Carrying out research is crucial in all sorts of contexts, but once you’ve got data to share, the real challenge is presenting your findings in a way that makes them digestible and comprehensible to a wide audience.
Presentations provide the perfect platform for the effective communication of research results, but you need to think carefully about how you put across your points in order to achieve maximum impact.
With that in mind, let’s go over some useful pieces of advice for optimizing your next research finding presentation to impress stakeholders.
Table of Contents
Understand what approach will engage your audience
You can’t take a cookie-cutter approach to every presentation, and assume that the same style will suit every audience equally well.
Instead, it’s better to think about the background, experience levels and interests of your audience each time you are due to present your findings, and try to tailor your tactics accordingly.
For example, when aiming to engage top-tier decision makers, focusing on stats that relate to revenue growth and profitability makes sense. If, on the other hand, your audience is made up of sales and marketing pros, you should put branding-focused findings front and centre.
Brevity is best
Even if you’ve got reams and reams of data and insights to share during a presentation, you shouldn’t outstay your welcome.
Planning to speak for 10-20 minutes, with time left over for questions from the stakeholders, is better than blathering on for as long as possible. The human attention span is a tricky thing to wrangle, and short but sweet presentations will mean that minds are less likely to wander elsewhere.
Summarize first, then go into detail
When it comes to research findings presentations, you should never bury the lede. Instead, make sure that the juiciest details are highlighted up top, and summarized concisely in the first slide or two.
This will help you to hook your audience in, and make them more amenable to sticking with you as you as you proceed to delve further into the data.
Also remember to circle back at the end to reemphasize the most important points you made initially. A little refresher like this will make sure your findings stay with stakeholders after you’ve wrapped up.
Show don’t tell
This rule usually applies to movie-making, but it also works well in a presentation context. If you can express a point using a visual aid, rather than relying on dry text, then this should always be the preferred route to take.
Graphics representing key points, as well as images and videos used to support and jazz up your findings, can go a long way.
Pinpoint solutions
In the event that your research reveals pain points, it’s necessary to go the extra mile and include suggestions of what can be done to alleviate them, rather than just tossing out an obvious issue and leaving it unsolved.
Even if your recommendations aren’t adopted in full or followed to the letter, it will at least show that you have engaged with the findings actively, rather than just being a conduit for untrammeled bad news.
Ask for feedback and adjust your approach in future
Finally, treat every presentation as a learning opportunity and don’t be afraid to ask what stakeholders and other audience members felt they got out of it afterwards.
If their feedback doesn’t align with what you were hoping to achieve, see if there is the option to go back and change things up so you don’t make the same missteps the next time around. Being adaptable is the only way to improve.
About Carson Derrow
