, encompassing business professionals, sales and marketing teams, educators, trainers, students, researchers, non-profit organizations, public speakers and presenters. 

No matter your field or role, these tips for presenting will equip you with the skills to deliver effective presentations that leave a lasting impression on any audience.

Click to jump ahead:

What are the 10 qualities of a good presentation?

Step-by-step guide on how to prepare an effective presentation, 9 effective techniques to deliver a memorable presentation, faqs on making a good presentation, how to create a presentation with venngage in 5 steps.

When it comes to giving an engaging presentation that leaves a lasting impression, it’s not just about the content — it’s also about how you deliver it. Wondering what makes a good presentation? Well, the best presentations I’ve seen consistently exhibit these 10 qualities:

1. Clear structure

No one likes to get lost in a maze of information. Organize your thoughts into a logical flow, complete with an introduction, main points and a solid conclusion. A structured presentation helps your audience follow along effortlessly, leaving them with a sense of satisfaction at the end.

Regardless of your presentation style , a quality presentation starts with a clear roadmap. Browse through Venngage’s template library and select a presentation template that aligns with your content and presentation goals. Here’s a good presentation example template with a logical layout that includes sections for the introduction, main points, supporting information and a conclusion: 

list of presentation good practice characteristics

2. Engaging opening

Hook your audience right from the start with an attention-grabbing statement, a fascinating question or maybe even a captivating anecdote. Set the stage for a killer presentation!

The opening moments of your presentation hold immense power – check out these 15 ways to start a presentation to set the stage and captivate your audience.

3. Relevant content

Make sure your content aligns with their interests and needs. Your audience is there for a reason, and that’s to get valuable insights. Avoid fluff and get straight to the point, your audience will be genuinely excited.

4. Effective visual aids

Picture this: a slide with walls of text and tiny charts, yawn! Visual aids should be just that—aiding your presentation. Opt for clear and visually appealing slides, engaging images and informative charts that add value and help reinforce your message.

With Venngage, visualizing data takes no effort at all. You can import data from CSV or Google Sheets seamlessly and create stunning charts, graphs and icon stories effortlessly to showcase your data in a captivating and impactful way.

list of presentation good practice characteristics

5. Clear and concise communication

Keep your language simple, and avoid jargon or complicated terms. Communicate your ideas clearly, so your audience can easily grasp and retain the information being conveyed. This can prevent confusion and enhance the overall effectiveness of the message. 

6. Engaging delivery

Spice up your presentation with a sprinkle of enthusiasm! Maintain eye contact, use expressive gestures and vary your tone of voice to keep your audience glued to the edge of their seats. A touch of charisma goes a long way!

7. Interaction and audience engagement

Turn your presentation into an interactive experience — encourage questions, foster discussions and maybe even throw in a fun activity. Engaged audiences are more likely to remember and embrace your message.

Transform your slides into an interactive presentation with Venngage’s dynamic features like pop-ups, clickable icons and animated elements. Engage your audience with interactive content that lets them explore and interact with your presentation for a truly immersive experience.

list of presentation good practice characteristics

8. Effective storytelling

Who doesn’t love a good story? Weaving relevant anecdotes, case studies or even a personal story into your presentation can captivate your audience and create a lasting impact. Stories build connections and make your message memorable.

A great presentation background is also essential as it sets the tone, creates visual interest and reinforces your message. Enhance the overall aesthetics of your presentation with these 15 presentation background examples and captivate your audience’s attention.

9. Well-timed pacing

Pace your presentation thoughtfully with well-designed presentation slides, neither rushing through nor dragging it out. Respect your audience’s time and ensure you cover all the essential points without losing their interest.

10. Strong conclusion

Last impressions linger! Summarize your main points and leave your audience with a clear takeaway. End your presentation with a bang , a call to action or an inspiring thought that resonates long after the conclusion.

In-person presentations aside, acing a virtual presentation is of paramount importance in today’s digital world. Check out this guide to learn how you can adapt your in-person presentations into virtual presentations . 

Peloton Pitch Deck - Conclusion

Preparing an effective presentation starts with laying a strong foundation that goes beyond just creating slides and notes. One of the quickest and best ways to make a presentation would be with the help of a good presentation software . 

Otherwise, let me walk you to how to prepare for a presentation step by step and unlock the secrets of crafting a professional presentation that sets you apart.

1. Understand the audience and their needs

Before you dive into preparing your masterpiece, take a moment to get to know your target audience. Tailor your presentation to meet their needs and expectations , and you’ll have them hooked from the start!

2. Conduct thorough research on the topic

Time to hit the books (or the internet)! Don’t skimp on the research with your presentation materials — dive deep into the subject matter and gather valuable insights . The more you know, the more confident you’ll feel in delivering your presentation.

3. Organize the content with a clear structure

No one wants to stumble through a chaotic mess of information. Outline your presentation with a clear and logical flow. Start with a captivating introduction, follow up with main points that build on each other and wrap it up with a powerful conclusion that leaves a lasting impression.

Delivering an effective business presentation hinges on captivating your audience, and Venngage’s professionally designed business presentation templates are tailor-made for this purpose. With thoughtfully structured layouts, these templates enhance your message’s clarity and coherence, ensuring a memorable and engaging experience for your audience members.

Don’t want to build your presentation layout from scratch? pick from these 5 foolproof presentation layout ideas that won’t go wrong. 

list of presentation good practice characteristics

4. Develop visually appealing and supportive visual aids

Spice up your presentation with eye-catching visuals! Create slides that complement your message, not overshadow it. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words, but that doesn’t mean you need to overload your slides with text.

Well-chosen designs create a cohesive and professional look, capturing your audience’s attention and enhancing the overall effectiveness of your message. Here’s a list of carefully curated PowerPoint presentation templates and great background graphics that will significantly influence the visual appeal and engagement of your presentation.

5. Practice, practice and practice

Practice makes perfect — rehearse your presentation and arrive early to your presentation to help overcome stage fright. Familiarity with your material will boost your presentation skills and help you handle curveballs with ease.

6. Seek feedback and make necessary adjustments

Don’t be afraid to ask for help and seek feedback from friends and colleagues. Constructive criticism can help you identify blind spots and fine-tune your presentation to perfection.

With Venngage’s real-time collaboration feature , receiving feedback and editing your presentation is a seamless process. Group members can access and work on the presentation simultaneously and edit content side by side in real-time. Changes will be reflected immediately to the entire team, promoting seamless teamwork.

Venngage Real Time Collaboration

7. Prepare for potential technical or logistical issues

Prepare for the unexpected by checking your equipment, internet connection and any other potential hiccups. If you’re worried that you’ll miss out on any important points, you could always have note cards prepared. Remember to remain focused and rehearse potential answers to anticipated questions.

8. Fine-tune and polish your presentation

As the big day approaches, give your presentation one last shine. Review your talking points, practice how to present a presentation and make any final tweaks. Deep breaths — you’re on the brink of delivering a successful presentation!

In competitive environments, persuasive presentations set individuals and organizations apart. To brush up on your presentation skills, read these guides on how to make a persuasive presentation and tips to presenting effectively . 

list of presentation good practice characteristics

Whether you’re an experienced presenter or a novice, the right techniques will let your presentation skills soar to new heights!

From public speaking hacks to interactive elements and storytelling prowess, these 9 effective presentation techniques will empower you to leave a lasting impression on your audience and make your presentations unforgettable.

1. Confidence and positive body language

Positive body language instantly captivates your audience, making them believe in your message as much as you do. Strengthen your stage presence and own that stage like it’s your second home! Stand tall, shoulders back and exude confidence. 

2. Eye contact with the audience

Break down that invisible barrier and connect with your audience through their eyes. Maintaining eye contact when giving a presentation builds trust and shows that you’re present and engaged with them.

3. Effective use of hand gestures and movement

A little movement goes a long way! Emphasize key points with purposeful gestures and don’t be afraid to walk around the stage. Your energy will be contagious!

4. Utilize storytelling techniques

Weave the magic of storytelling into your presentation. Share relatable anecdotes, inspiring success stories or even personal experiences that tug at the heartstrings of your audience. Adjust your pitch, pace and volume to match the emotions and intensity of the story. Varying your speaking voice adds depth and enhances your stage presence.

list of presentation good practice characteristics

5. Incorporate multimedia elements

Spice up your presentation with a dash of visual pizzazz! Use slides, images and video clips to add depth and clarity to your message. Just remember, less is more—don’t overwhelm them with information overload. 

Turn your presentations into an interactive party! Involve your audience with questions, polls or group activities. When they actively participate, they become invested in your presentation’s success. Bring your design to life with animated elements. Venngage allows you to apply animations to icons, images and text to create dynamic and engaging visual content.

6. Utilize humor strategically

Laughter is the best medicine—and a fantastic presentation enhancer! A well-placed joke or lighthearted moment can break the ice and create a warm atmosphere , making your audience more receptive to your message.

7. Practice active listening and respond to feedback

Be attentive to your audience’s reactions and feedback. If they have questions or concerns, address them with genuine interest and respect. Your responsiveness builds rapport and shows that you genuinely care about their experience.

list of presentation good practice characteristics

8. Apply the 10-20-30 rule

Apply the 10-20-30 presentation rule and keep it short, sweet and impactful! Stick to ten slides, deliver your presentation within 20 minutes and use a 30-point font to ensure clarity and focus. Less is more, and your audience will thank you for it!

9. Implement the 5-5-5 rule

Simplicity is key. Limit each slide to five bullet points, with only five words per bullet point and allow each slide to remain visible for about five seconds. This rule keeps your presentation concise and prevents information overload.

Simple presentations are more engaging because they are easier to follow. Summarize your presentations and keep them simple with Venngage’s gallery of simple presentation templates and ensure that your message is delivered effectively across your audience.

list of presentation good practice characteristics

1. How to start a presentation?

To kick off your presentation effectively, begin with an attention-grabbing statement or a powerful quote. Introduce yourself, establish credibility and clearly state the purpose and relevance of your presentation.

2. How to end a presentation?

For a strong conclusion, summarize your talking points and key takeaways. End with a compelling call to action or a thought-provoking question and remember to thank your audience and invite any final questions or interactions.

3. How to make a presentation interactive?

To make your presentation interactive, encourage questions and discussion throughout your talk. Utilize multimedia elements like videos or images and consider including polls, quizzes or group activities to actively involve your audience.

In need of inspiration for your next presentation? I’ve got your back! Pick from these 120+ presentation ideas, topics and examples to get started. 

Creating a stunning presentation with Venngage is a breeze with our user-friendly drag-and-drop editor and professionally designed templates for all your communication needs. 

Here’s how to make a presentation in just 5 simple steps with the help of Venngage:

Step 1: Sign up for Venngage for free using your email, Gmail or Facebook account or simply log in to access your account. 

Step 2: Pick a design from our selection of free presentation templates (they’re all created by our expert in-house designers).

Step 3: Make the template your own by customizing it to fit your content and branding. With Venngage’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor, you can easily modify text, change colors and adjust the layout to create a unique and eye-catching design.

Step 4: Elevate your presentation by incorporating captivating visuals. You can upload your images or choose from Venngage’s vast library of high-quality photos, icons and illustrations. 

Step 5: Upgrade to a premium or business account to export your presentation in PDF and print it for in-person presentations or share it digitally for free!

By following these five simple steps, you’ll have a professionally designed and visually engaging presentation ready in no time. With Venngage’s user-friendly platform, your presentation is sure to make a lasting impression. So, let your creativity flow and get ready to shine in your next presentation!

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What It Takes to Give a Great Presentation

  • Carmine Gallo

list of presentation good practice characteristics

Five tips to set yourself apart.

Never underestimate the power of great communication. It can help you land the job of your dreams, attract investors to back your idea, or elevate your stature within your organization. But while there are plenty of good speakers in the world, you can set yourself apart out by being the person who can deliver something great over and over. Here are a few tips for business professionals who want to move from being good speakers to great ones: be concise (the fewer words, the better); never use bullet points (photos and images paired together are more memorable); don’t underestimate the power of your voice (raise and lower it for emphasis); give your audience something extra (unexpected moments will grab their attention); rehearse (the best speakers are the best because they practice — a lot).

I was sitting across the table from a Silicon Valley CEO who had pioneered a technology that touches many of our lives — the flash memory that stores data on smartphones, digital cameras, and computers. He was a frequent guest on CNBC and had been delivering business presentations for at least 20 years before we met. And yet, the CEO wanted to sharpen his public speaking skills.

list of presentation good practice characteristics

  • Carmine Gallo is a Harvard University instructor, keynote speaker, and author of 10 books translated into 40 languages. Gallo is the author of The Bezos Blueprint: Communication Secrets of the World’s Greatest Salesman  (St. Martin’s Press).

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Home Blog Education Presentation Skills 101: A Guide to Presentation Success

Presentation Skills 101: A Guide to Presentation Success

Getting the perfect presentation design is just a step toward a successful presentation. For the experienced user, building presentation skills is the answer to elevating the power of your message and showing expertise on any subject. Still, one can ask: is it the same set of skills, or are they dependable on the type of presentation?

In this article, we will introduce the different types of presentations accompanied by the skillset required to master them. The purpose, as always, is to retain the audience’s interest for a long-lasting and convincing message.

cover for presentation skills guide

Table of Contents

The Importance of Presentation Skills

Persuasive presentations, instructional presentations, informative presentations, inspirational presentations, basic presentation skills, what are the main difficulties when giving a presentation, recommendations to improve your presentation skills, closing statement.

Effective communication is the answer to reaching business and academic goals. The scenarios in which we can be required to deliver a presentation are as diverse as one can imagine. Still, some core concepts apply to all presentations.

 We define presentation skills as a compendium of soft skills that directly affect your presentation performance and contribute to creating a great presentation. These are not qualities acquired by birth but skills you ought to train and master to delve into professional environments.

You may ask: is it really that evident when a presenter is not prepared? Here are some common signs people can experience during presentations:

  • Evasive body language: Not making eye contact with the audience, arms closed tightly to the body, hands in pockets all the time.
  • Lack of interest in the presenter’s voice: dull tone, not putting an effort to articulate the topics.
  • Doubting when asked to answer a question
  • Irksome mood

The list can go on about common presenter mistakes , and most certainly, it will affect the performance of any presented data if the lack of interest by the presenter is blatantly obvious.  Another element to consider is anxiety, and according to research by the National Institute of Mental Health, 73% of the population in the USA is affected by glossophobia , which is the fear of public speaking, judgment, or negative evaluation by other people.

Therefore, presentation skills training is essential for any business professional who wants to achieve effective communication . It will remove the anxiety from presentation performance and help users effectively deliver their message and connect with the audience.

Archetypes of presentations

Persuasive presentations aim to convince the audience – often in short periods – to acquire a product or service, adhere to a cause, or invest in a company. For business entrepreneurs or politicians, persuasive presentations are their tool for the trade.

Unless you aim to be perceived as an imposter, a proper persuasive presentation has the elements of facts, empathy, and logic, balanced under a well-crafted narrative. The central pillar of these presentations is to identify the single factor that gathered your audience: it could be a market need, a social cause, or a revolutionary concept for today’s society. It has to be something with enough power to gather critiques – both good and bad.

That single factor has to be backed up by facts. Research that builds your hypothesis on how to solve that problem. A deep understanding of the target audience’s needs , concerns, and social position regarding the solution your means can offer. When those elements are in place, building a pitch becomes an easy task. 

Graphics can help you introduce information in a compelling format, lowering the need for lengthy presentations. Good presentation skills for persuasive presentations go by the hand of filtering relevant data and creating the visual cues that resonate with what your audience demands.

One powerful example of a persuasive presentation is the technique known as the elevator pitch . You must introduce your idea or product convincingly to the audience in a timeframe between 30 seconds and less than 2 minutes. You have to expose:

  • What do you do 
  • What’s the problem to solve
  • Why is your solution different from others 
  • Why should the audience care about your expertise

presentation skills an elevator pitch slide

For that very purpose, using engaging graphics with contrasting colors elevates the potential power of your message. It speaks professionalism, care for details, and out-of-the-box thinking. Knowing how to end a presentation is also critical, as your CTAs should be placed with care.

Therefore, let’s resume the requirements of persuasive presentations in terms of good presentation skills:

  • Identifying problems and needs
  • Elaborating “the hook” (the element that grabs the audience’s attention)
  • Knowing how to “tie” your audience (introducing a piece of information related to the hook that causes an emotional impact)
  • Broad knowledge of body language and hand gestures to quickly convey your message
  • Being prepared to argue a defense of your point of view
  • Handling rejection
  • Having a proactive attitude to convert opportunities into new projects
  • Using humor, surprise, or personal anecdotes as elements to sympathize with the audience
  • Having confidence
  • Be able to summarize facts and information in visually appealing ways

skills required for persuasive presentations

You can learn more about persuasive presentation techniques by clicking here .

In the case of instructional presentations, we ought to differentiate two distinctive types:

  • Lecture Presentations : Presentations being held at universities or any other educative institution. Those presentations cover, topic by topic, and the contents of a syllabus and are created by the team of teachers in charge of the course.
  • Training Presentations : These presentations take place during in-company training sessions and usually comprise a good amount of content that is resumed into easy-to-take solutions. They are aimed to coach employees over certain topics relevant to their work performance. The 70-20-10 Model is frequently used to address these training situations.

Lecture presentations appeal to the gradual introduction of complex concepts, following a structure set in the course’s syllabus. These presentations often have a similar aesthetic as a group of professors or researchers created to share their knowledge about a topic. Personal experience does tell that course presentations often rely on factual data, adequately documented, and on the theoretical side.

An example of a presentation that lies under this concept is a Syllabus Presentation, used by the teaching team to introduce the subject to new students, evaluation methods, concepts to be learned, and expectations to pass the course.

using a course syllabus presentation to boost your instructional presentation skills

On the other hand, training presentations are slide decks designed to meet an organization’s specific needs in the formal education of their personnel. Commonly known as “continuous education,” plenty of companies invest resources in coaching their employees to achieve higher performance results. These presentations have the trademark of being concise since their idea is to introduce the concepts that shall be applied in practice sessions. 

Ideally, the training presentations are introduced with little text and easy-to-recognize visual cues. Since the idea is to summarize as much as possible, these are visually appealing for the audience. They must be dynamic enough to allow the presenter to convey the message.

presentation skills example of a training presentation

Those key takeaways remind employees when they revisit their learning resources and allow them to ruminate on questions that fellow workers raise. 

To sum up this point, building presentation skills for instructional presentations requires:

  • Ability to put complex concepts into simpler words
  • Patience and a constant learning mindset
  • Voice training to deliver lengthy speeches without being too dense
  • Ability to summarize points and note the key takeaways
  • Empathizing with the audience to understand their challenges in the learning process

skill requirements for instructional presentations

The informative presentations take place in business situations, such as when to present project reports from different departments to the management. Another potential usage of these presentations is in SCRUM or other Agile methodologies, when a sprint is completed, to discuss the advance of the project with the Product Owner.

As they are presentations heavily dependent on data insights, it’s common to see the usage of infographics and charts to express usually dense data in simpler terms and easy to remember. 

a SCRUM process being shown in an informative slide

Informative presentations don’t just fall into the business category. Ph.D. Dissertation and Thesis presentations are topics that belong to the informative presentations category as they condense countless research hours into manageable reports for the academic jury. 

an example of a thesis dissertation template

Since these informational presentations can be perceived as lengthy and data-filled, it is important to learn the following professional presentation skills:

  • Attention to detail
  • Be able to explain complex information in simpler terms
  • Creative thinking
  • Powerful diction
  • Working on pauses and transitions
  • Pacing the presentation, so not too much information is divulged per slide

skill requirements for informational presentations

The leading inspirational platform, TEDx, comes to mind when talking about inspirational presentations. This presentation format has the peculiarity of maximizing the engagement with the audience to divulge a message, and due to that, it has specific requirements any presenter must meet.

This presentation format usually involves a speaker on a stage, either sitting or better standing, in which the presenter engages with the audience with a storytelling format about a life experience, a job done that provided a remarkable improvement for society, etc.

using a quote slide to boost inspirational presentation skills

Empathizing with the audience is the key ingredient for these inspirational presentations. Still, creativity is what shapes the outcome of your performance as people are constantly looking for different experiences – not the same recipe rephrased with personal touches. The human factor is what matters here, way above data and research. What has your experience to offer to others? How can it motivate another human being to pursue a similar path or discover their true calling?

To achieve success in terms of communication skills presentation, these inspirational presentations have the following requirements:

  • Focus on the audience (engage, consider their interests, and make them a part of your story)
  • Putting ego aside
  • Creative communication skills
  • Storytelling skills
  • Body language knowledge to apply the correct gestures to accompany your story
  • Voice training
  • Using powerful words

skills required for inspirational presentations

After discussing the different kinds of presentations we can come across at any stage of our lives, a group of presentation skills is standard in any type of presentation. See below what makes a good presentation and which skills you must count on to succeed as a presenter.

Punctuality

Punctuality is a crucial aspect of giving an effective presentation. Nothing says more about respect for your audience and the organization you represent than delivering the presentation on time . Arriving last minute puts pressure on the tech team behind audiovisuals, as they don’t have enough preparation to test microphones, stage lights, and projector settings, which can lead to a less powerful presentation Even when discussing presentations hosted in small rooms for a reduced audience, testing the equipment becomes essential for an effective presentation.

A solution for this is to arrive at least 30 minutes early. Ideally, one hour is a sweet spot since the AV crew has time to check the gear and requirements for your presentation. Another benefit of this, for example, in inspirational presentations, is measuring the previous presenter’s impact on the audience. This gives insights about how to resonate with the public, and their interest, and how to accommodate your presentation for maximum impact.

Body Language

Our bodies can make emotions transparent for others, even when we are unaware of such a fact. Proper training for body language skills reduces performance anxiety, giving the audience a sense of expertise about the presented topic. 

Give your presentation and the audience the respect they deserve by watching over these potential mistakes:

  • Turning your back to the audience for extended periods : It’s okay to do so when introducing an important piece of information or explaining a graph, but it is considered rude to give your back to the audience constantly.
  • Fidgeting : We are all nervous in the presence of strangers, even more, if we are the center of attention for that moment. Instead of playing with your hair or making weird hand gestures, take a deep breath to center yourself before the presentation and remember that everything you could do to prepare is already done. Trust your instincts and give your best.
  • Intense eye contact : Have you watched a video where the presenter stared at the camera the entire time? That’s the feeling you transmit to spectators through intense eye contact. It’s a practice often used by politicians to persuade.
  • Swearing : This is a no-brainer. Even when you see influencers swearing on camera or in podcasts or live presentations, it is considered an informal and lousy practice for business and academic situations. If you have a habit to break when it comes to this point, find the humor in these situations and replace your swear words with funny alternatives (if the presentation allows for it). 

Voice Tone plays a crucial role in delivering effective presentations and knowing how to give a good presentation. Your voice is a powerful tool for exposing your ideas and feelings . Your voice can articulate the message you are telling, briefing the audience if you feel excited about what you are sharing or, in contrast, if you feel the presentation is a burden you ought to complete.

Remember, passion is a primary ingredient in convincing people. Therefore, transmitting such passion with a vibrant voice may help gather potential business partners’ interest.  

But what if you feel sick prior to the presentation? If, by chance, your throat is sore minutes before setting foot on the stage, try this: when introducing yourself, mention that you are feeling a bit under the weather. This resonates with the audience to pay more attention to your efforts. In case you don’t feel comfortable about that, ask the organizers for a cup of tea, as it will settle your throat and relax your nerves.

Tech Skills

Believe it or not, people still feel challenged by technology these days. Maybe that’s the reason why presentation giants like Tony Robbins opt not to use PowerPoint presentations . The reality is that there are plenty of elements involved in a presentation that can go wrong from the tech side:

  • A PDF not opening
  • Saving your presentation in a too-recent PowerPoint version
  • A computer not booting up
  • Mac laptops and their never-ending compatibility nightmare
  • Not knowing how to change between slides
  • Not knowing how to use a laser pointer
  • Internet not working
  • Audio not working

We can come up with a pretty long list of potential tech pitfalls, and yet more than half of them fall in presenters not being knowledgeable about technology.

If computers aren’t your thing, let the organization know about this beforehand. There is always a crew member available to help presenters switch between slides or configure the presentation for streaming. This takes the pressure off your shoulders, allowing you to concentrate on the content to present. Remember, even Bill Gates can get a BSOD during a presentation .

Presentations, while valuable for conveying information and ideas, can be daunting for many individuals. Here are some common difficulties people encounter when giving presentations:

Public Speaking Anxiety

Glossophobia, the fear of public speaking, affects a significant portion of the population. This anxiety can lead to nervousness, trembling, and forgetfulness during a presentation.

Lack of Confidence

Many presenters struggle with self-doubt, fearing that they may not be knowledgeable or skilled enough to engage their audience effectively.

Content Organization

Organizing information in a coherent and engaging manner can be challenging. Presenters often grapple with how to structure their content to make it easily digestible for the audience.

Audience Engagement

Keeping the audience’s attention and interest throughout the presentation can be difficult. Distractions, disengaged attendees, or lack of interaction can pose challenges.

Technical Issues

Technology glitches, such as malfunctioning equipment, incompatible file formats, or poor internet connectivity, can disrupt presentations and increase stress.

Time Management

Striking the right balance between providing enough information and staying within time limits is a common challenge. Going over or under the allotted time can affect the effectiveness of the presentation.

Handling Questions and Challenges

Responding to unexpected questions, criticism, or challenges from the audience can be difficult, especially when presenters are unprepared or lack confidence in their subject matter.

Visual Aids and Technology

Creating and effectively using visual aids like slides or multimedia can be a struggle for some presenters. Technical competence is essential in this aspect.

Language and Articulation

Poor language skills or unclear articulation can hinder effective communication. Presenters may worry about stumbling over words or failing to convey their message clearly.

Maintaining appropriate and confident body language can be challenging. Avoiding nervous habits, maintaining eye contact, and using gestures effectively requires practice.

Overcoming Impersonal Delivery

In virtual presentations, maintaining a personal connection with the audience can be difficult. The absence of face-to-face interaction can make it challenging to engage and read the audience.

Cultural and Diversity Awareness

Presenting to diverse audiences requires sensitivity to cultural differences and varying levels of familiarity with the topic.

In this section, we gathered some tips on how to improve presentation skills that can certainly make an impact if applied to your presentation skills. We believe these skills can be cultivated to transform into habits for your work routine.

Tip #1: Build a narrative

One memorable way to guarantee presentation success is by writing a story of all the points you desire to cover. This statement is based on the logic behind storytelling and its power to connect with people .

Don’t waste time memorizing slides or reading your presentation to the audience. It feels unnatural, and any question that diverts from the topic in discussion certainly puts you in jeopardy or, worse, exposes you as a fraud in the eyes of the audience. And before you ask, it is really evident when a presenter has a memorized speech. 

Build and rehearse the presentation as if telling a story to a group of interested people. Lower the language barrier by avoiding complex terms that maybe even you aren’t fully aware of their meaning. Consider the ramifications of that story, what it could lead to, and which are the opportunities to explore. Then, visualize yourself giving the presentation in a natural way.

Applying this technique makes the presentation feel like second nature to you. It broadens the spectrum in which you can show expertise over a topic or even build the basis for new interesting points of view about the project.

Tip #2: Don’t talk for more than 3 minutes per slide

It is a common practice of presenters to bombard the audience with facts and information whilst retaining the same slide on the screen. Why can this happen? It could be because the presenter condensed the talk into very few slides and preferred to talk. The reality is that your spectators won’t retain the information you are giving unless you give visual cues to help that process. 

Opt to prepare more slides and pace your speech to match the topics shown on each slide. Don’t spend more than 3 minutes per slide unless you have to introduce a complex piece of data. Use visual cues to direct the spectators about what you talk about, and summarize the principal concepts discussed at the end of each section.

Tip #3: Practice meditation daily

Anxiety is the number one enemy of professional presenters. It slowly builds without you being aware of your doubts and can hinder your performance in multiple ways: making you feel paralyzed, fidgeting, making you forget language skills or concepts, affecting your health, etc.

Meditation is an ancient practice taken from Buddhist teachings that train your mind to be here in the present. We often see the concepts of meditation and mindfulness as synonyms, whereas you should be aware that meditation is a practice that sets the blocks to reach a state of mindfulness. For presenters, being in the here and now is essential to retain focus, but meditation techniques also teach us to control our breathing and be in touch with our body signals when stress builds up. 

The customary practice of meditation has an impact on imagination and creativity but also helps to build patience – a skill much needed for connecting with your audience in instructional presentations.

Having the proper set of presentation skills can be quite subjective. It goes beyond presentation tips and deepens into how flexible we can be in our ability to communicate ideas.

Different presentations and different audiences shape the outcome of our efforts. Therefore, having a basic understanding of how to connect, raise awareness, and empathize with people can be key ingredients for your career as a presenter. A word of advice: success doesn’t happen overnight. It takes dedication and patience to build communication skills . Don’t condition your work to believe you will be ready “someday”; it’s best to practice and experience failure as part of the learning process.

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14 Must-Know Presentation Tips for a Killer Presentation [in 2023]

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Guru - November 8, 2022 - Leave your thoughts. 18 min read

We're all familiar with the old adage: "A good presentation is like a great conversation."

What makes a presentation great?

Is it a compelling story? Or a good connection with your audience? Or is it about an eloquent delivery by the presenter?

The truth is, there is no “one-size-fits-all solution” for creating great presentations. Every presentation is different, and every audience is different.

When you’re tasked with delivering a presentation, you want to ensure it goes off without a hitch. We all know how important it is for the audience to remember and understand the content.

So if you’re wondering how to make a killer presentation that will stand out and stay in people’s minds for a long time, you’ve come to the right place!

In this article, we have addressed the most frequently asked questions about presentations.

We have also compiled a list of great presentation tips to improve your deck designs, presentation best practices, and effective ways to communicate the subject to your audience.

Here’s what the article covers,

What makes a good presentation?

  • 14 Must-Know Presentation Tips to give a killer presentation

What are the difficulties in making a presentation?

Spellbound your audience with these presentation tips.

When we think about presentations, we often think about the content itself. We imagine a long list of facts or figures, a well-rehearsed script, and a PowerPoint slide deck.

But what makes a good presentation? What makes it memorable, engaging, and valuable?

These are questions that any presenter should be asking themselves.

Here are the four characteristics of a good presentation:

  • A good presentation makes you want to take action.
  • It helps your audience engage and be interested in what you have to say. It educates and entertains at the same time.
  • It puts forth information in a way that makes it easy for them to understand and process without overwhelming them.
  • If you're one of those people who's always thinking, "What can I add to my own presentation?”

Well, we've compiled some best presentation tips for you that will help make your next presentation memorable—and, more importantly, help you do what you came here to do: share information with the world.

So read on to find out.

14 Must Know Presentation Tips for a killer presentation [in 2023]

Ever felt like you're struggling to make a presentation on time? Worried about how good your presentation will turn out? We have all been there.

This is why we have put together a list of great presentation tips that can make your next presentation a breeze, and we hope it helps!

Here are some tips to help you create a great presentation:

  • Do proper homework on the subject
  • Have a strong opening
  • Follow a presentation structure
  • Have a Hook!
  • Tell an engaging story
  • Use visual elements
  • Keep it short
  • Add a touch of humor
  • Have a parking lot for questions
  • Learn to empathize with the audience
  • Keep it interactive with Call-to-action
  • Incorporate Data when required
  • Use Hashtags in your presentation
  • Try out unique presentation templates

Tip 1 - Do proper homework on the subject

Whenever a topic is assigned to you for a presentation, it goes without saying that you understand the topic correctly.

You must do proper homework and research on the subject to ensure you know what you're talking about.

Reading articles and books, or even watching videos or podcasts, will help you understand the topic and how the presentation should be structured.

Also, if you need more background information on the topic, don't be afraid to ask for help from other people—you might find that they know more than you think!

Take notes while learning about the topic. This will help you remember key points.

Then, read your notes before you present and practice saying them aloud (this will help with timing and pronunciation).

Use a timer; this helps keep track of how long you take to say things while also keeping yourself from getting too nervous.

Do some fundamental research on your audience and their expectations about your presentation.

For instance, If they're business executives, they might be looking for intellectual information and numbers. Or, If they're a general audience, they may want more details about how your product works or how it can benefit them.

You'll be surprised how much more effective your presentation will be when you know,

Everything about the topic How crucial it is for the audience, and What the audience expects from the presentation

So only present a topic after doing loads of essential research!

Tip 2 - Have a strong opening

An excellent way to ensure that your presentation is successful is by having a solid opening. Plan the intro slides ahead so that you can set the right tone for the pitch.

Have a strong opening statement that tells your audience who they are listening to, why they're here, what they will hear from you, and anything else you want them to know!

Doing so will help keep your audience engaged and interested in what you have to say.

Be prepared for questions from your audience before you start speaking. It is not necessary that the audience must wait till the end to ask questions.

Being prepared will help you answer them well and present yourself as an expert in the field.

Tip 3 - Follow a presentation structure

The first thing you should do is decide on a structure for your presentation. This will help you ensure that you cover all essential topics and leave no gaps in what you say.

The most successful presentations start with a strong introduction, followed by a clear and concise main body, and ending with a proper sign-off.

The body presents the study's research, findings, and conclusions in an organized and engaging way.

The final section/sign-off should close with any additional information or recommendations. Not just that, it must also give the audience space to ask questions related to the presentation.

Each section can have about two or three minutes of content. This would help structure the presentation concisely and make sure to include all important information.

Use transitions between slides that move from one topic to another, rather than just jumping from one slide to another in one continuous flow.

This makes your content more manageable for your audience to follow and gives them more time to digest what they're seeing before moving on to the next thing!

Hence, remember this effective presentation tip - follow a proper structure!

Tip 4 - Have a Hook!

When you're delivering a presentation, keeping your audience's attention is essential.

But how do you make learning a little more fun? What are the best presenting tips and tricks?

Well, one way is by making sure that your presentation has a hook.

A hook can be anything from an element of surprise (like an announcement that will keep them anticipated till the end) to something unexpected (a discount!).

This will help to keep your audience engaged because they won't feel like they're reading through a textbook or manual - they'll feel like they're getting involved in your story.

Ideally, hooks are placed at the start of the presentation. It's the part that acts as a surprise for the audience, keeping them engaged and excited, and would help retain the audience's attention.

However, remember that the fewer distractions in your presentation, the easier it will be for them to see how amazing it is!

Tip 5 - Tell an engaging story

When you're creating a presentation, it’s a thumb rule to make sure your slide decks are memorable and engaging throughout.

One of the best ways to do this is by telling a story—whether that's a story about your business, your life, or anything else related to the subject.

Telling a story is the key to creating an excellent presentation.

Your audience will be more interested if they can relate to what's on your slides. So tell them a story that connects with their lives and work experiences - it may be a funny anecdote or a relatable work prank!

Let's say you're talking about how to create a product. You can start by showing an image or a video of the product. You can develop the flow by telling the product story and how it has grown through the years.

That way, your audience gets to see both sides of the coin: what this product does and how it was made.

The more details you include in your presentation, the better it will be for viewers—not only because they'll get more information but because they'll also have more context for what they see on screen.

Hence, remember to carve your presentation with a well-practiced, engaging story.

Tip 6 - Use visual elements

People love visual aids—they help them remember things better than words alone!

When you're presenting a product or service, you have to look at it from all angles—from the customer's point of view, the provider's point of view, and your own.

It's essential to keep in mind that your presentation must build a connection with the audience. You must consider the audience’s needs and how you can meet them. The best way to bring that connection is not just through words but to incorporate visual proofs in your slide decks.

But the visual elements used must be relevant to the topic at hand.

For example, if your company is doing something great for the community, show pictures of people smiling in joy from being around you!

If you're talking about how much money you've made over the years as an entrepreneur, add pictures of dollar signs!

Finally, make sure that everything in your presentation flows together nicely.

For example, if visual element parts don't match, then consider breaking them up into two separate slides or changing how things are laid out so it doesn't feel so jarring when someone views it.

Use quality screenshots and images that are relevant to the topic at hand. This is especially important when you're speaking in front of an audience who may need to become more familiar with your product or service.

If possible, use photos or videos of people who might be familiar with your topic—people who will help convey your message more effectively than just text alone.

You don't have to go all out on the graphics, but if you can, try to use high-quality images that are easy to understand.

With online presentation makers like Animaker Deck, you get access to the stock images library; you can pick and add high-quality images for your slide decks with a simple click now!

Also, the best part is you can upload screenshots and brand images directly into the app and use them in the presentation.

list of presentation good practice characteristics

Tip 7 - Keep it short

Ever wonder why some presentations are so dull? It's because they're dragging!

A good presentation should be at most 20 minutes at maximum and be structured so that even a first-time viewer can easily understand the information conveyed.

Ensure your audience knows what to expect from you and your content. Refrain from crossing the line of being boring or boringly informative. Your audience should never feel like they're being lectured.

One key business presentation tip is to convey the message to the audience most memorably and engagingly possible.

It is really in the hands of the presenter to steer the audience’s attention throughout the presentation without giving too many dull moments.

The shorter, the better. Keep your slides concise, and avoid falling into the trap of talking about things that have nothing to do with your actual point.

Tip 8 - Add a touch of humor

If you're trying to create an awesome presentation, you can do a few things to ensure it's easy on the eyes and makes people want to engage.

One of the best methods for communicating the message in a light-hearted manner and making your presentation stand out is through humor.

Try to avoid text-heavy slides! You can use witty remarks, analogies, drawings, personal anecdotes, or even memes that suit current trends.

When you tell about something that has happened to you, people may be able to associate with it even more if the story is humorous.

This way, you can easily withhold the audience’s attention through the presentation.

Tip 9 - Have a parking lot for questions

When you're creating a presentation, it's important to keep the audience engaged and excited about what's coming up next. Therefore, it is very necessary to make the presentation a two-way street.

A good way to do this is by asking questions during your presentation and allowing them to answer. This helps keep the audience interested in what they're learning and makes them feel like they're part of the conversation.

The audience should be engaged throughout the presentation and allowed to ask questions to the presenter.

However, it is also vital to ensure that the flow of the presentation is not disrupted by the bombardment of questions in the middle of the presentation.

To tackle this, the presenter can introduce a “parking lot” in their presentation.

So when the audience asks a question about a particular section in the presentation, the presenter can choose to park similar questions together and answer them all together at the end of the presentation.

This way, the presentation’s flow is not affected, and even the audience will get their questions answered.

This is an important skill to be imbibed by every presenter to ensure the audience feels comfortable and gains a good experience from the presentation.

Tip 10 - Learn to empathize with the audience

One of the most important things to remember when creating a presentation is that you are trying to connect with your audience.

Learn to empathize with the audience. You'll want to understand what they're seeing, feeling, and thinking so that you can communicate your message in a way that resonates with them.

By understanding their needs, you can create a more meaningful presentation that will resonate with them. Try to put yourself in their shoes and imagine how they think about this topic.

Are they excited? Are they bored? What are they hoping for? What do they want to see from you?

Know your audience's needs!

It would help if you talked to people with similar backgrounds as your audience and how they would like to be educated on the topic.

Before you start creating content for your presentation, think about who you're speaking to and what they need from you.

When you do this, you will not only speak more clearly, but you'll also be able to connect with them emotionally, making your message stick.

Tip 11 - Keep it interactive with Call-to-action

Have you ever been in a presentation where the speaker makes it look like a one-way conversation? It's not an intentional act of rudeness—the speaker is just trying to get their point across.

But for the audience, it might be very disappointing!

The solution? Keep your presentation interactive with call-to-action buttons that let your audience help move things along.

When something important is being discussed, ask them to take action by clicking on one of the buttons that appear on the screen.

Include a call-to-action that tells your audience what they should do next (like sign up for my newsletter!) or take action on what you've just told them (like buy my product!).

So include call-to-action buttons wherever necessary, so viewers feel like they're partaking in something meaningful rather than just watching someone talk for hours on end!

But one thing, don’t go overboard on those CTAs either. Too many CTAs can be bugging.

Tip 12 - Incorporate Data when required

Creating a presentation is a complicated task, but it's also incredibly important that you need to be able to convey information clearly and effectively.

That's where data comes in!

Data can help you make your point by giving context and supporting the main points of your argument.

Incorporate data when required to present information to the audience quickly. This will make your audience understand what you're talking about more efficiently and allow them to consume the information in a way that makes sense to them.

Use real-life examples and statistics whenever possible because people love those!

With an online presentation maker like Animaker Deck, you get access to the property section, where you can search and add charts, graphs, icons, and other properties directly into your slide decks with just a few clicks.

For example, if you're presenting an overview of how your company's business model works, include graphs or charts that show how the different parts of the model work together so that people who aren't familiar with it can follow along easily.

deck properities

Or, if you're talking about something more complex, like an industry trend, use graphs or charts to illustrate key points about it, such as growth rates for specific industries over time or changes in consumer demand based on demographics.

You can also use numbers and percentages in charts when comparing different items or events.

deck properities

Tip 13 - Use Hashtags in your presentation

It’s the era of social media. People are likely tweeting, emailing, or running their entire little business on their phones and sharing every life update on the internet while still doing other chores.

When used correctly, hashtags can: Persuade attendees to share your event on social media, give participants a way to continue the conversation online, and permit you to review tagged comments to evaluate consumer feedback.

You can create a hashtag for your event and use it in the presentation. Promote social media interactions with the hashtag. This will allow you to connect with other users interested in what you have to say!

You can help inspire viewers to share news, ideas, and updates about your presentation by linking this custom hashtag you created. It combines social interaction, event promotion, and word-of-mouth marketing into one.

So if you use social media in your presentation, make sure you promote the hashtag you'll use. This will ensure that people who follow your brand or business see and interact with the hashtag!

Tip 14 - Try out unique presentation templates

We know how hard it is to come up with a good pitch and how hard it is to be creative when you have no time to waste on making something from scratch.

Thanks to online presentation makers like Animaker Deck, creating a presentation online is now easier than ever.

You can access exciting presentation templates with the help of Animaker's online presentation software, hundreds of customizable layouts and branding options, free stock images, properties, transition effects, and animations.

They'll let you get straight to the point and help you win every pitch because they're so easy to use and exceptionally engaging that they'll blow your audience away!

In other words, Animaker Deck handholds you in bringing all your fascinating presentation ideas to life with its one-of-a-kind features and built-in templates, ready for you to use on the go!

Making a presentation can be a daunting task.

The difficulty lies in brainstorming the subject matter, preparing the presentation, and successfully presenting it to the audience. Overall, it is a lengthy and time-consuming process.

A good presentation must be organized and have a logical flow.

Many difficulties are encountered when preparing a presentation. This includes lack of preparation, lack of information about the subject, or worse, lack of interest in learning the subject from an academic perspective, let alone presenting it.

1st , you have to know what you're talking about. You must do your research and be able to explain the topic clearly and concisely.

2nd , you have to make a good impression quickly. You need to get your point across in a way that makes people want to listen—so they don't drift off and tune out!

3rd , your presentation must be not only exciting but also useful. If people don't learn something from your presentation, then it wasn't worth making in the first place!

Sure, you've been doing it for years—but that doesn't mean you're an expert at it. On the contrary, it's a skill that takes practice and dedication to master, and it can be frustrating when things don't go quite as planned.

So if you want to make better presentations every time, implement the above compelling presentation tips and overcome all the difficulties!

That’s all, folks!

We hope you found the above slide Presentation tips very useful, and you will never have to worry about making a presentation anymore!

Now that you know how to make an excellent presentation, it's time to start imbibing these presentation tips in your next presentation and spellbound your audience immediately!

Create a free account with Animaker Deck today to start dominating all of your presentations right away!

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Self-Assessment • 18 min read

How Good Are Your Presentation Skills?

Understanding your impact.

By the Mind Tools Content Team

list of presentation good practice characteristics

How do you feel when you have to make a presentation? Are you well prepared and relaxed, confident that your performance will have the desired impact on your audience? new score

Or is the thought of standing on a podium, holding a microphone, enough to give you stage fright?

Enjoy it or not, presenting – in some form – is usually a part of business. Whether you get up in front of formal audiences on a regular basis, or you simply have to make your voice heard in a meeting, you're using presentation skills.

Many believe that good presenters are born, not made. This is simply not true . Sure, some people are more relaxed and comfortable speaking in front of others – but everyone can learn the skills and techniques they need to increase their level of confidence and performance when presenting.

From sales pitches to training lectures, good presentation and public speaking skills are key to many influential roles in today's business world. The good news about presenting is that you can improve with practice.

So do you have the skills you need to do a good job? And how effective are you when you have to "perform?" Take this short quiz to help you assess your skills.

Instructions

For each statement, click the button in the column that best describes you. Please answer questions as you actually are (rather than how you think you should be), and don't worry if some questions seem to score in the "wrong direction." When you are finished, please click the "Calculate My Total" button at the bottom of the test.

Becoming a Better Presenter

Effective presentations are a mixture of a variety of elements. You have to know what your audience wants. You need to prepare good, interesting, engaging content. You must be confident in presenting the material, you have to know how to manage your environment successfully, and you need to make sure that your message has maximum impact.

Balancing all four elements is no easy task. And, when combined with the natural anxiety often felt before giving presentations, it's no wonder that many people struggle with this skill. In fact, fear of public speaking is extremely common.

However, you don't have to remain fearful and stressed by the thought of giving a presentation. With the right tools and material, along with planning and preparation, you can present with energy and confidence.

Let's now look in detail at those four key elements of effective presentations:

  • Understanding your audience.
  • Preparing your content.
  • Delivering confidently.
  • Controlling the environment.

Understanding Your Audience

(Questions 2, 5, 9)

The success of most presentations is generally judged on how the audience responds. You may think you did a great job, but unless your audience agrees with you, that may not be the case. Before you even begin putting your PowerPoint slides together, the first thing you need to do is understand what your audience wants. Try following these three steps:

Determine who the members of the audience are.

Find out what they want and expect from your presentation. What do they need to learn? Do they have entrenched attitudes or interests that you need to respect? And what do they already know that you don't have to repeat?

Create an outline for your presentation, and ask for advance feedback on your proposed content.

When what you say is what your audience wants or needs to hear, then you'll probably receive positive reinforcement throughout your presentation. If you see nods and smiles, or hear murmurs of agreement, for example, then this will motivate you to keep going and do a great job.

When your audience is satisfied, it doesn't matter if your delivery wasn't absolutely perfect. The primary goal of the people listening to your presentation is to get the information they need. When that happens, you've done a good job. Of course, you want to do a great job, not just a good job – and that's where the rest of the tips can help.

Preparing Your Content

(Questions 6, 11, 13, 14)

The only way to satisfy your audience's needs and expectations is to deliver the content they want. That means understanding what to present, and how to present it. Bear in mind that if you give the right information in the wrong sequence, this may leave the audience confused, frustrated, or bored.

If you provide the information in a well-structured format, and you include various techniques to keep the audience engaged and interested, then they'll probably remember what you said – and they'll remember you.

There are a variety of ways to structure your content, depending on the type of presentation you'll give. Here are some principles that you can apply:

Identify a few key points -  To help the audience retain the messages you're giving them, use the chunking principle to organize your information into five to seven key points.

Don't include every detail -  Good presentations inspire the audience to learn more, and ask further statements to maximize their understanding of the issue.

Use an outline -  At the beginning, tell your audience what you intend to cover, and let them know what to expect. This helps build anticipation and interest from the start.

Start and end strongly -  Capture people's interest as soon as you begin, and leave them with a message they won't forget. It's tempting to put all of your effort into the main body of the presentation. However, if you don't get people's attention at the start, they'll probably lose interest, and not really hear the rest anyway.

Use examples -  Where possible, use lots of examples to support your points. A lecture is often the least interesting and engaging form of presentation. Look for ways to liven things up by telling stories, talking about real-life examples, and using metaphors to engage your audience fully.

A special type of presentation is one that seeks to persuade. Monroe's Motivated Sequence , consisting of five steps, gives you a framework for developing content for this kind of presentation:

1. Get the attention of your audience - Use an interesting 'hook' or opening point, like a shocking statistic. Be provocative and stimulating, not boring or calm.

2. Create a need - Convince the audience there's a problem, explain how it affects them – and persuade them that things need to change.

3. Define your solution - Explain what you think needs to be done.

4. Describe a detailed picture of success (or failure) - Give the audience a vision; something they can see, hear, taste, and touch.

5. Ask the audience to do something right away - Get the audience involved right from the start. Then it's usually much easier to keep them engaged and active in your cause.

To brush up on your skills of persuasion, look at The Rhetorical Triangle . This tool asks you to consider your communication from three perspectives: those of the writer, the audience, and the context. It's a method that builds credibility and ensures that your arguments are logical.

Delivering Confidently

(Questions 1, 4, 7, 10)

Even the best content can be ineffective if your presentation style contradicts or detracts from your message. Many people are nervous when they present, so this will probably affect their delivery. But it's the major distractions that you want to avoid. As you build confidence, you can gradually eliminate the small and unconstructive habits you may have. These tips may help you:

Practice to build confidence – Some people think that if you practice too much, your speech will sound rehearsed and less genuine. Don't necessarily memorize your presentation, but be so familiar with the content that you're able to speak fluently and comfortably, and adjust as necessary.

Be flexible – This is easier to do if you're comfortable with the material. Don't attempt to present something you just learned the previous night. You want to know your material well enough to answer statements. And, if you don't know something, just admit it, and commit to finding the answer.

Welcome statements from the audience – This is a sign that a presenter knows what he or she is talking about. It builds audience confidence, and people are much more likely to trust what you say, and respect your message.

Use slides and other visual aids – These can help you deliver a confident presentation. The key point here is to learn how much visual information to give the audience, and yet not distract them from what you're saying.

Keep your visuals simple and brief – Don't use too many pictures, charts, or graphs. Your slides should summarize or draw attention to one or two items each. And don't try to fit your whole presentation onto your slides. If the slides cover every single detail, then you've probably put too much information on them. Slides should give the overall message, and then the audience should know where to look for supporting evidence. Manage your stress – Confidence has a lot to do with managing your stress levels. If you feel particularly nervous and anxious, then those emotions will probably show. They're such strong feelings that you can easily become overwhelmed, which can affect your ability to perform effectively. A little nervousness is useful because it can build energy. But that energy may quickly turn negative if nerves build to the point where you can't control them.

If you have anxiety before a presentation, try some of these stress management tools:

Use physical relaxation techniques , like deep breathing and visualization, to calm your body and ease your tension.

Use imagery to help keep calm, and visualize yourself delivering a successful presentation.

Learn strategies to build your self-confidence in general. The more assured you are about yourself and your abilities, the better you'll feel when you get up in front of people, and say what you want to say.

When you present with confidence and authority, your audience will likely pay attention and react to you as someone who's worth listening to. So "pretend" if you need to, by turning your nervousness into creative and enthusiastic energy.

For other tips on delivering confidently, see Delivering Great Presentations , Speaking to an Audience , Managing Presentation Nerves , and our Skillbook Even Better Presentations .

Controlling the Environment

(Questions 3, 4, 8, 12)

While much of the outside environment is beyond your control, there are still some things you can do to reduce potential risks to your presentation.

Practice in the presentation room – This forces you to become familiar with the room and the equipment. It will not only build your confidence, but also help you identify sources of risk. Do you have trouble accessing your PowerPoint file? Does the microphone reach the places you want to walk? Can you move the podium? Are there stairs that might cause you to trip? These are the sorts of issues you may discover and resolve by doing one or two practice presentations.

Do your own setup – Don't leave this to other people. Even though you probably want to focus on numerous other details, it's a good idea not to delegate too much of the preparation to others. You need the hands-on experience to make sure nothing disastrous happens at the real event. Test your timing – When you practice, you also improve your chances of keeping to time. You get a good idea how long each part of the presentation will actually take, and this helps you plan how much time you'll have for statements and other audience interactions.

Members of the audience want you to respect their time. If you end your presentation on time or early, this can make a huge, positive impression on them. When speakers go over their allowed time, they may disrupt the whole schedule of the event and/or cause the audience unnecessary inconvenience. Be considerate, and stick to your agenda as closely as possible.

Presenting doesn't have to be scary, or something you seek to avoid. Find opportunities to practice the tips and techniques discussed above, and become more confident in your ability to present your ideas to an audience. We all have something important to say, and sometimes it takes more than a memo or report to communicate it. You owe it to yourself, and your organization, to develop the skills you need to present your ideas clearly, purposefully, engagingly, and confidently.

This assessment has not been validated and is intended for illustrative purposes only. It is just one of many that help you evaluate your abilities in a wide range of important career skills.

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Hello, This was really an excellent overview with concise instructions, using clear communication methods. I found the article to be captivating and poignant. Thank You

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Complete Guide for Effective Presentations, with Examples

July 9, 2018 - Dom Barnard

During a presentation you aim to look confident, enthusiastic and natural. You’ll need more than good words and content to achieve this – your delivery plays a significant part. In this article, we discuss various techniques that can be used to deliver an effective presentation.

Effective presentations

Think about if you were in the audience, what would:

  • Get you to focus and listen
  • Make you understand
  • Activate your imagination
  • Persuade you

Providing the audience with interesting information is not enough to achieve these aims – you need to ensure that the way you present is stimulating and engaging. If it’s not, you’ll lose the audience’s interest and they’ll stop listening.

Tips for an Effective Presentation

Professional public speakers spend hours creating and practicing presentations. These are the delivery techniques they consider:

Keep it simple

You shouldn’t overwhelm your audience with information – ensure that you’re clear, concise and that you get to the point so they can understand your message.

Have a maximum of  three main points  and state them at the beginning, before you explain them in more depth, and then state them at the end so the audience will at least remember these points.

If some of your content doesn’t contribute to your key message then cut it out. Also avoid using too many statistics and technical terminology.

Connect with your audience

One of the greatest difficulties when delivering a presentation is connecting with the audience. If you don’t  connect with them  it will seem as though you’re talking to an empty room.

Trying to make contact with the audience makes them feel like they’re part of the presentation which encourages them to listen and it shows that you want to speak to them.

Asking the audience questions during a presentation

Eye contact and smile

Avoiding eye contact is uncomfortable because it make you look insecure. When you  maintain eye contact  the audience feels like you’re speaking to them personally. If this is something you struggle with, try looking at people’s foreheads as it gives the impression of making eye contact.

Try to cover all sections of the audience and don’t move on to the next person too quickly as you will look nervous.

Smiling also helps with rapport and it reduces your nerves because you’ll feel less like you’re talking to group of faceless people. Make sure you don’t turn the lights down too much before your presentation so you can all clearly see each other.

Body language

Be aware of your body language and use it to connect:

  • Keep your arms uncrossed so your  body language is more open .
  • Match your facial expressions with what you’re saying.
  • Avoid fidgeting and displaying nervous habits, such as, rocking on your feet.
  • You may need to glance at the computer slide or a visual aid but make sure you predominantly face the audience.
  • Emphasise points by using hand gestures but use them sparingly – too little and they’ll awkwardly sit at your side, too much and you’ll be distracting and look nervous.
  • Vary your gestures so you don’t look robotic.
  • Maintain a straight posture.
  • Be aware of  cultural differences .

Move around

Avoid standing behind the lectern or computer because you need to reduce the distance and barriers between yourself and the audience.  Use movement  to increase the audience’s interest and make it easier to follow your presentation.

A common technique for incorporating movement into your presentation is to:

  • Start your introduction by standing in the centre of the stage.
  • For your first point you stand on the left side of the stage.
  • You discuss your second point from the centre again.
  • You stand on the right side of the stage for your third point.
  • The conclusion occurs in the centre.

Watch 3 examples of good and bad movement while presenting

Example: Movement while presenting

Your movement at the front of the class and amongst the listeners can help with engagement. Think about which of these three speakers maintains the attention of their audience for longer, and what they are doing differently to each other.

Speak with the audience

You can conduct polls using your audience or ask questions to make them think and feel invested in your presentation. There are three different types of questions:

Direct questions require an answer: “What would you do in this situation?” These are mentally stimulating for the audience. You can pass a microphone around and let the audience come to your desired solution.

Rhetorical questions  do not require answers, they are often used to emphasises an idea or point: “Is the Pope catholic?

Loaded questions contain an unjustified assumption made to prompt the audience into providing a particular answer which you can then correct to support your point: You may ask “Why does your wonderful company have such a low incidence of mental health problems?” The audience will generally answer that they’re happy.

After receiving the answers you could then say “Actually it’s because people are still unwilling and too embarrassed to seek help for mental health issues at work etc.”

Delivering a presentation in Asia

Be specific with your language

Make the audience feel as though you are speaking to each member individually by using “you” and “your.”

For example: asking “Do you want to lose weight without feeling hungry?” would be more effective than asking “Does anyone here want to lost weight without feeling hungry?” when delivering your presentation. You can also increase solidarity by using “we”, “us” etc – it makes the audience think “we’re in this together”.

Be flexible

Be prepared to adapt to the situation at the time, for example, if the audience seems bored you can omit details and go through the material faster, if they are confused then you will need to come up with more examples on the spot for clarification. This doesn’t mean that you weren’t prepared because you can’t predict everything.

Vocal variety

How you say something is just as is important as the content of your speech – arguably, more so.

For example, if an individual presented on a topic very enthusiastically the audience would probably enjoy this compared to someone who covered more points but mumbled into their notes.

  • Adapt your voice  depending on what are you’re saying – if you want to highlight something then raise your voice or lower it for intensity. Communicate emotion by using your voice.
  • Avoid speaking in monotone as you will look uninterested and the audience will lose interest.
  • Take time to pronounce every word carefully.
  • Raise your pitch when asking questions and lower it when you want to sound severe.
  • Sound enthusiastic – the more you sound like you care about the topic, the more the audience will listen. Smiling and pace can help with this.
  • Speak loudly and clearly – think about projecting your voice to the back of the room.
  • Speak at a  pace that’s easy to follow . If you’re too fast or too slow it will be difficult for the audience to understand what you’re saying and it’s also frustrating. Subtly fasten the pace to show enthusiasm and slow down for emphasis, thoughtfulness or caution.

Prior to the presentation, ensure that you  prepare your vocal chords :

  • You could read aloud a book that requires vocal variety, such as, a children’s book.
  • Avoid dairy and eating or drinking anything too sugary beforehand as mucus can build-up leading to frequent throat clearing.
  • Don’t drink anything too cold before you present as this can constrict your throat which affects vocal quality.
  • Some people suggest a warm cup of tea beforehand to relax the throat.

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Pause to breathe

When you’re anxious your breathing will become quick and shallow which will affect the control you have on your voice. This can consequently make you feel more nervous. You want to breathe steadily and deeply so before you start speaking take some deep breaths or implement controlled breathing.

Controlled breathing is a common technique that helps slow down your breathing to normal thus reducing your anxiety. If you think this may be useful practice with these steps:

  • Sit down in an upright position as it easier for your lungs to fill with air
  • Breathe in through your nose and into your abdomen for four seconds
  • Hold this breathe for two seconds
  • Breathe out through your nose for six seconds
  • Wait a few seconds before inhaling and repeating the cycle

It takes practice to master this technique but once you get used to it you may want to implement it directly before your presentation.

Take a deep breath when delivering a presentation

Completely filling your lungs during a pause will ensure you reach a greater vocal range.

During the presentation delivery, if you notice that you’re speaking too quickly then pause and breathe. This won’t look strange – it will appear as though you’re giving thought to what you’re saying. You can also strategically plan some of your pauses, such as after questions and at the end of sections, because this will give you a chance to calm down and it will also give the audience an opportunity to think and reflect.

Pausing will also help you  avoid filler words , such as, “um” as well which can make you sound unsure.

  • 10 Effective Ways to use Pauses in your Speech

Strong opening

The first five minutes are  vital to engage the audience  and get them listening to you. You could start with a story to highlight why your topic is significant.

For example, if the topic is on the benefits of pets on physical and psychological health, you could present a story or a study about an individual whose quality of life significantly improved after being given a dog. The audience is more likely to respond better to this and remember this story than a list of facts.

Example: Which presentation intro keeps you engaged?

Watch 5 different presentation introductions, from both virtual and in-person events. Notice how it can only take a few seconds to decide if you want to keep listening or switch off. For the good introductions, what about them keeps you engaged?

More experienced and confident public speakers use humour in their presentations. The audience will be incredibly engaged if you make them laugh but caution must be exercised when using humour because a joke can be misinterpreted and even offend the audience.

Only use jokes if you’re confident with this technique, it has been successful in the past and it’s suitable for the situation.

Stories and anecdotes

Use stories whenever you can and judge whether you can tell a story about yourself because the audience are even more interested in seeing the human side of you.

Consider telling a story about a mistake you made, for example, perhaps you froze up during an important presentation when you were 25, or maybe life wasn’t going well for you in the past – if relevant to your presentation’s aim. People will relate to this as we have all experienced mistakes and failures. The more the audience relates to you, the more likely they will remain engaged.

These stories can also be  told in a humorous way  if it makes you feel more comfortable and because you’re disclosing a personal story there is less chance of misinterpretation compared to telling a joke.

Anecdotes are especially valuable for your introduction and between different sections of the presentation because they engage the audience. Ensure that you plan the stories thoroughly beforehand and that they are not too long.

Focus on the audience’s needs

Even though your aim is to persuade the audience, they must also get something helpful from the presentation. Provide the audience with value by giving them useful information, tactics, tips etc. They’re more likely to warm to you and trust you if you’re sharing valuable information with them.

You could also highlight their pain point. For example, you might ask “Have you found it difficult to stick to a healthy diet?” The audience will now want to remain engaged because they want to know the solution and the opportunities that you’re offering.

Use visual aids

Visual aids are items of a visual manner, such as graphs, photographs, video clips etc used in addition to spoken information. Visual aids are chosen depending on their purpose, for example, you may want to:

  • Summarise information.
  • Reduce the amount of spoken words, for example, you may show a graph of your results rather than reading them out.
  • Clarify and show examples.
  • Create more of an impact. You must consider what type of impact you want to make beforehand – do you want the audience to be sad, happy, angry etc?
  • Emphasise what you’re saying.
  • Make a point memorable.
  • Enhance your credibility.
  • Engage the audience and maintain their interest.
  • Make something easier for the audience to understand.

Visual aids being used during a presentation

Some general tips for  using visual aids :

  • Think about how can a visual aid can support your message. What do you want the audience to do?
  • Ensure that your visual aid follows what you’re saying or this will confuse the audience.
  • Avoid cluttering the image as it may look messy and unclear.
  • Visual aids must be clear, concise and of a high quality.
  • Keep the style consistent, such as, the same font, colours, positions etc
  • Use graphs and charts to present data.
  • The audience should not be trying to read and listen at the same time – use visual aids to highlight your points.
  • One message per visual aid, for example, on a slide there should only be one key point.
  • Use visual aids in moderation – they are additions meant to emphasise and support main points.
  • Ensure that your presentation still works without your visual aids in case of technical problems.

10-20-30 slideshow rule

Slideshows are widely used for presentations because it’s easy to create attractive and professional presentations using them. Guy Kawasaki, an entrepreneur and author, suggests that slideshows should  follow a 10-20-30 rule :

  • There should be a maximum of 10 slides – people rarely remember more than one concept afterwards so there’s no point overwhelming them with unnecessary information.
  • The presentation should last no longer than 20 minutes as this will leave time for questions and discussion.
  • The font size should be a minimum of 30pt because the audience reads faster than you talk so less information on the slides means that there is less chance of the audience being distracted.

If you want to give the audience more information you can provide them with partially completed handouts or give them the handouts after you’ve delivered the presentation.

Keep a drink nearby

Have something to drink when you’re on stage, preferably water at room temperature. This will help maintain your vocal quality and having a sip is a subtle way of introducing pauses.

Practice, practice, practice

If you are very familiar with the content of your presentation, your audience will perceive you as confident and you’ll be more persuasive.

  • Don’t just read the presentation through – practice everything,  including your transitions  and using your visual aids.
  • Stand up and speak it aloud, in an engaging manner, as though you were presenting to an audience.
  • Ensure that you practice your body language and gesturing.
  • Use VR to  practice in a realistic environment .
  • Practice in front of others and get their feedback.
  • Freely improvise so you’ll sound more natural on the day. Don’t learn your presentation verbatim because you will sound uninterested and if you lose focus then you may forget everything.
  • Create cards to use as cues – one card should be used for one key idea. Write down brief notes or key words and ensure that the cards are physically connected so the order cannot be lost. Visual prompts can also be used as cues.

This video shows how you can practice presentations in virtual reality. See our  VR training courses .

Two courses where you can practice your presentations in interactive exercises:

  • Essential Public Speaking
  • How to Present over Video

Try these different presentation delivery methods to see which ones you prefer and which need to be improved. The most important factor is to feel comfortable during the presentation as the delivery is likely to be better.

Remember that the audience are generally on your side – they want you to do well so present with confidence.

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Presentations, Demos, and Training Sessions pp 1–6 Cite as

THE IMPORTANCE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF A GOOD PRESENTATION

  • Adrian Wallwork 3  
  • First Online: 01 January 2014

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Part of the book series: Guides to Professional English ((GPE))

Presentations are opportunities to:

establish yourself within the company as being an expert in your field

show that you have good communication skills (i.e. to persuade, to inspire, to motivate) and thus have management potential – in most surveys of companies, presentation skills were rated as being as important (if not more so) than technical skills

learn a lot about the topic you are presenting, it will help you understand your topic better, and it may help you to see the topic from a new perspective (i.e. that of the user rather than the developer / designer)

Any kind of training session or demo is like selling a product – you are trying to get your audience to do something, e.g. to use some product or service.

  • Good Communication Skills
  • English Examination
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  • Professional Presentations
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Wallwork, A. (2014). THE IMPORTANCE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF A GOOD PRESENTATION. In: Presentations, Demos, and Training Sessions. Guides to Professional English. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0644-4_1

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Module 8: Developing and Delivering Business Presentations

Parts of a good presentation, learning outcomes.

  • Identify key features of a good presentation

Like reverse engineering a product, we can distill the key features of a good presentation by looking at presentation evaluation scorecards. Refer to Table 1 for a sample class presentation grading rubric.

At the macro level, the key elements of a good presentation are content, organization, and delivery. There are both substance and style aspects of content. Substance elements include the originality and significance of your idea, the quality of your research and analysis, clarity and potential impact of your recommendations. Style aspects of content include confidence and credibility, both of which have a significant impact on how you—and your message—are received.

Good organization starts with a strong opening and continues in a logical and well-supported manner throughout the presentation, leading to a close that serves as a resolution of the problem or a summary of the situation you’ve presented. The audience experiences good organization as a sense of flow—an inevitable forward movement to a satisfying close. This forward momentum also requires audiences to have a certain level of technical and information-management competency. To the latter point, good presentation requires a presenter to put thought into information design, from the structure and content of slides to the transitions between individual points, slides and topics.

Delivery entails a range of factors from body language and word choice to vocal variety. In this category, your audience is responding to your personality and professionalism. For perspective, one of the three evaluation categories on the official Toastmasters speaker evaluation form is “As I Saw You;” in parentheses: “approach, position, personal appearance, facial expression, gestures and detracting mannerisms.” A good presenter has a passion for the subject and an ability to convey and perhaps elicit that emotion in the audience. Audience engagement—through eye contact, facial expression, perhaps the use of gestures or movement—also contributes to an effective presentation. However, to the point in the Toastmasters evaluation, gestures, movement other mannerisms can be distracting (see Module 7: Public Speaking for more on this). What works: natural (not staged) movement that reinforces communication of your idea.

Text reading "What's in it for me?" Me is the largest word.

Figure 1. The WIIFM Principle.

With those key features and presentation-evaluation criteria in mind, let’s add a disclaimer. The reality is that your features won’t matter if you don’t deliver one essential benefit: relevance.

Whether you think in Toastmasters terminology—”What’s in it for me? (WIIFM)” from the audience perspective—or put yourself in the audience’s position and ask “So what?,” it’s a question that you need to answer early. We’ll get into this more in the next section as we discuss presentation planning.

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  • Parts of a Good Presentation. Authored by : Nina Burokas. Provided by : Lumen Learning. License : CC BY: Attribution
  • Modification of WIIFM. Authored by : Nathan Stephens. Located at : https://flic.kr/p/dEFKQS . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

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CHARACTERISTICS OF A GOOD PRESENTATION

At the beginning.

  • Introduce the topic
  • State what is known
  • State what remains unknown
  • Introduce the main question
  • Indicate how this work fits into the big picture
  • Convince the audience of the importance of the work
  • Refer to the original main question and how this research has addressed the question
  • State the significance of this work and how it relates to the "big picture"
  • Consider unanswered questions
  • Suggest new questions that have arisen from this work
  • Suggest possible future experiments
  • Organize along this format: Intro, Methods, Results (and their implications), Discussion
  • Establish eye contact with audience
  • Provide an overview
  • Become familiar with all methods and techniques
  • Explain why a particular technique was used
  • Use your own words and examples
  • Make sure you understand the most difficult aspects
  • Anticipate questions and have answers ready.
  • Practice the entire talk while timing yourself
  • Record your talk and listen for errors or rough spots
  • Carefully point to subregions within the figures
  • Screen supplemental figures (Avoid complexity; you want the audience to feel "OK, now I understand.")
  • Emphasize the most important points, de-emphasize less important points
  • Perhaps organize the talk as a series of questions and responses
  • Justify each set of experiments (Why must these experiments be done? What was the question and why was it important?)
  • Check word pronunciations in advance
  • Include a drawing or diagram of the experimental setup
  • Choose words carefully (importance of practice)
  • Point out errors or flaws in text, figures, or logic
  • Don't say "they" or "scientists. " Rather, say "investigators" or "workers" or "researchers."
  • Don't say "they found out...."
  • Don't say "OK" or "ahmmmm"
  • Don't say "proved" (instead, use these verbs: suggested, indicated, demonstrated, showed, etc.) in most cases, avoid being absolutely definite.
  • Don't rush through figures (Explain the axes and summarize each figure.)
  • Don't attempt humor.
  • Don't provide unnecessary details (ex: means of anesthesia, food, etc, unless relevant)
  • Don't make nervous movements (snap pen cap, pace, fiddle with pointer, etc.)
  • Don't talk directly to wall or talk with pen in mouth
  • Don't trail off sentences into mumbling
  • Don't worry. (Be happy.)

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7 Qualities Of A Good Presentation

Presenting is not most people’s favourite thing to do, but it is unfortunately a significant part of the modern professional world. While it’s not easy to shake those presenting nerves, there are ways you can learn to deal with them, chief among them is by giving a good presentation. When you deliver effective and successful presentations, it builds your confidence which makes it much easier the next time you present.

If you have a big presentation lingering in the near future and want to really nail it, identify what makes a good presentation. Here are some examples:

I know this seem fairly impossible at the moment but going into a presentation with confidence really helps to sell it to your audience. People want you to succeed and they are looking to you to make them at ease. If you’re second guessing everything about your speech pattern and delivery, how can you expect those listening to buy in to what you’re selling. Prepare thoroughly and come ready to do the best job you can. The right attitude can make a big difference.

Keeping a captive audience is not an ease task, especially within the business world. While the information is no doubt important, the subject material can sometimes be dry, so it’s your job as a presenter to give it some life. Delivering the topic with passion can often times translate into your audience forming their own interest in the subject. When you can speak passionately and eloquently about a subject, it will at the very least help to hold the attention of those you’re speaking to and hopefully ignite a passion of their own.

Before getting started on your presentation, you want to learn as much as possible about the subject you’re going to speak about. Become as much an expert as is reasonable to expect. The hope is that without even preparing a presentation, you would be able to speak at length on the subject. Without having a handle on the material, you will lose the audience. No matter how many times you practice, an audience can always tell the difference between someone who really knows the subject and those who are just regurgitating facts.

Naturalness

Memorizing a presentation can help to make you feel more prepared, but an overly memorized presentation isn’t too much fun to sit through. Presentations should certainly be professional but they can also benefit from adding a bit of informality to the proceedings. Being comfortable with the material allows you to be open to a bit of naturalism when presenting which makes for a much more engaging talk. Stay on your talking points and don’t stray off course, but don’t make things too rigid or else it won’t be fun for anyone.

Organization

While a little informality can be great for a presentation, when it comes to the structure of your presentation, strict guidelines are important. When a presentation hopes around too often, even if the right points are being hit, it can cause confusion in the audience and the message to become muddled. Your points need to connect and lead from one into the other so the audience has a story to follow. This helps them to remember information more easily and actually attain what you’re trying to say.

Time-sensitive

Getting across all the necessary information in your presentation is important, but keeping the whole things to a reasonable length is also important. No matter what you’re talking about, your audience isn’t going to stay with you forever, so you need to make the presentation as concise as possible. Make cuts where necessary, understand what’s really important and what is not and be able to improvise if you’re running long.

Above all else, a presentation is meant to convey a message. You could check all the box for the above qualities but if your audience leaves the presentation not knowing what your message was, then the whole thing failed. Identify a clear and concise message that can easily be interpreted and taken from your presentation. Know each time within your presentation that you need to hammer home that message. A clear message well delivered is the absolute key to a successful presentation.

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7 Qualities of a Good Presentation

presentation

Presenting is not most people’s favourite thing to do, but it is, unfortunately, a significant part of the modern professional world. While it’s not easy to shake those presenting nerves, there are ways you can learn to deal with them, chief among them is by giving a good presentation. When you deliver effective and successful presentations, it builds your confidence which makes it much easier the next time you present.

If you have a big presentation lingering in the near future and want to really nail it, identify what makes a good presentation. Here are some examples:

I know this seems fairly impossible at the moment but going into a presentation with confidence really helps to sell it to your audience. People want you to succeed and they are looking to you to make them at ease. If you’re second-guessing everything about your speech pattern and delivery, how can you expect those listening to buy into what you’re selling. Prepare thoroughly and come ready to do the best job you can. The right attitude can make a big difference.

Keeping a captive audience is not an easy task, especially within the business world. While the information is no doubt important, the subject material can sometimes be dry, so it’s your job as a presenter to give it some life. Delivering the topic with passion can often times translate into your audience forming their own interest in the subject. When you can speak passionately and eloquently about a subject, it will at the very least help to hold the attention of those you’re speaking to and hopefully ignite a passion of their own.

Before getting started on your presentation, you want to learn as much as possible about the subject you’re going to speak about. Become as much an expert as is reasonable to expect. The hope is that without even preparing a presentation, you would be able to speak at length on the subject. Without having a handle on the material, you will lose the audience. No matter how many times you practice, an audience can always tell the difference between someone who really knows the subject and those who are just regurgitating facts.

Naturalness

Memorizing a presentation can help to make you feel more prepared, but an overly memorized presentation isn’t too much fun to sit through. Presentations should certainly be professional but they can also benefit from adding a bit of informality to the proceedings. Being comfortable with the material allows you to be open to a bit of naturalism when presenting which makes for a much more engaging talk. Stay on your talking points and don’t stray off course, but don’t make things too rigid or else it won’t be fun for anyone.

Organization

While a little informality can be great for a presentation, when it comes to the structure of your presentation, strict guidelines are important. When a presentation hopes around too often, even if the right points are being hit, it can cause confusion in the audience and the message to become muddled. Your points need to connect and lead from one into the other so the audience has a story to follow. This helps them to remember information more easily and actually attain what you’re trying to say.

Time-sensitive

Getting across all the necessary information in your presentation is important, but keeping the whole things to a reasonable length is also important. No matter what you’re talking about, your audience isn’t going to stay with you forever, so you need to make the presentation as concise as possible. Make cuts where necessary, understand what’s really important and what is not and be able to improvise if you’re running long.

Above all else, a presentation is meant to convey a message. You could check all the box for the above qualities but if your audience leaves the presentation not knowing what your message was, then the whole thing failed. Identify a clear and concise message that can easily be interpreted and taken from your presentation. Know each time within your presentation that you need to hammer home that message. A clear message well delivered is the absolute key to a successful presentation.

– Courtesy of BoomersPlus

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Institute of Medicine (US) Committee to Advise the Public Health Service on Clinical Practice Guidelines; Field MJ, Lohr KN, editors. Clinical Practice Guidelines: Directions for a New Program. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 1990.

Cover of Clinical Practice Guidelines

Clinical Practice Guidelines: Directions for a New Program.

  • Hardcopy Version at National Academies Press

3 Attributes of Good Practice Guidelines

Remember the drunk who searched for his keys under the lamp post because that's where the light was? Science is a highly systematic process of creating lamps and then looking under them. David Warsh, Washington Post

Developing practice guidelines that enlighten practitioners and patients is an exceptionally challenging task. It requires diverse skills ranging from the analysis of scientific evidence to the management of group decisionmaking to the presentation of complex information in useful forms. Although the need for these skills has not always been recognized in the past, the recent focus on guidelines is bringing not only a greater awareness of what is required for their development but also a higher level of expertise to the field. The Office of the Forum for Quality and Effectiveness in Health Care should make every effort to reinforce this trend as it works with contractors, expert panels, and others to develop and disseminate practice guidelines.

This chapter describes eight attributes that the committee believes are essential if a set of guidelines are to serve their intended purposes of assisting practitioners and patients, providing a better foundation for the evaluation of services and practitioners, and improving health outcomes. These attributes are ideal characteristics to which real guidelines are unlikely to conform fully either now or in the future. However, in the committee's judgment, guidelines can approach these ideals to a greater extent than has generally been achieved to date.

The next four sections review the context, working assumptions, principles, and sources that guided the committee in developing its list of attributes, followed by a discussion of the attributes themselves. This chapter, however, is not intended either as an exhaustive description of how guidelines should be developed or as an endorsement of one specific method. 1 The discussion in this chapter focuses on attributes of guidelines rather than attributes of medical review criteria, standards of quality, and performance measures. The recent IOM report on quality assurance in the Medicare program (1990d) discusses some attributes that good medical review criteria should have, for example, specificity and sensitivity.

One further introductory point: the committee has urged AHCPR and its Forum to focus their efforts on guidelines for clinical conditions rather than specific treatments or procedures. This focus will undoubtedly make their task more difficult: a consideration of conditions generally involves a broader look at alternatives, evidence, practice settings, and outcomes. The result, however, should be guidelines that are both more broadly and more specifically useful to clinicians and patients. The discussion of attributes in this chapter reflects this emphasis on conditions rather than procedures.

  • Background and Terminology

OBRA 89 specifies that "the Director [of the Forum] shall establish standards and criteria to be utilized by the recipients of contracts" for "developing and periodically reviewing and updating" guidelines, standards, performance measures, and review criteria. Confusion is likely if "criteria and standards" are used to label both the bases for prospectively assessing practice guidelines and the bases for assessing clinician practice. Consequently, to reduce possible terminological confusion, this report refers to ''attributes of guidelines" rather than to "standards and criteria" for "guidelines, standards, performance measures, and review criteria." Synonyms include properties and characteristics. 2

The Forum must be able to employ the list of attributes set forth in this chapter in at least two ways. First, it will need to communicate its expectations in advance to the contractors or expert panels that may develop guidelines for the agency. Second, the Forum and potential users of the guidelines must be able to assess the soundness of a given set of guidelines after they are developed. The IOM expects in a second project to prepare a practical assessment instrument that the Forum can use to systematically review guidelines developed by its panels or by other groups ( Appendix C ).

During the committee's deliberations, a question was raised about whether the Forum has formal authority under OBRA 89 either to reject or approve the guidelines developed by its contractors or expert panels. This report does not speak to that legal point. Nevertheless, regardless of the Forum's statutory authority in this regard, it is reasonable that the agency should examine the soundness of guidelines developed under its auspices. This examination may (1) improve the way the agency works with contractors or panels in the future, (2) contribute to more informed consideration of dissemination options and evaluation strategies, (3) allow more sophisticated consultations with HCFA and other government agencies about their use of the guidelines, and (4) provide feedback about the feasibility of the assessments proposed here.

In this report, assessment means the prospective or initial judgment of the soundness and feasibility of a set of guidelines. In contrast, the empirical evaluation of the cost, quality, and other effects of guidelines occurs after they are published and implemented.

Further, a set of guidelines includes a series of statements or recommendations about appropriate practice and the accompanying descriptions of evidence, methodology, and rationale. A guideline in the singular refers to a discrete statement or recommendation (for example, annual breast physical examination for women aged 40 to 49 with no family or personal history of breast cancer). Each of the appropriateness reports published by the RAND Corporation clearly exemplifies a set of guidelines (Park et al., 1986). Likewise, using this terminology, the report of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (1989) contains 60 sets of guidelines and not 60 guidelines.

  • Working Assumptions

The committee's first working assumption has been that a set of guidelines will be assessed as a whole; that is, its elements will not be assessed individually in isolation. Under this assumption the Forum could judge a set of guidelines acceptable even if individual statements lacked—for legitimate reasons—some essential attributes. Realistically, early guidelines and (especially) existing guidelines are not likely to score well on all eight attributes collectively. However, the committee expects that, as the development process matures, guidelines will continue to comprise more and more of the attributes.

Second, the committee assumes that the Forum will (in line with OBRA 89 provisions) convene expert panels to assess either existing guidelines or guidelines for which the Forum has contracted. These panels will need to make both objective and subjective assessments guided by instructions from the Forum. This report is a step toward the preparation of an assessment instrument that the expert panels can use in their reviews and deliberations ( Appendix C ). The AMA has recently taken a similar step by developing a preliminary worksheet to evaluate what it terms practice parameters (AMA, 1990b).

Third, the committee sees the initial assessment of guidelines as part of an evolutionary process of guidelines development, assessment, use, evaluation, and revision. This evolutionary process will involve the government, professional organizations, health service researchers, consumers, and others. As a result, the committee fully expects the set of attributes presented here to be tested, reassessed, and revised, if necessary.

The identification of attributes of practice guidelines rests on four principles. These principles call for:

  • clarity in the definition of each attribute;
  • compatibility of each attribute and its definition with professional usage;
  • clear rationales or justifications for the selection of each attribute; and
  • sensitivity to practical issues in using the attributes to assess actual sets of practice guidelines ("accessibility").

That the definition of an attribute be clear and succinct is obviously desirable, although often difficult when one is working with very abstract or technical concepts. It is also desirable that the term used to label an attribute be recognizable and consistent with customary professional usage. The label should be a single word or short phrase that is carefully chosen to convey the core concept. (Thus, attributes will not be described by number, for example, Attribute No. 1.)

The rationale or justification for each attribute should be clearly described, and it should also be consistent with the professional and technical literature and the legislative mandate. The rationale should describe explicitly any trade-offs between the theoretically ideal attribute and the practical, usable one.

Practicality requires that attributes be definable in operational as well as conceptual terms; that is, it should be possible to devise an instrument that instructs assessors of a set of guidelines on how they can determine whether the guidelines conform to the attributes. Not only is this necessary if the Forum is to judge the soundness of the guidelines that emerge from its expert panels; it is fundamental that the Forum instruct developers of guidelines on the desired properties of guidelines and on the documentation needed as a basis for assessment. As mentioned earlier, the development of a formal instrument for assessing guidelines is an important next step for this committee.

More generally, the number of attributes must be sensible and practical. An appropriate balance must be reached between enough attributes to allow adequate assessment of the guidelines but not so many that the assessment exercise becomes infeasible, confusing, or excessive, given limited resources. It is likely that an instrument for assessing guidelines will need to weight the eight attributes in some manner, specifying which of them are more significant in determining whether a given set of guidelines are sound. Given its time and resource constraints, this committee did not systematically rank the different attributes by relative importance, although the discussion below does distinguish some of the more important ones.

A final point: this report differentiates between the priorities for selecting particular targets for guidelines and the desirable attributes of guidelines. The attributes listed in this chapter do not incorporate the OBRA 89 provisions requiring that priorities for the development of guidelines reflect the needs and priorities of the Medicare program and include clinical treatments or conditions accounting for a significant portion of Medicare expenditures.

The legislation also calls on the Secretary of Health and Human Services to consider the extent to which guidelines can be expected "(i) to improve methods of prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and clinical management for the benefit of a significant number of individuals; (ii) to reduce clinically significant variations among physicians in the particular services and procedures utilized in making diagnoses and providing treatment; and (iii) to reduce clinically significant variations in the outcomes of health care services and procedures." In arriving at its eight recommended properties of guidelines, the committee did not incorporate these factors. Priority setting is a crucial but separate task and one that IOM has undertaken as part of other studies (IOM, 1990a,b,c,e).

  • Past Work on Defining Attributes

This committee considered three primary sources in identifying attributes for practice guidelines: (1) the legislation, (2) the IOM report on quality assurance for Medicare, and (3) work by the AMA. Other important materials, which in some cases were used in the primary sources, include the work of Brook, Chassin, Eddy, Greenfield, and their collaborators, as cited elsewhere in this report.

In addition to describing priorities to guide the Forum in selecting topics for guidelines, OBRA 89 sets forth some characteristics that guidelines should have. The committee distinguished these four points from the legislation.

Guidelines should be based on the best available research and professional judgment regarding the effectiveness and appropriateness of health care services and procedures.

The Forum director is expected to ensure that appropriate, interested individuals and organizations will be consulted during the development of guidelines.

The director has the power to pilot-test the guidelines.

Guidelines should be presented in forms appropriate for use in clinical practice, in educational programs, and in reviewing quality and appropriateness of medical care.

A second major source for the committee's work, the IOM report on a quality assurance strategy for Medicare (1990d), included a chapter on attributes of quality of care and appropriateness criteria. These attributes derived from a June 1989 meeting of experts on the construction and use of practice guidelines. Some of the distinctions proposed by the quality panel are not used here. For example, this committee's report emphasizes key attributes of good guidelines but contains relatively little discussion of desirable but less critical attributes. In addition, this report drops the panel's distinction between substantive and implementation guidelines because the committee found it awkward to label every attribute as either one or the other. The point that lay behind the original distinction should, nonetheless, be stressed: the designers of guidelines need to keep implementation in mind—whether and how the guidelines can be used.

A third source considered by the committee was the AMA's booklet, "Attributes to Guide the Development of Practice Parameters" (1990a), which sets forth five attributes. They are (minus their accompanying discussion and more detailed descriptions) as follows: (1) practice parameters should be developed by or in conjunction with physician organizations; (2) reliable methodologies that integrate relevant research findings and appropriate clinical expertise should be used to develop practice parameters; (3) practice parameters should be as comprehensive and specific as possible; (4) practice parameters should be based on current information; and (5) practice parameters should be widely distributed.

  • Attributes for Assessing Practice Guidelines: Overview

The art of developing practice guidelines is in an early stage, and the strengths and weaknesses of specific approaches are still being debated. As a consequence, the committee recognizes that what is expected of guidelines, in terms of their development and implementation, will need to evolve beyond these initial specifications.

Table 3-1 lists the eight attributes for assessing guidelines that the committee identified. One theme emphasized here, which ties these guideline attributes together, is credibility —credibility with practitioners, with patients, with payers, with policymakers. This theme encompasses the scientific grounding of the guidelines, the qualifications of those involved in the development process, and the relevance of the guidelines to the actual world in which practitioners and patients make decisions.

TABLE 3-1. Eight Attributes of Good Practice Guidelines.

Eight Attributes of Good Practice Guidelines.

A second and related theme is the importance of accountability , a key element of which is disclosure. That is, the committee expects that procedures, participants, evidence, assumptions, rationales, and analytic methods will be meticulously documented—preferably in an accompanying background paper. This documentation will help those not participating in any given process of guidelines formulation to assess independently the soundness of the developers' work.

Explanations should be provided for any conflict or inconsistency between the guidelines in question and those developed by others. The issue of disagreement or inconsistency among practice guidelines is an important one for patients, practitioners, managers, payers, and policymakers. As discussed in Chapter 5 of this report, merely identifying inconsistencies in guidelines says nothing about the legitimacy of such differences. Careful documentation of the evidence and rationales can help potential users of guidelines judge whether inconsistencies arise from differences in the interpretation of scientific evidence, from differences in the care taken in developing the guidelines, or from other factors.

In the committee's view, the validity of practice guidelines ranks as the most critical attribute, even though it may be the hardest to define and measure. Conceptually, a valid practice guideline is one that, if followed, will lead to the health and cost outcomes projected for it, other things being equal. In the research literature, validity is commonly defined by three questions. Do the instruments for measuring some concept (for example, quality of care) really measure that concept? Does the relationship or effect that the researchers assert exists (for example, following a set of guidelines improves quality of care) really exist? Can that relationship be generalized (for example, from clinical trials to everyday medical practice)?

Until a guideline is actually applied and the results evaluated, validity must be assessed primarily by reference to the substance and quality of the evidence cited, the means used to evaluate the evidence, and the relationship between the evidence and recommendations. 3 In the context of the Forum's practical needs, the committee recommends that an assessment of validity look for 11 elements in a set of guidelines. These elements are listed below:

  • Projected health outcomes
  • Projected costs
  • Relationship between the evidence and the guidelines
  • Preference for empirical evidence over expert judgment
  • Thorough literature review
  • Methods used to evaluate the scientific literature
  • Strength of the evidence
  • Use of expert judgment
  • Strength of expert consensus
  • Independent review
  • Pretesting.

Projected Health Outcomes

A key reason for developing and using practice guidelines is the expectation that they will improve health outcomes. Ideally, a set of guidelines should give practitioners, patients, and policymakers an explicit description of the projected health benefits (for example, a reduction in postoperative infection rates from 4 to 2 percent) and the projected harms or risks (for example, an increase in the risk of incontinence from 10 to 20 percent). If reasonable and technically feasible, the net effects of a course of action—the balance of benefits against risks or harms—also need to be estimated. In addition, projected outcomes should be compared with those for alternative courses of care for the clinical condition in question.

The ideal set of projections just described will often be technically or practically beyond the reach of guidelines developers. In most situations, the assistance of outside consultants or specialized technical advisory panels will be at least helpful or at most essential; yet even with such help, projecting health outcomes is intrinsically a complex and subjective process. The nature of the process makes it particularly important that the methods for projecting outcomes, the limitations in these methods, and the evidence for such projections be described.

When empirical evidence is limited, potential effects may only be listed, not quantitatively compared or weighed. In addition, in cases in which patient preferences about different risks and benefits may differ, practice guidelines will need to be sensitive to such variation, and a comprehensive statement of net effects may have to be omitted (Mulley, 1990). In any event, a systematic effort should be made to provide practitioners, patients, and others with information that will help them make their own judgments of the balance of benefits and risks.

Figure 3-1 provides a simple checklist of outcomes that might be estimated. The particular outcomes to be considered will vary with the clinical conditions and practices under consideration.

A possible checklist for describing benefits, risks, and costs. SOURCE: This figure is adapted in part from the National Research Council report, Improving Risk Communication (1989).

To support the eventual evaluation of the actual impact of guidelines, guidelines developers should indicate what information related to outcomes will be needed, where it can be obtained, and whether better means for collecting and analyzing data need to be established to permit evaluation.

On this last point, limitations in the sources of data and the variables used to project outcomes are likely to provide inspiration for recommending improvements.

Projected Costs

Recent interest in practice guidelines is founded in part on the explicit or implicit expectation that they can help control escalating health care costs. The committee has already cautioned that some guidelines, if followed, may increase short- or long-term costs and that the net cost effects of current initiatives are not clear. These kinds of uncertainty underscore the desirability of including some form of cost projections in the background documentation for guidelines.

Cost estimation, like the projection of health outcomes, has its own special technical complexities and subjective aspects that will often require the services of outside consultants or specialized technical advisory panels. Even with such assistance, the committee recognizes that the results will be imperfect. In general, estimates of the costs associated with a set of guidelines should follow the same principles of documentation and discussion described for the estimation of health outcomes, including comparisons of alternative courses of care (see Figure 3-1 ). The remainder of this section describes desirable elements of cost projections, elements the committee sees as goals rather than minimum requirements.

Ideally, cost estimates should have two components, one involving projected health care costs and the other relating to administrative costs. The estimated health care costs of following the guidelines should reflect (1) the estimated total number of services that will be added, substituted, or deleted if a guideline is followed and (2) the substantiated charges (or production costs) for these services. For example, for screening services, the expected costs of providing the services and of treating the problems that are detected all need to be included. Depending on the available information and the assumptions used, estimates will often take the form of ranges rather than point estimates.

If health outcomes are projected in terms of additional life expectancy or similar measures, then the cost per unit of each identified outcome should be projected. Again, ranges may be more suitable than point estimates. If the guidelines indicate acceptable alternative courses of care, the total costs of the major alternatives and their cost per unit of each expected benefit should be described.

Cost estimates should also consider the additional expenses that may be associated with administering or using the guidelines. For example, computer hardware or software may be required to support easy access to various sets of guidelines. In the case of medical review criteria, additional staff may be required to handle inquiries.

This report does not take a position on whether costs should be explicitly factored into recommendations, although some committee members have strong views that such a step should be mandatory if guidelines are to control costs. The committee did agree that information on projected health outcomes and costs will help developers and users of guidelines better understand the implications of following or not following the guidelines. One part of this process will be some clarification of both the factual and the value judgments involved for practitioners, patients, health plans, and others in making such decisions. In some cases, a patient may decide that a service is not worth the personal out-of-pocket cost; in others, a provider may choose among clinically acceptable alternatives on the basis of financial considerations, such as the opportunity cost of acquiring new equipment. Similarly, a health benefits plan may opt not to cover a category of service that it is quite appropriate for a practitioner to provide and a patient to receive. 4

Relationship Between the Evidence and the Guidelines

Practice guidelines have not always been clearly and consistently related to the scientific and clinical evidence (Eddy and Billings, 1988), but they should be. The link between the base of evidence and a set of guidelines needs to be explicit, preferably with specific citations for specific portions of a set of guidelines. This implies the need for a reference list rather than just a bibliography of literature used in the guidelines development process. A bibliography may, however, indicate sources consulted but not cited.

Preference for Empirical Evidence Over Expert Judgement

Empirical evidence should take precedence over expert judgment in the development of guidelines. When the empirical evidence has important limitations and experts reach conclusions that are not consistent with the evidence, then the conflict and limits of the evidence should be clearly described and the rationale for departing from the evidence, such as it is, should be explained. When expert judgment proceeds in the absence of direct empirical evidence about a particular clinical practice, a frequent circumstance, the general scientific reasoning or normative (ethical, professional) principles supporting the expert judgments should be described.

Thorough Literature Review

A thorough review of the scientific literature should precede the development of practice guidelines and serve as their foundation. This review must be well documented and easily available to those assessing or using a set of guidelines. It should describe all relevant aspects of the scientific research including (1) sponsors of the research, (2) investigators and their institutional affiliations, (3) research settings (for example, academic medical center or public outpatient clinic), (4) research populations, (5) methods (for example, randomized clinical trial), (6) limitations (for example, a research population limited to males when the condition or service under study is not), and (7) findings. The literature search method should also be described (for instance, MEDLARS), and the rules for including and excluding research should be explicitly noted (for example, whether unpublished materials or articles ''in press" were used).

Altogether, the thoroughness of the review is a key step in developing valid guidelines, and documentation is a key requirement for later assessments of validity. The task, like those of estimating health outcomes and costs, may require the assistance of outside consultants or technical advisory panels. The qualifications of the individual or individuals responsible for the review should be described.

Methods Used to Evaluate the Scientific Literature

Methods for reviewing, summarizing, and evaluating the literature range from unarticulated and subjective—one person's unsupported synopsis, for instance—to highly formal, quantitative means of information synthesis and techniques of meta-analysis (Eddy, 1990b). The former approach is usually unsatisfactory for developing valid guidelines, and it is certainly no aid to those assessing guidelines independently. At a minimum, the factors considered in "weighing" or evaluating the evidence should be explicitly identified. For example, a reviewer could state that he or she weighed evidence from randomized clinical trials more heavily than evidence from case-control studies. An explicit rating of each entry in the literature used in the guidelines development process may be helpful but is not essential (Canadian Task Force on the Periodic Health Examination, 1979).

The more formal the analytic approach, the more valid the literature review (and hence the resulting guideline) can be expected to be. Formal approaches require that analysts guard against any application of quantitative and other systematic techniques that may disguise the limitations of incomplete or poor literature and thereby distort conclusions. The references to this chapter describe several formal approaches to evaluating evidence.

Strength of Evidence

Inevitably, the evidence for some guidelines will be more abundant, consistent, clear, relevant, and methodologically rigorous than the evidence for others. Consequently, guidelines developers should provide some explicit description of the scientific certainty associated with a set of guidelines (Eddy, 1990a–e). The approach recently taken by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (1989) was to rank study designs; randomized controlled trials were ranked highest and expert opinion, lowest. However, this unidimensional scheme would rate a poorly executed randomized clinical trial more highly than a carefully done nonrandomized trial, a questionable result in the committee's view. More complex and statistically based techniques may be more accurate, but specific recommendations are beyond the scope of this committee.

One consequence of a thorough and expert assessment of the evidence may be a decision to defer the effort to develop guidelines for the condition or service in question because the evidence is weaker or less conclusive than expected when the effort was initiated. When it is imperative to go ahead with guidelines on a topic, the alternative is to rely more heavily on expert consensus. Even so, the experts may eventually agree that guidelines should be deferred for lack of either evidence or consensus.

Use of Expert Judgment

Expert or group judgment may come into play in guidelines development in two somewhat different but not incompatible ways. First, groups may be used to evaluate and rate scientific evidence with or without the support of quantitative methods such as meta-analysis. Second, group judgment may be used as the primary basis for a guideline when the scientific evidence is weak or nonexistent. Rather than have expert panels accept a consultant's or other party's review uncritically, the panels should conduct their own careful "review of the review" of the literature.

The methods used to arrive at group judgments must be carefully selected and well described (IOM, 1985). For example, if formal votes are taken, a secret, written ballot should be used, insofar as possible, and a record of the results of each round of voting should be maintained. Any departure from a policy of "one person-one vote" must be justified. If a panel member is absent from active group discussion of the guidelines, that absence should be noted. A recent IOM workshop on group judgment noted that more research needs to be done regarding the validity and reliability of judgments reached using different group judgment techniques (IOM, 1990f; Lomas, 1990).

Strength of Expert Consensus

Expert groups will almost assuredly participate in the literature review and development of guidelines. The extent to which those experts agree on their findings and recommendations is important information. Thus, a set of guidelines should describe the strength and nature of the group consensus or agreement.

In some cases, the experts may strongly agree that clear evidence supports precise statements in a set of guidelines about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of a particular clinical practice. This agreement is powerful support for the validity of those statements. In other situations, experts may strongly agree that no clear evidence exists on which to base precise statements about appropriateness. This, too, is important information. In still other cases, the experts may disagree about what the evidence indicates and what statements about appropriateness are warranted (Park et al., 1986). These three quite different situations have different implications for guidelines developers and users.

The extent of agreement within an expert group should be reported in quantitative terms (for example, simple percentages describing levels of agreement or disagreement). When evidence or professional agreement is very strong, guidelines may be more confidently translated into criteria for evaluating practitioner performance.

Independent Review

In any endeavor involving expert panels and the subjective evaluation and interpretation of data, different groups may well arrive at different conclusions. Replication of guidelines development on the same clinical condition or technology is not likely to be feasible, affordable, or desirable (in terms of the opportunity costs involved). Therefore, at a minimum, some effort should be made to subject guidelines (including the relevant literature reviews) to review and criticism by professionals who are not involved in the original development process. These procedures should be described and the results summarized.

Pretesting a set of guidelines on members of the intended user group (for example, practitioners or patients) using a real organization or a set of prototypical cases is desirable. (See also the discussions of reliability/reproducibility and clarity, below.) Description of methods, settings, and results of any pretests of the guidelines should be described. The Forum has been given authority to pretest guidelines, and the committee believes it should exercise that authority.

  • Reliability/Reproducibility

As conventionally used in a research context, reliability is linked to the measuring, diagnosing, or scoring of some phenomenon such as intelligence or bacterial infection. 5 In the context of guidelines, the committee uses the concept to refer to the ability of some method or process to produce consistent results across time or across users, or both. In strictly technical terms, levels of reliability dictate possible (achievable) levels of validity; that is, qualitative and quantitative instruments and tools cannot be valid if they are not reliable.

One kind of reliability is methodological. Ideally, if another group of qualified individuals using the same evidence, assumptions, and methods for guidelines development (for example, the same rules for literature review) were to develop guidelines, then they should produce essentially the same statements. In practice, such replications are almost unknown given the expense of the process, 6 but discussion of previous trials of the methodology (for different conditions) and any resulting revisions may be useful. Likewise, review of the guidelines by an outside panel can help in assessing reliability. (Recall that independent review is also important to an assessment of validity, a fact that underscores the link between reliability and validity.)

A second kind of reliability that is important for practice guidelines is clinical reliability. Practice guidelines are reliable if—given the same clinically relevant circumstances—the guidelines are interpreted and applied consistently by practitioners (or other appropriate parties). That is, the same practitioner, using the guidelines, makes the same basic clinical decision under the same circumstances from one time to the next, and different practitioners using the guidelines make the same decisions under the same circumstances. Pretesting of guidelines in actual delivery settings or on prototypical cases can help test this kind of reliability as well as contribute to assessments of validity.

For medical review criteria and other specific tools for evaluating health care actions or outcomes, the concept of reliability (or reproducibility) seems straightforward. Ideally, review criteria and other tools for evaluating performance should be pretested to provide evidence that they meet a specified level of reliability over time for the same user (test-retest reliability) and between users (interrater reliability). Review criteria often run into reliability problems when they use undefined terms—such as "frequent" or "serious" or "presence of comorbid conditions"—that different users may interpret quite differently. Thus, one tactic developers of guidelines and review criteria should use to maximize reliability is to avoid such terms unless precise definitions are provided.

  • Clinical Applicability

Because of the considerable resources and opportunity costs involved in developing practice guidelines, guidelines should be written to cover as inclusive a patient population as possible, consistent with knowledge about critical clinical and sociodemographic factors relevant for the condition or technology in question. For instance, a guideline should not be restricted to Medicare patients only through age 75 or through age 85 if evidence and expert judgment indicate that the clinical condition or the technology in question is pertinent to those over age 85.

This attribute requires that guidelines explicitly describe the population or populations to which statements apply. These populations may be defined in terms of diagnosis, pathophysiology, age, gender, race, social support systems, and other characteristics. The purpose of such a definition is to help physicians concentrate specific services on classes of patients that can benefit from those services and avoid such services for classes of patients for whom the services might do harm or produce no net benefit. Again, the relevant scientific literature needs to be cited or its absence noted.

  • Clinical Flexibility

Flexibility requires that a set of guidelines identify, where warranted, exceptions to their recommendations. The objective of this attribute is to allow necessary leeway for clinical judgment, patient preferences, and clinically relevant conditions of the delivery system (including necessary equipment and skilled personnel). 7

Operationalizing this attribute may be difficult. In the committee's view, a fairly rigorous approach should be adopted, one that requires a set of guidelines to (1) list the major foreseeable exceptions and the rationale for such exceptions, (2) categorize generally the less foreseeable or highly idiosyncratic circumstances that may warrant exceptions, (3) describe the basic information to be provided to patients and the kinds of patient preferences that may be appropriately considered, and (4) indicate what data are needed to document exceptions based on clinical circumstances, patient preferences, or delivery system characteristics.

The role of patient preferences, whether considered in the context of daily clinical practice or in the context of developing guidelines, is a particularly complex issue. For example, there is much disagreement about the proper behavior for practitioners faced with preferences they believe are unreasonable or unacceptable (Brock and Wartman, 1990). Likewise, the balance between patient preferences and societal resources is the subject of intense debate.

A thorough treatment of this issue was not part of the committee's charge. However, in addition to recommending that patient interests be taken into account at several points in the process of developing guidelines, the committee makes two observations. First, patient preference for a service generally need not be acceded to when the service cannot be expected to provide any benefit or when it can be expected to produce a clear excess of harm over benefit. Second, when a mentally competent patient unreasonably wishes (in a practitioner's view) to forego treatment, the practitioner can try to persuade the patient to accept care but cannot, with rare exceptions, insist on treatment.

Clarity means that guidelines are written in unambiguous language. Their presentation is logically organized and easy to follow, and the use of abbreviations, symbols, and similar aids is consistent and well explained. Key terms and those subject to misinterpretation are defined. Vague clinical language, such as "severe bleeding," should be avoided in favor of more precise language, such as "a drop in hematocrit of more than 6 percent in less than eight hours." Similarly, guidelines must be specific about what populations and clinical circumstances are covered and what specific elements of care are appropriate, inappropriate, and (if relevant) equivocal, as those terms were defined earlier.

For practical reasons, assessments of language and modes of presentation may have to be largely subjective. Depending on the audience, somewhat different standards for assessing clarity may be needed. Materials for consumers might be subject to the "readability" measures that have been variously applied to regulations, consumer warranties, and similar materials. Materials for practitioners may be more technical but should not be burdened by needless jargon, awkward writing, or "unfriendly" software. Software itself may soon allow organizations to apply computer-based "style manuals" or ''templates" to help standardize writing for different purposes (Frankel, 1990).

  • Multidisciplinary Process

One of the committee's strongest recommendations is that guidelines development include participation by representatives of key affected groups and disciplines. 8 The rationale for this position is threefold. First, multidisciplinary participation increases the probability that all relevant scientific evidence will be located and critically evaluated, thereby strengthening the scientific grounding, scope, and flexibility of the guidelines. Second, such participation increases the likelihood that practical problems with using guidelines will be identified and addressed, thus constructing a firmer foundation for successful application of the guidelines in real-world situations. Third, participation helps build a sense of involvement or "ownership" among different audiences for the guidelines, thereby improving the prospect for cooperation in implementing them. Figure 3-2 summarizes these rationales and other key issues in developing or assessing a participation strategy.

Multidisciplinary participation in guidelines development.

Among clinicians, multidisciplinary participation may call for the use of clinicians with and without full-time academic ties, for the inclusion of specialists and generalists, and for participation by relevant nonphysician practitioners. Optometrists, for instance, could well have an important role to play on panels to develop guidelines for cataract surgery. Experts in research and analytic methods also need to be represented on guidelines development panels; that is, methodological expertise should not be obtained only on a contractual basis or from specialized technical advisory panels.

User groups—in addition to clinicians—include health care administrators, members of peer review organizations, payers, and patients or consumers. If guidelines are expected to pertain to groups distinguished mainly by sociodemographic characteristics (for example, age or minority ethnic groups), special efforts are warranted to involve representatives of those groups at some early stage of development. Successful involvement of patients or consumers is a challenge that may require multiple strategies, as described below.

Documentation for this attribute will need to describe the parties involved, their credentials and potential biases, and the methods used to solicit their views and arrive at group judgments. The committee does not recommend, however, that the Forum develop detailed, rigid definitions of what constitutes a consumer or other participant category. (The often unproductive troubles such definitions created for federally funded health planning agencies were cited during the committee discussion.)

A frequent although not necessarily valid criticism of guidelines is that their content can be improperly manipulated by selecting group participants for their known opinions rather than on the basis of their expertise. The position taken here is that all participants in the guideline-setting process are likely to have personal opinions, biases, and preferences about the clinical problem or service at issue, and no amount of effort will expunge those factors. What is critical is that those factors be known and balanced insofar as possible. 9

The committee discussed at some length the question of who should develop guidelines. Some members felt quite strongly that the Forum should not contract with medical specialty societies for guidelines development services. Others felt that establishing such a blanket prohibition was not the right approach. Instead, decisions should be based on a comparative assessment of potential developers' track records and capacities. These capabilities include, for example, related work that the groups or individual participants have already done, existing documentation of participants' credentials and biases, and the methods and evidence with which they have experience. Although the committee did not reach a specific consensus that the Forum should completely exclude specialty societies as potential direct contractors or subcontractors, the agency should be sensitive to the credibility concerns raised by this question. Physician organizations in any case should be extensively consulted by developers of guidelines, involved in reviewing draft guidelines, and used to help disseminate guidelines.

Another debate arose during the committee's meetings over the question of who should chair a guidelines development group. Again, some felt that a specialist user of a particular technology (for example, a cardiac surgeon who performs coronary artery bypass surgery) should never chair a group developing guidelines on the use of that technology. Others felt that exceptions to the general principle might sometimes be warranted. There was considerable agreement that a physician should chair the development of any clinical practice guidelines. Again, explicit attention to questions of bias is essential.

Participation by affected groups in the process of guidelines development can be achieved in several ways. The strongest form of participation is membership on the panel charged with developing guidelines, but the benefits of this approach have to be balanced against the practical management problems created by too large a panel. Participation may also be achieved through mechanisms other than the panel—for example, public hearings, circulation of draft guidelines for review and comment by a wide variety of groups, and contracts with particular interests for specific analyses. Focus groups and pretests may uncover confusing language or highlight the "hassle factor" associated with draft guidelines and allow practitioners or patients to suggest more acceptable alternatives.

Different types of guidelines are likely to require different mechanisms for participation, and the benefits of participation need to be balanced against resource limitations and other constraints. Therefore, this report stresses the principle and value of participation rather than the specific vehicles. Creativity and experimentation should, in fact, be encouraged.

  • Scheduled Review

Clinical evidence and judgment are not static. Therefore, guidelines should designate a review date to determine whether they should be updated or, potentially, withdrawn. In a clinical area where technologies are changing rapidly and new research findings can be expected to accumulate quickly, a relatively short timetable may be appropriate. More stable clinical areas may permit a longer period before scheduled review. In every case, however, a guideline should contain a specific review date or time frame for review (for example, within three years of initial publication). The greater the amount of change in a clinical area, the more the revision process will resemble the initial development process in scope, cost, and intensity.

Follow-up on review schedules is part of the implementation process (see Chapter 4 ) as is determination of whether review is needed before the scheduled date. Unscheduled revisions may be prompted by major new clinical evidence or by emerging or disintegrating professional consensus. To oversee both scheduled and unscheduled reviews, an organization responsible for the development of multiple sets of guidelines should subject all of its guidelines to some kind of yearly examination to flag particular guidelines for either scheduled or unscheduled review. As described in the next chapter, the mechanisms for disseminating and administering guidelines need to provide for guidelines updating or withdrawal.

  • Documentation

For the purposes of emphasis, the committee lists documentation as a separate attribute even though it has already been referred to repeatedly in the discussion of other attributes. As a practical matter, a documentation checklist, such as the preliminary version presented in Table 3-2 , may be helpful for contractors and review panels.

TABLE 3-2. Provisional Documentation Checklist for Practice Guidelines.

Provisional Documentation Checklist for Practice Guidelines.

This chapter has proposed eight attributes of practice guidelines that the Forum should employ in advising its contractors and expert panels and in assessing the quality of the guidelines it receives. The attributes are validity, reliability (reproducibility), clinical applicability, clinical flexibility, clarity, multidisciplinary process, scheduled review, and documentation. Definitions of these terms and some examples that may aid in their operationalization are also given. Operationalization, that is, turning these eight concepts into a practical instrument for the Forum to use in prospectively assessing guidelines, is one task in a broader project that the IOM is currently conducting ( Appendix C ).

Several issues about guidelines development need to be kept in mind as the Forum proceeds. First, neither existing guidelines nor those likely to be developed by the agency in the foreseeable future will "score well" on all eight properties simultaneously; indeed, near-perfect scores may always lie in the realm of aspiration rather than attainment. Second, a balance needs to be maintained between an ideal process and a feasible one. For example, this committee, and others, could design a very meticulous process to take into account the views of all interested groups. At some level, that process would consume more resources—in time, professional input, and money—than the outputs would warrant. That is, it would be too slow, too cumbersome to administer, and too costly to meet the needs of providers, third-party payers, or patients. It undoubtedly would not conform to the congressional deadlines of OBRA 89.

The third point to stress is that guidelines development must be an evolutionary process, especially at the national (or federal) level. There is no proven "right way" to conduct this endeavor, even if there clearly are some "better ways." Guidelines that satisfactorily reflect the eight attributes proposed here may not be products of an ideal process, but in the committee's view they will be defensible.

Two other themes should be reiterated: the need for credibility among practitioners, patients, payers, and policymakers, and the need for accountability. The entire practice guidelines enterprise will not fulfill its promise (and certainly the federal program will not) if the products lack solid scientific grounding and widespread understanding and support from the provider and patient communities. The significance accorded such attributes as validity and reliability, clarity, multidisciplinary approach, and documentation reflects the committee's concerns with these needs. Although in the first instance the themes of credibility and accountability apply to the procedures followed in guidelines development, they also carry through to the procedures of implementation and evaluation, which are the subjects of the next chapter.

  • American College of Physicians. Clinical Efficacy Assessment Project: Procedural Manual . Philadelphia, Pa.: 1986.
  • American Medical Association. attributes to Guide the Development of Practice Parameters . Chicago, Ill.: American Medical Association, 1990. a.
  • American Medical Association. Preliminary Worksheet for the Evaluation of Practice Parameters . Draft of ad hoc review panel. Chicago, Illinois, May 1990b. Canadian Task Force on the Periodic Health Examination. Canadian Medical Association Journal 121:1193-1254, 1979. [ PMC free article : PMC1704686 ] [ PubMed : 115569 ]
  • Battista, R., and Fletcher, S. Making Recommendations on Preventive Practices: Methodological Issues . American Journal of Preventive Medicine 4:53-67, 1988. (Supplement). [ PubMed : 3079142 ]
  • Brock, D., and Wartman, S. When Competent Patients Make Irrational Choices . New England Journal of Medicine 322:1595-1599, 1990. [ PubMed : 2336090 ]
  • Chassin, Mark. Presentation to the IOM Committee to Advise the Public Health Service on Practice Guidelines . Washington, D.C., April 2, 1990.
  • Eddy, D. Comparing Benefits and Harms: The Balance Sheet . Journal of the American Medical Association 263:2493-2505, 1990. a. [ PubMed : 2329639 ]
  • Eddy, D. Guidelines for Policy Statements: The Explicit Approach . Journal of the American Medical Association 263:2239-2240, 1990. b. [ PubMed : 2319689 ]
  • Eddy, D. Practice Policies--Guidelines for Methods . Journal of the American Medical Association 263:1839-1841, 1990. c. [ PubMed : 2313855 ]
  • Eddy, D. Practice Policies--What Are They? Journal of the American Medical Association 263:877-880, 1990. d. [ PubMed : 2296151 ]
  • Eddy, D. Practice Policies--Where Do They Come From? Journal of the American Medical Association 263:1265-1275, 1990. e. [ PubMed : 2304243 ]
  • Eddy, D. Designing a Practice Policy: Standards, Guidelines, and Options . Journal of the American Medical Association , forthcoming (a). [ PubMed : 2342221 ]
  • Eddy, D. A Manual for Assessing Health Practices and Designing Practice Policies . American College of Physicians, forthcoming (b).
  • Eddy, D., and Billings, J. The Quality of Medical Evidence and Medical Practice . Paper prepared for the National Leadership Commission on Health, Washington, D.C., 1988.
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  • Frankel, S. Hello, Mr. Chips: PCs Learn English . Washington Post , April 29, 1990, p. D3.
  • Gottlieb, L. Margolis, C., and Schoenbaum, S. Clinical Practice Guidelines at an HMO: Development and Implementation in a Quality Improvement Model . Quality Review Bulletin 16:80-86, 1990. [ PubMed : 2110358 ]
  • Institute of Medicine. Effects of Clinical Evaluation on the Diffusion of Medical Technology . Chapter 4 in Assessing Medical Technologies . Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1985. [ PubMed : 25032428 ]
  • Institute of Medicine. Acute Myocardial Infarction: Setting Priorities for Effectiveness Research . Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1990. a. [ PubMed : 25144072 ]
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  • Institute of Medicine. Medicare: A Strategy for Quality Assurance , Lohr, K., editor. , ed. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1990. d.
  • Institute of Medicine. National Priorities for the Assessment of Clinical Conditions and Medical Technologies , Lara, M., editor; , and Goodman, C., editor. , eds. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1990. e. [ PubMed : 25144085 ]
  • Institute of Medicine. Workshop to Improve Group Judgment for Medical Practice and Technology Assessment , Washington, D.C., May 15-16, 1990f.
  • Lomas, J. Words Without Action? The Production, Dissemination and Impact of Consensus Recommendations . Draft paper (dated May 1990) prepared for the Annual Review of Public Health , Vol. 12, Omenn, G., editor. , ed. Palo Alto, Calif., forthcoming.
  • Mulley, A. Presentation to the Workshop to Improve Group Judgment for Medical Practice and Technology Assessment , Washington, D.C., May 15, 1990.
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  • Park, R., Fink, A., Brook, R., et al. Physician Ratings of Appropriate Indications for Six Medical and Surgical Procedures . R-3280-CWF/HF/PMT/RWJ. Santa Monica, Calif.: The RAND Corporation, 1986. See also the same authors and same title in the American Journal of Public Health 76:766-772, 1986. [ PMC free article : PMC1646864 ] [ PubMed : 3521341 ]
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The list of works by Eddy, Gottlieb and associates, and Park and colleagues at the end of this chapter contains more detailed discussions of processes for developing guidelines.

This language generally follows the precedent set by the IOM report Medicare: A Strategy for Quality Assurance (1990d). It is also consistent with the booklet "Attributes to Guide the Development of Practice Parameters" (AMA, 1990a).

The committee discussed four types of validity: face validity, content validity, criterion validity, and construct validity. These concepts may have the following connotations when applied to practice guidelines. First, the content of guidelines and their development processes need to be plausible, at first pass, to practitioners—to have face validity . Second, content validity has to be assessed by reviewing the scientific evidence on which a set of guidelines are based—how much evidence there is, how clear it is, how directly it relates to the guidelines, how sound its methodology is. Third, for a prospective assessment of criterion validity , one judges whether the guidelines would be likely to produce predicted results when applied in the real world of health care delivery. Construct validity involves the fit of the guideline to broader scientific theories.

For example, childhood immunizations and other preventive services have traditionally been excluded from indemnity health plans because insurers believe it is actuarially unwise to cover smaller, more predictable expenses that their subscribers can budget. Competitive pressures from health maintenance organizations may sometimes offset these beliefs, but this may reflect marketing more than clinical considerations.

The committee discussed how two common methodological concepts, sensitivity and specificity , applied to practice guidelines. For medical review and other evaluation criteria, these two related terms are fairly straightforward. Sensitivity and specificity refer, respectively, to a high "true positive rate" in detecting deficient or inappropriate care and a high "true negative rate" in passing over cases of adequate care. The concepts can be operationalized by requiring some evidence, drawn, for example, from pretesting of the review criteria on "prototype" cases or through pilot-testing in a specific organization. As described in Chapter 10 of the Medicare quality report, case-finding screens have often been found to be deficient on these two attributes. The committee concluded that these attributes need to be considered for evaluation instruments but do not add anything to the assessment of practice guidelines.

One effort at replication has been undertaken by those involved with the RAND Corporation's work to develop appropriateness indicators (Chassin, 1990).

Clinical applicability and clinical flexibility could be grouped together as one attribute. Keeping them separate emphasizes the distinctions among the populations or settings that are covered by guidelines and those that are not so covered.

The term multidisciplinary is used broadly here rather than narrowly; it does not refer only to academic and professional disciplines.

The procedures of the National Academy of Sciences might serve as a model for the panel selection process. These procedures require that members of study committees submit bias statements and that an official of the Academy lead each committee through a member-by-member discussion of possible biases. Major funders of a study cannot be represented on a study committee, and every committee report must be reviewed by a panel of outside experts under the oversight of the National Research Council.

  • Cite this Page Institute of Medicine (US) Committee to Advise the Public Health Service on Clinical Practice Guidelines; Field MJ, Lohr KN, editors. Clinical Practice Guidelines: Directions for a New Program. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 1990. 3, Attributes of Good Practice Guidelines.
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