You are all ready for your presentation. You have practiced for hours. From the moment you begin your presentation, you’ve tailored every slide in your deck to work in tandem with you, telling your powerful story with beautiful visuals. Great. We just have one question for you. What do you show on the screen before you begin your presentation?
Those moments before the presentation can be valuable—if you know how to use them. Today we are breaking down three strategies for what to put on your pre-presentation slides, which we’ll call scrolling screens. We’ll talk about using those starting screens to build suspense, to increase access to information, and to engage the audience.
Build Suspense
One of the easiest ways to use those pre-presentation scrolling screens is to build suspense about your presentation. As Robert J. Yanal reminds us, suspense is an emotion grounded in uncertainty. It is the feeling we get when we don’t have a clear idea of what is coming next, but we are eager to know. Smart speakers can capitalize on this human desire to know and be in control.
Create slides that ask questions that your audience won’t know the answer to, but questions that your presentation will answer. For example, if you are giving a presentation seeking funds for your start-up company that aims to make downtown parking easier via an app, you might ask questions on the slides like these:
- Which member of our team worked as a valet in college while earning his degree in business?
- What unique, patented feature makes our app different from other parking apps?
- How much time and money can typical customers expect to save when using our app?
When you use your scrolling screens this way, you are not only building suspense, you are priming your audience to listen for certain things. The slides prompt the audience to seek out specific answers. That increases their attention during the presentation.
Increase Access to Information
Another way to use your scrolling screens is to increase your audience’s access to information about you, your company, or your presentation topic. For example, scrolling screens are a great way to present your company’s social media sites or website. Provide simple slides with clear calls to action. For example, using the same example above of the start-up downtown parking app, you might include slides like:
- Check out our Facebook Page to see testimonials from our test groups.
- Visit our website to learn more about our team.
- Scan this QR code to dive into the technology that drives our app.
For more great call-to-action examples, check out this list.
Engage the Audience
You can also use your scrolling screens to engage the audience and drum up participation. Anytime you can make them feel more included, they’ll feel more interested. If the pre-presentation slides are fun and engaging, this primes the audience to be a good mood moving into your presentation. Researchers have found that your mood has “a direction connection with [your] perception and thoughts.” Audience members who are in good moods may be better able to focus their attention, engage in creative thinking, and offer feedback.
Engaging the audience is a tactic that you often see in movie theaters and restaurants. Many of them use trivia to focus the audience’s attention on the screen. And they pepper in persuasive branding materials and commercials, as well, which is a solid strategy. But trivia isn’t the only way to engage the audience. You can also:
- Create photo backdrops for users to take pictures in front of (make sure to include your brand and suggest ways for the audience members to share their photos).
- Create user polls to get real-time audience feedback. Check out our tips on how to include polls in your PowerPoint presentations here.
One final note. Just make sure you don’t steal any of your own thunder. Don’t share things in your scrolling screens that you’ll be repeating in your presentation. Keep it related, but different. That way you have primed the audience to listen without boring them with repetition.
Recapture those moments before your presentation begins with powerful and intentional scrolling screens. Use them as an opportunity to build suspense, offer more information, and engage your audience.
For more ways to make your presentation design work for you and for your audience, get in touch with one of the experts at our award-winning presentation design agency now.
