| I was once told that a presenter should change a slide, add a build or include an animation every 90 seconds of a presentation in order to keep the audience's attention. That was a while ago and I'm willing to bet that attention spans have decreased, especially in the past year as many of us have developed Zoom fatigue. Of course it's harder to keep someone's attention online to begin with, so what's a presenter to do? Start strong: Start with a short story or a strong statistic related to your topic to get your audience's attention. Don't waste this opportunity by focusing on your bio and talking about why the topic is important. Check the number of slides you have: For a 30 minute presentation, unless you have builds and animations on each slide, the minimum number of slides you would have is 20 not including your introduction and closing slides. That means you're changing slides every 90 seconds, but as noted, we want to do this more than. Use the chat: Most event sessions and webinars have chat capabilities for viewers to talk to each other and ask the speaker questions, so use this interactive tool. Ask viewers to answer a question by posting in the chat. You can even do this when it's a pre-recorded session, you just won't be able to react to the answers if it's not live. Pause to take questions: Who says you have to wait until the end of the presentation to answer questions. If you see live questions coming into the chat, answer a few during the presentation. Poll the audience: If there's a polling feature in the technology you're using, use it. You can poll the audience about their experience level, test them on what they might think they know about the topic, or ask them any number of things. Most people enjoy seeing the live results. Raise the hand feature: Again, this depends on the technology but if you have this feature, take advantage of it. You can ask a simple yes/no question and ask people to raise their hand to indicate a yes. Save the polling feature for questions with multiple choice answers. There are many options available to keep your presentation interactive. The important thing to remember is that your audience is likely to lose focus so plan a few ways to draw them back into your presentation. Feel free to reach out to me at kbushman@thirddoormedia.com. | 
