What are the best practices for creating clear and concise messages in your outreach presentations?
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— The LinkedIn Team
If you are involved in community outreach, you know how important it is to communicate effectively with your audience. Whether you are raising awareness, educating, or persuading, your message needs to be clear and concise to achieve your goals. In this article, we will share some best practices for creating effective messages in your outreach presentations.
Before you design your presentation, you need to understand who you are speaking to. What are their interests, needs, challenges, and values? How familiar are they with your topic and your organization? How do they prefer to receive information and feedback? Knowing your audience will help you tailor your message to their level of knowledge, expectations, and preferences. You can use surveys, interviews, focus groups, or online research to gather insights about your audience.
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Mohd Ali Mahmood
Social Work Consultant | Educator | Mentor
Empathise with what your audience is going through. Craft your presentation to echo their concerns and how your organisation feels similarly and what you hope to address with the audience's involvement. Use simple language and skip the jargons. State, elaborate, and then, illustrate.
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Dr. Melissa Oden
Chief Executive Officer at DMO Enterprises/Dr. Melissa Oden Coaching & Consulting
Know your audience! WHO, exactly, are you talking to? What are their struggles, their pain points, their challenges? Make sure you are clear on the topic you've been asked to present on and speak not only to your audience's intellect but to their emotion as well. Connection is key.
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Nathifa Carr
Creating and Disseminating Accurate Information for Public Sector Organizations | Public Relations | Event Planning | Corporate Communications | Passionate about helping NGOs
Reiterate your key points, and encourage audience engagement. Often times we communicate a message, and the takeaways are minimal because your audience gets lost along the way. By emphasizing your message, and seeking audience participation, the chances of getting your message heard and understood improve.
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Next, you need to clarify what you want to achieve with your presentation. What is the main goal or objective of your outreach? What are the key messages or points you want to convey? What action or outcome do you want your audience to take or have? Defining your purpose will help you focus your presentation on the most relevant and impactful information. You can use the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) to set clear and realistic goals for your outreach.
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Christiana Shoushtari Corvin, MD MPH
Consider also setting up the presentations into the “power of threes”. Come up with 3 key points, and then provide 3 examples to support and so forth. Information is easier and more digestible
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Sarene Alsharif, LDN, MPH
Visionary CEO | FashionTech Innovator | Public Speaker | Championing Sustainability in Fashion
Have a clear purpose that is easy to explain in one sentence. Don’t get too complicated, you will lose your audience. The simpler and easier to connect, the more they will absorb and enjoy your presentation.
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Alison Cundiff, MPA
Efficiency Expert || Program Management || Student Success
Defining your purpose is very important, but it can also be helpful to think about it from an audience perspective. What does the audience currently think or do and what should they think or do after your presentation? Does your presentation successfully accomplish this?
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Once you have your purpose and audience in mind, you need to organize your presentation in a logical and coherent way. A common structure for outreach presentations is the problem-solution-benefit approach. You start by presenting the problem or issue that your audience cares about or faces. Then, you propose a solution or an alternative that your organization offers or supports. Finally, you explain the benefits or advantages of your solution for your audience and the community. You can use transitions, headings, and summaries to guide your audience through your presentation.
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Chitraparna S.
Founder - Lekhak.xyz | 14+ Yrs. as Communications Specialist
Make use of simple transition features: people usually stop listening to the speaker when a slide is full of text; they disconnect from the speaker in order to read the slide. Avoid this by using transition: show the text / image that you are talking about, and then move to the next. This way you keep the communucation focused and clear.
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Lavleen M.
Amazon | Apple | Walmart | UIC | Harvard
Define Your Objective, Clearly define the purpose of your presentation. Are you informing, persuading, or entertaining? Your message should align with your objective. One should always remember that clarity and conciseness are key to making your outreach presentations memorable and impactful.
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Matthew Kerfoot
Estimator/Project Manager at Eastern Caisson Corp
Take your purpose of your presentation and build everything off that. Typically you have a limited amount of time to present, so you want to make sure all the information you provide supports the purpose. Everyone knows in this setting that it is typically near and dear to your heart, and that you have tons of stories you could share. Don't get caught up in the weeds in your excitement, but choose what best keeps everyone on the path toward the purpose of your presentation.
The language you use in your presentation can make a big difference in how your audience perceives and remembers your message. You want to use simple and clear language that avoids jargon, acronyms, or technical terms that your audience may not understand. You also want to use engaging and positive language that appeals to your audience's emotions, values, and interests. You can use stories, examples, metaphors, or analogies to illustrate your points and connect with your audience.
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Ryan Hegreness
Deputy Executive Director | Marketing Strategist | CPRE | Public Speaker & Consultant for Park & Recreation Engagement & Innovation
Run through your presentation with a few people with a similar background as your audience. Ask them to provide feedback on anything that they didn’t completely understand. Refine these parts of your presentation. Grammarly, ChatGPT, and other AI tools can assist in simplifying complex wording and rewriting technical content in an engaging way. Ask AI to rewrite your draft for a certain reading level, in a particular style, or for a particular at audience. Do all three and borrow the phrases you like!
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Matthew Kerfoot
Estimator/Project Manager at Eastern Caisson Corp
Again, you want your message to resonate with everyone, so speak in a language fit for everyone. Avoid using terms that are understood within the organization, but not outside of the organization. If there is a term or topic you need to bring up, make sure you define it both quickly and clearly. Practice that as well to make sure people understand, before you present it.
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Marie Candelora
Entrepreneur | Leader | Dog Mom
This goes back to knowing your audience...are they experts in the field? You are probably ok with acronyms and jargon. Not experts? Keep it simple, but don't be condescending about it. Find a way for it to flow into the conversation: "KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are important for determining progress..."
Another way to enhance your message and make it more convincing and memorable is to use visuals and data in your presentation. Visuals, such as images, graphs, charts, or videos, can help you show rather than tell your message and capture your audience's attention and curiosity. Data, such as statistics, facts, or quotes, can help you back up your message and demonstrate your credibility and authority. However, you need to use visuals and data sparingly and strategically. You don't want to overwhelm or distract your audience with too much or irrelevant information.
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Mrb Rafi
Seeking Online Community Management role (Remote) | Experienced in Community Building & Governance
People don't like being overwhelmed with tons of words, we are already consuming enough information everyday and when you get an overwhelming volume of information, your brain simply ignores it. That is called information overload - an interesting topic in UI/UX design. Use only the keywords in your slidedeck, use visual contents such as icons, graphs and so on. One or two lines of details can be added, best in verbless format. That will make people interested in your presentation and once you get the attention, you can always describe later. Less is always more.
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Finally, you need to practice and get feedback on your presentation before you deliver it to your audience. Practicing will help you improve your delivery, confidence, and timing. Getting feedback will help you identify and fix any issues or gaps in your content, structure, or language. You can practice and get feedback from yourself, your colleagues, or a test audience. You can use tools, such as recording devices, checklists, or rubrics, to evaluate and improve your presentation.
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Matthew Kerfoot
Estimator/Project Manager at Eastern Caisson Corp
Practice, practice, practice! In the mirror. In front of someone. Record it and play it back. Make sure it's clear and that it flows. Make sure you don't make funny faces while speaking.
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Jim Sliney Jr, RMA, BCPA
Chief Patient Officer
Clear and concise? Find the right words Use only those words LinkedIn forces me to reach 125 characters or I would have stopped already.
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Michael J. Oghia
Partnerships Manager, Datacenter Forum | ICT Sustainability Advocate
Two tips to consider as it relates to effective outreach messaging that haven't been mentioned are: 1. Prepare effectively – If YOU know what you want to communicate, it will be easier for the audience to know. 2. Less is more – Don't bombard the audience with information. Let them come to you with questions. The goal is to communicate messaging, but _also_ draw people in for more. And this applies to slides, too – keep them simple and communicate your message with images and stories, not fine print that's difficult to read!
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Marie Candelora
Entrepreneur | Leader | Dog Mom
Know yourself! If you know that reading a script will make you trip over your words, then don't do it. If you know that you need bulleted notes to keep you on track, then prepare that.
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