Boost effectiveness, personalize your presentations

Here are the results of an interesting experiment, where people were sent a questionnaire to fill out (A) with a hand-written post-it on it, (B) with a hand-written message on the cover, (C) with no personalized message:

“More than 75% of the people who received the survey with the sticky-note request filled it out and returned it, whereas 48% of the second group and 36% of the third group did so.”

The shift is impressive, from 36% to 75% the effectiveness more than doubles!

There are two findings for presenters here:

• A no-brainer: You should personalize your presentation design and delivery for every audience
• Above all: your customizations should be apparent and obvious, so that your audience notice it

Indeed, a personalized presentation certainly has an increased efficiency, but the real gain comes from your audience’s reciprocity. If they can feel and recognize all the hard-work and extra attention you have put in the presentation for them, they will feel the need to reciprocate. They will listen carefully, ask more questions and probably agree more.

Obvious personalization doesn’t have to be a ton of work. A simple way is to change some examples to match the audience’s interest. If the audience is heterogeneous find an example in the recent news.

You may think that finding the perfect example every time you present is impossible, but remember the effect of personalization! Even an average example that helps personalize your presentation is better than a high quality presentation without personalization.

To learn more about this experiment, reciprocity and other persuasion techniques, you should read: “Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive” from Noah J. Goldstein PhD, Steve J. Martin and Robert B. Cialdini PhD. This book is a short and yet exhaustive collection of persuasion principles. If you want to communicate effectively, you should read it.