Giving a presentation is a task that most safety professionals will have to face eventually. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been asked to conduct a safety training session or deliver a formal presentation to a committee, in order to properly prepare, you need some background information first.

5 Key Questions to Ask Before Preparing Your Presentation

To give an effective and appropriate presentation, there are some details you need to consider before you even begin to prepare your material. As soon as you’ve been asked to make a presentation, find out the answers to these five questions:

1. What is the date and time of the presentation?
2. Where will this presentation take place?
3. How big an audience is expected?
4. Who will be in the audience?
5. How much time will there be to speak?

Why do you need all this information? Last week, we looked at why the first three questions are important. Let’s take a look at the last two.

4. Who will be in the audience? Will you be making a technical presentation to technical people or a technical presentation to non-technical people? What is their education level? What age ranges will you have? What if children are present?

For example, a presentation to safety professionals on how to use PPE wouldn’t draw much of a crowd. They almost all know how to do that. However, if you were talking about advances in respirators for nano-particles, you would have standing room only, because that’s something new and everyone wants to get cutting edge information.

Now imagine you’re the EHS consultant for a Brownfield redevelopment project and have to make a presentation to the town council and citizens. You’re talking about microgram levels of heavy metals as being safe. The mother of a three-year-old child asks you if you would play in that soil and drink that water. What would you say? How would you answer?

Knowing in advance who’ll be in your audience allows you to prepare information to answer such questions. It has often been said that in meetings such as this example, the citizens are talking about emotions and the consultants are talking about facts – neither the twain shall meet.

5. How much time will there be to speak? This might very well be the most important question because it will help you select your topic.

Will you be a keynote speaker at a safety conference or just one of many presenters? Is yours a break-out session, where people will have to choose one session over another?

A keynote speaker may get one or two hours to make a presentation. In that time, you need to get the audience’s attention, tell a story or two, use some humor, leave the audience with the keynote idea to remember and wrap everything up in a neat package.

As a session presenter, you’ll need to do the same thing in anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes and still leave time for questions.

You can see that the less time you have, the more specific or limited your subject has to be.

Conclusion

To paraphrase William Shakespeare, your presentation is a performance and you are playing your part. When you’ve been asked to make a presentation, get as much information as you can ahead of time so that you can deliver a fine performance.

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