Know Your Audience – the Key to Successful Speeches and Presentations

by Claire Doole | Oct 9, 2022 | Blog

What is the first thing you think about when asked to give a presentation or speech?

That is a question I often ask in my presenting and speechwriting workshops.

The answers are often very candid but very wrong. They range from the slides I can recycle from previous presentations to structure and messaging.

You can’t give an impactful presentation or speech until you have worked out who you are talking to. Too many speaking engagements are wasted opportunities because the speaker has not tailored his or her content to the audience. If you give some off-the-shelf presentation, audiences know that you are speaking at them and not to them, and will, often, zone out.

You need to ask yourself three questions:

1. What does my audience know about the topic of my speech?
2. What is their attitude to the topic?
3. How big is the audience, and what is the setting?

Know your audience

The audience will likely be a mix – some know more, others less. In this case, you need to speak so that everyone in the audience understands what you are saying. Albert Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” It is worth taking the time to do this, as the spoken word must be simple as the audience, unlike the written word, must understand it immediately.

Audience attitude

If you are facing a hostile or skeptical audience, you must select your arguments and supporting evidence carefully. I often advise to connect immediately with this type of audience by addressing the concerns they may have. If you work for an oil company and are addressing environmental activists, you have to have the right level of humility, as you can easily be accused of greenwashing.

However, even with a favorable audience, you should think about what motivates them, what arguments they will find convincing and what are their biggest concerns. Here it is vital to tap into what is in it for them in terms of reward or the risk of not doing something.

Size and setting

If the audience is large and the setting formal, the style of your speech is likely to be more formal and rhetorical. If a smaller audience, particularly if you know them well, your tone should reflect this. In any case, you should think conversational rather than declamatory.

The setting – where the presentation takes place – is important as it may give you a way of connecting with the audience by referring to it. Similarly, assess how important the occasion is, as this will impact the tone and style of your speech.

It may seem like a lot of work, but it will pay off as audiences really appreciate a speaker who realizes that a successful presentation or speech must be audience- centric.

How to Construct a Memorable Speech

by Claire Doole | Jul 16, 2018 | Blog, Speechwriting

Recently, I coached the head of a large Swiss NGO for a series of speeches she is giving at a popular summer forum.

We worked on a structure and delivery that holds the attention of a global audience from different backgrounds – academic, non-governmental, diplomatic and corporate.

What the coaching reminded me of is that the theories on memory recall developed by a German Professor during the last century are still valid today. Namely, the ability of the brain to retain information decreases over time.

Professor Hermann Ebbinghaus developed the “forgetting curve” which shows that the sharpest decline is during the first 20 minutes and then it levels off after 1 day. The speed of the decline depends on a number of factors such as how easy, visual or relevant the information is to retain. However, on average as the graph below shows people only retain 40% after the first day.

He also developed the concepts of primacy and recency – that we remember the first things and last things we are told with a good chance of forgetting much that is in the middle.

Theory into practice

Armed with this knowledge, she constructed a speech that put the overarching key message in the introduction and then developed 3 related key messages in the body before recapping them at the end.

So did the audience remember the key messages?

I asked people at the forum a couple of hours later and they clearly remembered the introduction – about the rise of xenophobia and restrictive immigration policies in Europe and the US and the call for fundamental rights to be respected.

However they only remembered the messages in the body of the speech when prompted. This may have been because the introduction focussed on a problem that was familiar to the audience and the body on innovative solutions to that problem.

Whatever the reason, it showed that when writing a speech the author has to frontload their key messages to be sure that they are remembered.

The next day, I asked several people what they remembered and true to Ebbinghaus’s theory they recalled the introduction but even less than the day before. The explanations ranged from battling jet lag, the time of day (late afternoon), listening to a foreign language to the temperature in the room (28 degrees outside).

When I tested their recall of the other opening speeches, the results were dismal. They remembered very little a couple of hours after and nothing on the second day.

It has to be said that I remembered very little either, as the speeches were not audience centric and certainly not structured according to the Ebbinghaus principles.

So, however engaged and educated your audience may be, it is worth remembering that it is your responsibility as the speaker to hold their attention by delivering a clear structure with memorable key messages.

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Motivational Speeches: Take a Lesson from Football

by Claire Doole | Jun 24, 2018 | Blog, Speechwriting

Photo credit: AFP
The coach of the German football team, Joachim Löw, must have given an exceptional motivational speech to his players at half-time on Saturday evening when they were trailing Sweden by a goal in the World Cup in Russia.

As defending champions, Germany faced the prospect of going out in the opening rounds. However, the team rallied to score two goals – the last one in extra time.

This made me think of one of the best motivational speeches ever written and delivered. In the 1999 film, “Any Given Sunday”, Al Pacino plays the coach of a great American football team that is struggling to make the playoffs. Before the big game, he gives this speech to his players with the aim of motivating them to put aside their differences and play as a team.

Have a look at his speech.

Apart from the locker room language, it has all the ingredients of a speech that inspires and motivates.

For me, these are the key learning points:

• He matches his words with his voice and body language to take us on an emotional rollercoaster.
• He clearly identifies the purpose to motivate the team for the “biggest battle of our professional lives.”
• He builds rapport with the audience by connecting emotionally and talking about his mistakes.
• He has a strong key message where he makes an analogy between life and football saying that it comes down to a matter of inches.
• He reinforces this message through repetition – repeating the word inch 13 times.
• He uses contrast, playing with ideas of lightness and darkness, living and dying, and working as a team or as an individual.
• He groups ideas in threes – “every break of the game, every minute, every second.”
• He has a strong call for action at the end – “That’s football, guys. That’s all it is. Now, what are you going to do?”

Vocal delivery:

Take a leaf out of Al Pacino’s book when you deliver a speech: identify the main points, pause before the key messages and emphasise key words.

For example,

“The inches we need are everywhere around us.

On this team, we fight for that inch.

I’m still willing to fight and die for that inch.

That’s a team, gentlemen.”

So what exactly did the German coach say to his team during half time?

“I told them to keep their calm, to not start panicking and try things out. To not just start to try long and high balls. To keep going with rapid passing shots, to go wider with Timo Werner. We have 45 minutes to turn this around. Don’t lose hope. We can turn the tide and win this match. That’s what I told them.”

It would have been great to have been a fly on the wall during his pep talk, but whatever Joachim Löw said and how he said it, it worked.

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How to Craft a Memorable Sound Bite

by Claire Doole | Apr 17, 2018 | Blog

As a journalist, I knew immediately what sound bites I would use in my radio or television reports for the BBC. They were the couple of sentences that made for lively copy and were instantly memorable.

What I may not have grasped in my rush to hit my deadline was that the speaker or in some cases their communications teams had carefully crafted that sound bite with the express intent that I would use it. They knew that sound bites serve as a perfect delivery vehicle for their key messages.

Speakers, who want their messages to be memorable, ensure that they plant at least one sound bite in their media interviews and speeches to illustrate their central idea. They then use them again in their Tweets as 280 characters are the equivalent of around 50 words or 17 seconds of speech.

The art of rhetoric
Although we talk about today’s sound bite culture, it dates back thousands of years to the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, who developed the art of rhetoric.

Some of the most powerful sound bites come from the rhetorical devices that they mastered.

Rule of three
When we make points in threes this gives the impression of finality. American presidents down the centuries have been using this technique in their speeches. Abraham Lincoln’s “Government of the people, by the people for the people” is one of the most memorable.

I was particularly struck by the power of this device when Beatrice Fihn, the head of the Nobel Peace Prize winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons sent this message to U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un:

“Nuclear weapons are illegal. Threatening to use nuclear weapons is illegal. Having nuclear weapons, possessing nuclear weapons, developing nuclear weapons, is illegal, and they need to stop.”

Contrast
This highlights the senses, and forces the audience to pick sides. Think of George Bush’s remarks to Congress after the September 11th attacks in 2001.

“Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

It is often used at the beginning of speeches as in Barack Obama’s inaugural in January 2009 when he told crowds “we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over discord.”

Images, similes and metaphors
These allow the speaker to strike the message deep into the audience’s hearts. Some of history’s most famous speeches have focussed around a single image these such as Nelson Mandela’s “road to freedom” and Margaret Thatcher’s “the lady’s not for turning.”

It is a technique that is guaranteed to get media coverage. When
Beatrice Fihn spoke to the world’s media after winning the Nobel Peace Prize last year, her remarks that ” mankind’s destruction caused by nuclear war is just one impulsive tantrum away” made headlines around the world as the US and North Korea exchanged threats over the nation’s nuclear tests.

Great speakers make sure they use imagery, which is meaningful for their audience. Those involved in healthcare often see it in terms of war, using metaphors such as “fighting infection” or “combating malaria” or “doctors on the frontline”. Recently the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross operations in the Middle East, Robert Mardini, was much quoted when he said that Yemen “had been drip-fed for two years. It needs intensive care.”

Use with care
A note of caution though, the images must be fresh and not have become clichés. To quote George Orwell, “never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”

Similarly any speech or interview must be more than just a collection of sound bites. They must be substantive, containing something new and reinforcing your line of argument.

So, if you want to make sure the media quotes you and the public remember you, take time and craft a sound bite that captures the essence of your message. After all, if people can remember what you say, they’re more likely to think about what you said and then act upon it.

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