EYN#039: The Most Important Framework For Presentation Planning

So many meetings and presentations are irrelevant, unengaging and don't drive any action. We can do a lot better.

But how do you choose the right content, make it memorable and drive action from the audience? Use the AOREN framework.

AOREN is a framework I've released to help you elevate your presentations and Technical Storytelling. It helps you select relevant content, that will maximise impact and drive action. Here it is:

• Audience
• Objective
• Remembered
• Emotion
• Next Steps

Audience

The audience is the centre of your presentation not you. You need to know your audience, be relevant to them and be valuable. It's essential to build understanding and empathy for the different personas that will be in your audience. It's the foundation of everything else.

 

Objective

Your audience have an objective for listening to you. Empathise with them and understand it. As you select the topics that you'll talk about, keep referencing the objective of your audience. Why your audience bothered to show up? Does your content meet their objective?

You also have an objective for delivering the presentation. Be clear in your mind what it is. If you have no clarity on your objective then your presentation will be as woolly as an old knitted jumper.

Remembered

Don't just spurt out everything you know on a topic. It will lack structure and people will be overwhelmed. Instead identify what few things you want your audience to remember. No more than 5 things and 3 things is best. Structure everything around those key messages.

Emotion

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." - Maya Angelou

Have you ever thought about how you want your audience to feel? Maybe not. And yet science and history show that if you can connect on an emotional level, as well as a rational level you can persuade people more effectively, and ensure people remember you message. People remember feelings, not statistics.

Next Steps

Your Next Steps strategy should not be, "I`ll send you the slides". Be intentional on what you want your audience to do next. The presentation is never the end, it's the means to the end. So create a frictionless set of steps that you want your audience to take following the presentation.

Whenever I`m preparing for a presentation, important meeting or event I fill out an AOREN template.

And when I say template, I mean I write down each of the 5 headings and jot a couple of bullet points down for each heading.

Then I use that reference for all the decisions I need to make as I build the content.

Hope this helps.

Ben