Audience participation in public speaking

by Paul Archer

Here we have 18 methods you can use straight away to encourage audience participation when speaking in public.

Audience polling

Easily done to get a quick poll of the audience. “Hands up in the room all those that have…” or “Those people that think they inclined to do this, could you please stand up” or “if you like that idea…cheer now”

Moving amongst audience

With a roving microphone you can occasionally move into your audience just like Jerry Springer or Opra Winfrey. Careful though because you’ll have your back to some people and lose eye contact, but it does break up the routine.

Tell stories

These involve your audience’s imagination, sense of humour and allows them to connect your world with theirs. This is subtle involvement.

Humour

Use humour where appropriate. Just having your audience laugh or chuckle involves them and gets those endorphins working which inject motivation and energy into them.

Jobs for the boys or girls

Ask those keen ones to help with your handouts, be the timekeeper, be the fetcher and carrier with, say, the roving microphone. Doesn’t involve everyone but gets some people moving around enjoying their role.

Ask questions of the audience

Easy to do in smaller groups, when training, for example. But in a group of 50 or more this can be tricky as peer pressure may ensure you get a loud silence thrown back at you. Rhetorical questions are best earlier on. Also you could use this with humour. After a period of silence you could say….“that was a rhetorical question by the way.”

Put people’s names in your speech

Do a little research beforehand to find out who’s who in the organisation. Who doesn’t mind being mentioned and use their names.

Use audience questionnaires

Have your handout buddies distribute a short questionnaire connected to the subject and ask people to complete these. Keep them short and self explanatory, at least with the instructions on what to do printed on the sheet. The last thing you want is people asking questions about how to fill it in.

Partner pledge

Quick and simple and ensures people start to take action following your input. Ask them to turn to a partner and make a pledge to them on what you’re going to do when you leave today. Afterwards you could ask for one or two volunteers to say to the whole group what they’re going to do.

Group discussion

An old favourite in training circles and has it’s place in speaking as well. Set up a topic to be discussed which needs personal thoughts and ideas and then ask everyone to turn to their partner to discuss the topic for, say, 5 minutes. Alternatively ask two people sitting next to each other to join in with the two people in front of them, who could turn their chairs around.

Questions from the audience

Usually taken at the end of the presentation and that’s fine as long as people know. You could take questions periodically, say, every 30 minutes. Or you could ask for them at any time and this is usually OK for smaller groups. But the worse scenario is that no one wants to ask a question. Faced with this prospect you could dish out index cards to everyone and get them to write questions anonymously. Ask them to pass the completed cards around the audience and ask people to read these out. Since the question doesn’t belong to them, you’ll get lots of people volunteering. A great idea I saw the other day, with a young audience, was phone text messaging. The speaker asked everyone to text a question to her mobile number. Sure enough within a few minutes the speaker was able to read out the questions she was receiving and answer them.

Use audience photos

Need permission for this, but incorporate audience pictures in your PowerPoint presentation.

Forum theatre

This is great fun and allows audience members to get involved in a role play without actually role playing. Let me give you one example of how this works and there’s plenty more. You need some actors on the stage or some very outgoing and enthusiastic audience members. Set up a situation, for example a sales scenario, and tell the actors, secretly, to do it badly. Run the acting for a few minutes and then ask the audience what they’re doing badly and how they could do it differently. Ask the audience to give their ideas straight to the actors who then act out this way or using their words, or whatever was suggested.

Flipcharts around the room

Here you want some input from the audience in the form of ideas or suggestions linked to a subject. Have flipchart easels placed around the room beforehand and write on each chart the subject you want ideas on or the question to answer. Next put audience members into teams and ask them to physically walk over to a flipchart. Shout go and ask them to write down their ideas. After 2 minutes ask them to move onto the next chart and do the same thing. After about 10 minutes you should have lots of ideas or input to use how you wish.

Energisers

Activities that put energy into the group. There are thousands out there, some risky some not, but they all serve the purpose of re-energising the audience in some way. The best ones are where the actual energiser is connected to the subject in some way otherwise some people think they’re wasting their time.

Quizzes

Highly energetic and can be run in countless ways. Teams, individuals it doesn’t matter. The point is that you’ve prepared some questions on the topic and you’re going to run a quiz of some description to teach further information or test to see what people have learnt in a fun manner. Easy when you have smaller groups but large groups will work too.

Volunteers on the stage

Does what it says on the tin. Let me give you an example to get you thinking about this. A speaker asked for 12 volunteers from the audience to come onto the stage and act out a particular character. The characters were all the challenging types of delegate you can get on training courses – the joker, the griper, the dinosaur etc. We had great fun acting out scenarios that were pre arranged by the speaker.

Bistro exercises

My final suggestion for you and the most effective. As an example, I arranged the room so that we had bistro tables which contained about a dozen people each. I then organised a series of games, activities, exercises that each table would do amongst themselves facilitated by me.

For example we asked alternate tables to act out body language movements and the adjoining table had to guess what the body language meant. We had tables solving puzzles and riddles to learn more about the subject. We set various syndicate exercises for each table. Each exercise had the instructions on handouts or on PowerPoint slides so that the instructions were clear.