Three minutes into the speech I knew the speaker was in trouble and my heart went out to him.
He was normally a good speaker and he was sharing some valuable information but his audience was becoming more and more distracted.
What had gone wrong this time? When you are invited to speak at an event, you will usually be given the date, the time, the venue, the topic for you to speak on and perhaps the length of your speech.
If you do nothing else, find out something about your audience.
This is called audience analysis.
This is extremely important to many aspects of your speech.
How will you begin to write a speech if you don't know anything about the audience? Ask whatever you think will help you to write and present a speech that has relevance to them.
Ask questions such as: What is special about this group? What are their wants and needs? What will turn them on or off? What will inspire them to take action? Is their attendance voluntary or mandatory? What do they expect from my presentation? How can I exceed their expectations? What are some of their biggest challenges and problems? What successes have they had that you can comment on? What is their listening and learning style? What are their feelings about me and my topic? What do they have in common with me? Have they been drinking alcohol? If you consistently analyse your audience before you even begin writing your speech you will avoid the pain of the speaker above.
You see, he had made his presentation to another organisation two weeks ago and they loved it.
So unedited both in style and content, he presented it to this audience.
But they were having none of it.
So always remember that the same way you can more easily sell something to someone the more you know about them, so too can you more easily persuade an audience the more you know about them.