How To Be INTERACTIVE In A Virtual Presentation

How To Be Interactive In A Virtual Presentation

Three Secrets to Breaking the “Sage-on-the-Stage” Dynamic in a Virtual Presentation

My job is most people’s biggest fear: public speaking. I’ve traveled around the world and spoken to tens of thousands of people virtually and in person. I’ve had the opportunity to share my ideas on the TEDx stage and with some of the top organizations in the world. That means I’ve also had plenty of opportunities to fail and learn from those mistakes. As the writer James Joyce once said, “Mistakes are the portals to discovery.” 

I believe a presentation should feel more like a conversation. In my work, I’ve had to develop ways to make virtual presentations more interactive. So I’m going to share three secrets that help me give really interactive, engaging presentations. I’m not a big fan of the “sage-on-the-stage,” let-me-speak-at-you approach. Here are three ideas you can implement right away to make your presentations much more interactive.

Secret No. 1: Don’t Use PowerPoint—Unless You Really Must

Everyone uses PowerPoint. You’ll stand out by choosing a more engaging alternative. A slide presentation puts people in a certain “business as usual” mindset. Your audience will expect to just be a consumer and take in what you have to say passively. So if you must use PowerPoint, at least don’t start with it.

I’m certainly not saying you shouldn’t use visuals, which can be powerful. My preference, though, is analog visuals. I love holding up quotes to the screen that frame where we’re going, and using props—like say a rubber heart, since public speaking often increases people’s heart rate. That’s going to be so much more visceral and memorable than just using PowerPoint. 

For a TEDx Talk I did with Will Wise, my co-founder at We and Me, we brought a big sign on stage with the words “Listening to Understand.” For really important ideas, consider printing them out. Turning your words into a visual can be more engaging than simply conveying your message verbally.

Going a step further to interact with my audience, sometimes I will “break the fourth wall”—an idea from theater. You can do this presenting in a boardroom or conference room or on a big stage in front of 8,000 people.

In theater, what happens on stage usually stays on stage—you don’t generally interact with the audience. But the moment an actor, character or performer turns to the audience and says, “Hey, you,” they’re breaking the fourth wall. When you do this, you can see people react, and they become much more alert and focused on what you’re saying.

 Secret No. 2: Use Cards or Analog Props Your Audience Can Access

Although you’re using these for virtual meetings, you still want your cards or props to be something others could touch and feel if you were in the same place.

I’ve created a deck called We! Connect Cards that have questions on them to spark interaction and connection. For example, “What is something kind that someone else has done for you recently?” and “What are you grateful for?” Going back to secret No. 1, if it’s important enough—like asking my audience, “What brings you joy?—I print out a giant poster and bring it on stage with me.

You can access a free printable version of the We! Connect Cards on our website, www.weand.me, or you can purchase a deck. Use these visuals with your group to promote connection before content.

I also use quotes from a deck we compiled called We! Engage Cards in my virtual presentations and videos. These have quotes on one side and pictures on the other. They’re really useful to create what one of my favorite facilitators, Jennifer Stanfield, calls “shielded discussion.” The cards serve as prompts, helping people get to know each other in a non-threatening way.

If you want your presentation to be interactive, you’ve got to invite people to contribute, rather than just consume material. To do that, you might lay out all the cards—picture side face up. If you don’t have the deck, lay out a bunch of images. Then tell everyone to grab an image that represents one unique thing you bring to the team.

You see how I’m making my presentation about others in the group, not about me.

Going back to the first TEDx Talk I was ever invited to give on the topic of “Positive Social Risk,” I did something a little bit edgy—I threw things at the audience. Boxes. Fairly big ones. People may have assumed I was calm and confident. But what you might not have known if you were in the audience, is that the minutes—and days—before the talk, I was about as nervous as I’ve ever been in my entire life. I’ve since come to learn why. 

I was nervous because before my talk, all I was thinking about was one person—me. Even into the first 30 seconds of the talk, I was totally focused inwardly on myself. I wondered, “Will people like this?” “Will they like me?” 

At some point, however, my perspective shifted. I remembered that this is for the audience—the collective we—this is for the group. Throwing boxes (which represented a perceived social barrier that isolates us from other people) into the audience was my way of really pulling them in and engaging the audience. It was a way to say to everyone all at once, “I see you.” 

If you’re not using the We! Engage Cards I mentioned, you could print your own materials. The idea is to have something tactical and tangible that prompts interaction or conversation. This is an amazing way to create shielded discussion that increases psychological safety and is really phenomenally interactive for a group.

Once, before leading a workshop for a group of CEOs in Philadelphia, I went to Glassdoor and pulled a bunch of online reviews from their companies, printed them and cut out things their employees said. My intention was to make the session deeply personalized and interactive. I wanted them to identify why people stayed at their companies and why people left.

I could have just told them that because I already read all the reviews and analyzed the data a bit in preparation for the session. But I knew that if I did that, they would be much less likely to remember and retain that information and actually do anything about it. Using the little cutout paper versions of their reviews, I told them they had 15 minutes to sort the printed comments into two different buckets and figure out why people were staying at their companies and why people were leaving.

You can do something equally interactive virtually by using any digital whiteboard. Create a bunch of sticky notes. Have the group sort them out into two different buckets. If you’re trying to teach definitions, you can have the words on one side and the definitions on the other, and have the group learn the same vocabulary together.

There are so many things you can do when you’ve got materials you can separate and use in interactive ways. 

Secret No. 3: Use the Popcorn Method

The best way to avoid awkward silence is to create productive silence. To turn this idea into action, I regularly use what I call the popcorn method.

Think about making microwave popcorn. Save for the hum of the microwave, it’s quiet until POP! Then a moment later, POP, POP, POP, POP, POP, POP, POP! The momentum is exciting. But you’ve probably learned you have to stop heating it before the pops slow down too much or there’s space between the pops. If you don’t it’ll burn. As I’ve said before regarding when to wrap up meetings or take breaks, you want to end the party while it’s still fun. In the same way, you don’t want to wait for responses beyond the time it’s fun for the group.

Practically, this looks and sounds a bit like making microwave popcorn. 

I ask the audience one question, say, “What did you notice about the conversations you just had?” or “What did you notice about the last three slides that I just shared?” or “What stuck out to you about the last 10 minutes of what I shared with you?” I’ll tell everyone that I’m giving them 10 seconds to think about their responses, and then I want them to quickly “popcorn out” a bunch of answers. The point is to avoid eliciting that one long, two-minute answer, and make sure you’re getting rapid-fire answers to bring in more voices, more energy and more momentum. 

At any point, you can invite someone to elaborate on your quick response. You can add some “butter” to their popcorn by offering your perspective or share what thoughts their response sparked for you. This is a powerful way to affirm that you heard someone and to implicitly reward the group for taking the risk to share.

To Review

Don’t use PowerPoint ideally, and if you must, don’t use it in the first few minutes. Instead, kick off your presentation with a question, a prompt or an activity.

If you can, use cards or some other materials you can separate that are tangible. One way I encourage this virtually is by inviting people to grab an image off Google Images and paste that link into the chat. Remember, if the group isn’t doing anything, you might be interesting, but they’re not actually interacting yet.

Then, we have the popcorn method. Ask the group a question, let everyone think on it and then get a bunch of responses quickly. The advanced version of the popcorn method that I love—and which you may or may not be comfortable trying—involves riffing off what your audience says.

I think the best presentations contain an element of improvisation, where you hear something from the audience, and then respond with a related story, statistic or example. When I do this, I might share something, and we go down that rabbit hole just for 30 seconds or a minute, and then we come back. 

The goal is to turn a one-way presentation into a two-way conversation. By following these three tips, you can make any virtual presentation much more interactive.