Your Audience is Drowning, and Your PowerPoints Aren't Life Jackets

Picture it. A convention center ballroom. The late twenty-teens. 

2,500 people have been in the audience since 7:30 a.m. with back-to-back presentations. Some ran just a few minutes long--but those minutes added up and the schedule is now off. 

It's lunch time. However, next on the agenda is a 45 minute health care panel. 

The audience is struggling. Much like the lettuce in the buffet they weren't getting to eat--they are visibly wilting.

Think fast, hot-shot. What do you do?

This is the time when you need to shift the agenda. That panel might need to turn into a workshop. That panel might need to be moved to after lunch. That panel might need to be turned into a series of "insight" videos that play through the rest of the event. There are lots of options--all of which require some fast thinking and agenda adjustment (not unknown at even the most well-planned event). 

What should not have happened did. They decided to plow through anyway. Get it over with.

The panel, predictably, also ran long. The content wasn't irrelevant--it was interesting and critical--and the audience was just not able to absorb it. At that point, it would have been better to not do the panel at all. I'd say the effect was the same, but the extra content was lost AND it sapped even more of the audience's energy and willpower. Instead of getting a rescue, a drowning audience was pulled under. 

So how do you throw out a life line to a drowning audience?

• Watch your audience. What's going on in their heads is just as important (and more so) than the technical smoothness of what's going on onstage. 

• Adjust as needed. Agendas are living things at live events. If your audience is drowning--send the lifeboat early if you need to.

• Incorporate physical activity. If you need to plow on, have the audience stand up, shake hands, greet each other, share an insight, etc.

• Incorporate interaction. Make a passive audience active participants through gamification and other strategies.

• Plan ahead. If your agenda is jam-packed, consider that you're not optimizing your time by getting the most content in--you're overstuffing your audience.